A syllabus excerpt: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat: Contemporary media is intrinsically social. We're going to be closely reading and discussing texts from a broad variety of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, computer science, economics, and political science. The objective is not to present an overarching theory of social media, but to furnish you with the fundamental conceptual tools and lenses that social scientists use when examining notions of community and collective action, to equip you with a vocabulary for discussing the technological, social, and institutional aspects of virtual community and social media, and give you direct experience of how it feels to communicate through a wide variety of digital media.
The goal of this course is to provide you with:
- A lens for seeing and a vocabulary for discussing the way you, your mind, our society, and culture are impacted by changes in communication media.
- An introduction to the discourse in media and communication and other disciplines about the structure and dynamics of social behavior.
- A direct, hands-on, first-person understanding of how to use social media.
- An introduction to self-awareness regarding your own use of media in social contexts
- An understanding of social media from sociological, psychological, computer science, economics, and political science perspectives.
