Readings should be completed no later than the date under which they are listed. Reading ahead is practical and encouraged.

Changes to readings and assignments may become necessary during the semester, and will be announced in class. It is your responsibility to keep abreast of changes, if you miss class.
I) How do Media Matter?: Finding the scholarly conversation

1/18 Making sense of the symbolic: Analyzing Media Texts


1/25 Media and Modernity

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.Engels, Friedrich, and Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin UK, 2004/1848

  • Rebecca Solnit, “Diary,” London Review of Books, August 29, 2013.

2/1 Culture, Ideology, and Power

Part II: Making News
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2/8 Making News: methods and theory

• Tuchman, Gaye. Chapter 1 “News as Frame,” Making News. Free Press, 1980, pp. 1-8.
How to do a Frame Analysis of News
• Tuchman, Gaye. “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity.” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (1972): 660–79.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory
• Usher, Nikki, “Methods,” from Making News at the New York Times, University of Michigan Press (2014), pp. 242-246.

2/15 Usher, Making News at the New York Times, pp. 1-124

2/22 Usher, Making News, pp. 125-241

Part III: Reality TV vs. Reality

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3/1


  • Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Wiley-Blackwell: 2008)., Introduction, Chapter 1

3/8

  • Ouelette and Hay, Chapters 2-4

3/22

  • Ouelette and Hay, Chapters 5-6

3/29


Part IV: Media and Technology

Photo by Stanley Kubrik, from Look Magazine, 1946
Social Media and Social Relations


4/5


4/12

  • Tim Jordan, Internet, Society and Culture: Communicative Practices Before and After the Internet (Bloomsbury Academic: 2014) Chapters 1 through 4

4/19

  • Jordan, Chapters 5 and 6

V. Term paper presentations April 26 and May 3rd