What is communication? Why do we communicate? What are media, and how are communication practices mediated? This course offers a wide-angle lens on the “problems” of communication and media. To examine communication and media together is ultimately to examine relationships between Self and Other, the personal and public, and the human-made world and the world out there. We will do this by exploring both communication and media on their own terms, and then again by considering them in cahoots as they appear in speech, writing, textuality, aurality, visuality, digital realms, and more. We will also grapple with matters of language, symbolic action, rhetoric, discourse, imagery, and the Internet. At each step of the way we will translate these grapples into thought pieces—or short written essays that develop critical ideas—that students will compose in order to evaluate and even rethink how communication and media are at the heart of meaning-making and message-making within the confines of the human condition.
Semester Offered
Fall
Spring