Sections offered SPRING 2020:

CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

We may watch The Daily Show for its award-winning satire of contemporary politics and media, but that isn’t why a network like Comedy Central produces and broadcasts the program. From a business perspective, The Daily Show attracts viewers ages 18-34, who are the target market for advertisers selling movies, liquor, and video games. The Daily Show is clearly more than a marketing scheme, but the bottom line is that Comedy Central uses The Daily Show to attract our attention and then to sell that attention to advertisers, who target messages that address us as consumers. While this has always been the case with mass media like television, the same formula holds true today for new digital media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

This marriage of culture and economics – using cultural experiences to capture and then sell human attention – took shape in the 20th century, but has become more deeply woven into our lives with the explosion of digital media and the internet in the 21st century. Although Facebook and Instagram are technically free for users to enjoy, these social media have adopted the same economic model as the mass media before them: they encourage us to give them our attention and then turn around and sell us to advertisers. In fact, critics of social media like to remind users that virtually nothing on the internet is actually free. If you don’t pay for a product, then you are the product.

We live in a society in which culture is a product: organized into industries with their own lobbying groups in Washington, produced and distributed by corporations, and sold to consumers in the commercial marketplace. The buying and selling of mass-produced cultural products dates back to the origins of book and newspaper publishing, accelerated with the rise of motion pictures and the expansion of national advertising in the early 20th century, and now in the age of social media pervades every aspect of our lives. It is virtually impossible to imagine how one might live a life beyond the reach of commercial culture. Corporations make cultural products widely available, but this also means that the market determines cultural value 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, the social practices of users and the social organization of audiences, the influence of advertising and marketing in the cultural marketplace, and the expansion of global markets. The readings, assignments, and classroom activities are intended to help students develop competence in critical thinking about 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.