Media in Modern Society

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

• View Semiotic Analysis slide show; look over this set of definitions of semiotic concepts, and read this, this, and this advertising analyses. (If your ad concerns gender, or you just are curious, you may also want to check out this online slideshow on the male gaze, which involves some of the images and issues we talked about last week.) Start working on your semiotic analysis of an advertisement (due in Class 1/25).

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.

• Ferdinand Tonnies, excerpts “On Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,” from Marcello Truzzi, Sociology: The Classic Statements, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 145-154;
• Marshall Berman, excerpt from All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 1982 (Simon and Schuster), pp 15-36.

2/1 Culture, Ideology, and Power

• James Curran, “Capitalism and Control of the Press, 1800-1975,” Mass Communication and Society (1977): 195–230.

• Steven Lukes, excerpts from Power: A Radical View, 2nd edition. Palgrave, 2005, pp. 14-29

• Thomas Streeter, "Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism, and the Desire for Good Capitalism," International Journal of Communication 9 (2015), Feature, pp. 3106–3124. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4062/1473

• http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/gramsci-and-hegemony/

• T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities”’

Part II: Making News


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




3/1

• Alison Hearn, ‘John, a 20-year-old Boston native with a great sense of humour’: on the spectacularization of the ‘self ’ and the incorporation of identity in the age of reality television,” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics Volume 2 Number 2, 2006
• Laurie Ouellette, “THE SELF AS PROJECT,” in Ouellette, Laurie (ed.). Lifestyle TV. Routledge, 2016.

• 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

• Jennifer Seiner, “Breaking up with ‘The Bachelor’,” New York Times, March 11, 2017, A21.
• Alison Hearn, “Trump’s Reality Hustle,” Television & New Media, 2016, Vol. 17(7) pp. 660–662
• Laurie Ouellette, “The Trump Show,” Television & New Media, 2016, Vol. 17(7) pp. 647-650.

• Greg Elmer and Paula Todd, “Don’t Be a Loser: Or How Trump Turned the Republican Primaries into an Episode of The Apprentice,” Television & New Media, 2016, Vol. 17(7) pp. 660-662.