Sections offered FALL 2023:
#33358 |
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON |
TuTh 1:15 PM–2:30 PM |
HU 108 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
TikTok is certainly more than just a marketing tactic, but the bottom line is that the platform uses our fascination with short videos to capture our attention and then sell that attention to advertisers, who target us with messages addressing us, first and foremost, as consumers. This business model – harvesting human attention through the media and reselling it to advertisers – serves as the economic foundation of all commercial media, from the tabloid newspapers of the nineteenth century to the social media platforms of the twenty-first, from The New York Sun in 1833 to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube today.
This marriage of culture and economics – using cultural experiences to transform human attention into a valuable commodity – reached its full potential as early as the 1920s, when radio stations began offering content to listeners at no apparent cost to those listening in. Afterwards, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its “free” content.
Although TikTok and other social media are technically free for users to enjoy, these platforms have adopted the same economic model as the mass media before them. In fact, critics of social media like to remind users that virtually nothing on the internet is free. If you don’t pay for a product like TikTok, then you are the product. These platforms capture vast amounts of personal data that allow them to observe our lives and target us more precisely as consumers. This business model has become deeply woven into our lives with the explosion of the mobile internet in the 21st century, when most of us carry a smartphone that allows advertisers to surveil us and commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention.
Given the almost indispensable role of mass media and social media in the everyday lives of billions of people, it is virtually impossible in the 21st century to imagine how one might live a life beyond the reach of commercial culture. Corporations make cultural participation widely accessible, but this also means that market values shape cultural values in ways that are clearly worth examining more closely.
The object of this course is to understand how media function by discussing many of the defining features of commercial culture, including the role of corporations in producing and distributing cultural products – often on platforms of their own design, the social practices of users and the social organization of audiences, the influence of advertising and marketing in the cultural marketplace, the expansion of global markets, and the role of the attention economy in shaping contemporary society and politics. The readings, assignments, and classroom activities are intended to help students develop competence in critical thinking about technology, culture, and society, as demonstrated through exams and short essays, and advanced skill in the writing of reasoned arguments, as demonstrated in formal papers. Students are not expected to have any prior experience with the topics to be studied in this course – just an interest in learning to think critically about contemporary media and culture.