Communication fourOne7

"People who like to avoid shocking discoveries, who prefer to believe that society is just what they were taught in Sunday School, who like the safety of the rules and maxims of what Alfred Schutz has called 'the world-taken-for-granted,' should stay away from this course."

                                                                            (Peter Berger, in Invitation to Sociology.)

                                                        (Don Juan in Journey to Ixtlan.)

This course will be a critical exploration - on both the "objective" and the "personal" level - of the phenomenon conventionally labeled "mass media;"  by examining the functions of "mass media" and its pervasive effects on our social life.  Is the function of mass media to inform, educate, and enlighten or rather to deform and darken, to train us to become more and more unaware of how we actually live our lives, more and more actively ignorant? How does the mass media mix with and permeate the texture of our intimate experience of who we are, of how we experience our personal and social identities?  

This course is designed to expand your critical understanding of the role of media in society, and to help you develop critical skills to evaluate more knowledgeably the motivations, techniques, attitudes, underlying themes, structures and realities of media messages and the multi-trillion-dollar industries that create them. The goal is to sharpen the understanding and critical thinking skills of students who take part in media-as either producers or consumers-to make you more reflective in understanding connections between media practice and the society's legitimate expectations of mass media professionals.

This is a media criticism course. That is not to be misunderstood to mean a "media-bashing course." Because there is a very important difference between judgmental criticism ("I HATE this!") and critical judgment ("There's more to this story than that."). This course is designed to help give you the broader context and understanding of how media work to be more critical consumers of the media in this "information age."

In a sense, you already are experts on the subject of the mass media-you've been "mediated" since you were born by what you hear and see on television and radio, by what you see and read in newspapers and magazines, by advertising, sitcoms, news headlines and the computer-mediated communication. For most Americans, what we "know" about the rest of the world beyond our immediate horizons comes to us through someone else's eyes, told to us by people we don't know from places we've never been, about topics we usually don't know much about. From Friends to CNN, to the Simpsons, so much of what we assimilate about the world around us comes to us from the media. Whether it's news or advertising or entertainment, media messages strongly help form the world we "know" both in terms of news events (what we think about) and our cultural norms and mores (how we think). At the same time, however, most of us know far too little about the media that create those realities we accept and live with.

 The goal is to help you reflect on your media use and tastes from a certain critical distance. I hope that this course will give you a few more tools to be more reflective consumers of the media, and will provide a stronger basis of understanding from which to form your assessments of media performance in the larger social context. We encourage you to challenge our preferences or those of your classmates and the authors found in your readings. But be smart-be prepared to back up your opinions with more critical analysis than just "I don't like this" or "I disagree with that." What are the implications-political, social, economic, cultural-that lie behind a particular media content, and what issues are raised-or conveniently ignored-in that message? We hope this course will represent a process of critical synthesis and understanding of information that begins this semester and continues as long as you live in a mediated society and an information age.

Part of the goal of this course is to help you understand how pervasive mass communication is in everyday life, and to help you become active and critical consumers of mass media messages. I hope to provide you with ways to interpret popular media & culture in which you do not take their meaning for granted. We want you to think about the ways you respond to and use media products and the way in which your preferences are shaped by other factors.

Objectives

Course Objectives

1. To develop an understanding of some of the basic concepts operating in the process of      communication, i.e. social cognition, message, medium, technology, and culture.

2. To understand how the medium of communication dominant during a particular historical  period influences how people think, their communication behavior, and thus,the natureof the culture.

3. To understand how the form of discourse influence the substance and content of discourse.

4. To understand how the epistemology of television exert influence both on other mediums      of communication and on important institutions within the culture such as politics,education, religion, commerce (advertising).

5. To put you in a better position to "push as hard as the age that pushes against you" by enhancing your level of media literacy and level of "media-consciousness".

6. To enhance expereince in small group communication by furnishing the opportunity to    work in a small group project team across the course of the semester.

An article by Neil Postman furnishes an excellent rationale for this course.

Why Technology Education?

Neil Postman, Ph.D.

"As I see it, the subject is mainly about how television and movie cameras, Xerox machines, and computers reorder our psychic habits, our social relations, our political ideas, and our moral sensibilities.

It is about how the meaning of information and education change as new technologies intrude upon a culture, how the meanings of truth, law, and intelligence differ among oral cultures, writing cultures, printing cultures, and electronic cultures.

It should be said that technology education does not imply a negative attitude toward technology, it does imply a critical attitude. To be "against technology" makes no more sense that to be "against food." We can't live without either. But to observe that it is dangerous to eat too much food, or to eat food that has no nutritional values, is not be to "antifood." It is to suggest what may be the best uses of food.

Technology education aims at students' learning about what technology helps us to do and what it hinders us from doing; it is about how technology uses us, for good or ill, and about how it has used people in the past, for good or ill.

It is about how technology creates new worlds, for good or ill. It is about helping students gain an understanding of how the world was made and how it is being remade, and may even have some ideas on how it should be remade.

Assuming we make technology education a core subject in schools, what is it we would want students to know?

I would include the following ten principles.

1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new  technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.

2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed   evening among the population. This means that every new technology benefits  some and harms others.

3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language, itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and   value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every  technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology  makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it  codifies the world, in which ofour senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional  and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it  for time, attention, money, prestige, and a "worldview".

5. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not  merely add something; it changes everything.

6. Because  of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different     technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.

7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies  have different political biases.

8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory  biases.

9. Because of the condition in which we attend to them, different technologies have  different social biases.

10. Because of their technical and economic structures, different technologies have  different content biases.

Why Technology Education?

Neil Postman, Ph.D.

"As I see it, the subject is mainly about how television and movie cameras, Xerox machines, and computers reorder our psychic habits, our social relations, our political ideas, and our moral sensibilities.

It is about how the meaning of information and education change as new technologies intrude upon a culture, how the meanings of truth, law, and intelligence differ among oral cultures, writing cultures, printing cultures, and electronic cultures.

It should be said that technology education does not imply a negative attitude toward technology, it does imply a critical attitude. To be "against technology" makes no more sense that to be "against food." We can't live without either. But to observe that it is dangerous to eat too much food, or to eat food that has no nutritional values, is not be to "antifood." It is to suggest what may be the best uses of food.

Technology education aims at students' learning about what technology helps us to do and what it hinders us from doing; it is about how technology uses us, for good or ill, and about how it has used people in the past, for good or ill.

It is about how technology creates new worlds, for good or ill. It is about helping students gain an understanding of how the world was made and how it is being remade, and may even have some ideas on how it should be remade.

Assuming we make technology education a core subject in schools, what is it we would want students to know?

I would include the following ten principles.

1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new      technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.

2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed      evening among the population. This means that every new technology benefits      some and harms others.

3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three
    powerful ideas. Like language, itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and     value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every     technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology     makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it     codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional     and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it      for time, attention, money, prestige, and a "worldview".

5. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not     merely add something; it changes everything.

6. Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different     technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.

7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies     have different political biases.

8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory     biases.

9. Because of the condition in which we attend to them, different technologies have      different social biases.

10. Because of their technical and economic structures, different technologies have       different content biases.