Sections offered SPRING 2019:

CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) S&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.

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, Instagram, and YouTube 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 cultural industries 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 on the selling in the cultural marketplace, and the expansion of global markets. Students will come to understand how these features of cultural industries shape and contribute to the cultural value of the movies, television, music, and social media they encounter in daily life. 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.

Course readings will include the following books, as well as selected articles to be announced:

• Bharat Anand, The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change (2016)
• Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017)
• Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction (2017)
• James G. Webster, The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age (2014)
• Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016)