| source Berkeley (X) |
level |
department Media Studies (X) |
This course, aims to promote a critical understanding of American mass media from social, historical, philosophical, cultural, and other perspectives. It is designed to foster a critical understanding of media, inviting students to question and critique the many multiple messages at work within the mass media and the media's role in our political, social, and cultural life. Course readings and lectures are designed to examine the history of the various media forms (such as newspapers, radio, photography, magazines, cinema, television, and advertising) and to introduce debates concerning their role in American society and culture. The course introduces students to key ideas and debates in the field of media studies.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 freshmen.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by the faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
This course aims to promote a critical understanding of visual culture from a critical theory perspective. It is designed to foster a critical understanding of media images, inviting students to question and critique the many and multiple messages at work within visual culture. It is organized around the different cultural and social theoretical approaches used to analyze visual images and explain the role of visual media in today's society.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines the often contentious history of communication theory concerning media effects. At issue among scholars working within different research traditions are core disagreements about what should be studied (institutions, texts, audiences, technologies), how they should be studied, and even what constitutes an "effect." Course readings and lectures stress an understanding of different empirical and critical research traditions by focusing on the social, political, and historical contexts surrounding them, the research models and methods they employ, as well as the findings and conclusions they have reached. Course assignments and exams assess student understanding of course readings as well as the ability to apply mass media theory to new media texts.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
In this course, students learn why sound journalism is so important to a healthy, working democracy. Journalism is rapidly changing. The class will give a context to those changes and provide an overview of comtemporary journalistic institutions. Students will examine how news is made, who decides what news is, who makes it, who profits by it, and what rules guide how reporters and editors work. Central issues affecting journalism, such as bias and professionalism, will be discussed. The class is not specifically intended for future journalists, but students will learn why pursuing a career in journalism can be so fulfilling and thrilling, as well as becoming better consumers of the news. Also listed as Journalism C141.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
The course considers the philosophical and historical underpinnings of the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom, with particular emphasis on the practical implications of major Supreme Court decisions. The focus is on the contemporary legal rights and obligations of the print and broadcast media with regard to libel, privacy, prior restraint, fair trial/free press, newsgathering, and access to information.
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The history of journalism is a broad subject--far broader than can comprehensively be covered in a single course. So necessarily, this course takes an idiosyncratic approach. This course examines how news has been defined, discovered, and communicated from its early modern origins to the present. It will also focus on particular areas of journalism. The class will take a critical look at how wars get reported on, including the current war in Iraq. The class will examine the role of journalists in the rise of the Cold War more than half a century ago. It will also examine the importance of media barons, by studying two highly readable biographies, one of William Randolph Hearst, the other of Katherine Graham. And finally, the class will look at the role journalists played in unseating President Nixon.
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This course explores the history of information and associated technologies, uncovering why we think of ours as "the information age." We will select moments in the evolution of production, recording, and storage from the earliest writing systems to the world of Short Message Service (SMS) and blogs. In every instance, we'll be concerned with both what and when and how and why, and we will keep returning to the question of technological determinism: how do technological developments affect society and vice versa? Also listed as History C192, Information C103, and Cognitive Science C103.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
This course is intended to familiarize students with some of the primary research methods used to study mass media texts and audiences (and the relationship between the two). Because the field of media studies has historical roots in both the social sciences and humanities, the course will cover both quantitative and qualitative approaches to communications research. Course readings will describe research methods, offer examples of research projects and findings, and present critiques of research studies and methods. Course assignments will involve designing and conducting a series of sample projects on a single topic of the student's choosing in order to gain a fuller understanding of various research methods and their limitations and strengths. There are five separate research projects on the syllabus; students must complete the first project and may conduct any three of the remaining four projects. Students must present and discuss their research findings for one project to the class.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
Topics in film employs theory to examine different film genres, historical periods, and topics.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
Case studies of the foreign mass media. Focus may be on the press and publishing, broadcasting, documentaries, or new media. Possible topics: Pacific Rim press; mass media in China; Israeli and Palestinian media.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
Introduction to the history of advertising and the roots of consumer culture in the United States. Presents constrasting approaches to the study of advertising and the analysis of advertising themes and images.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examinines contemporary approaches to the study of television, investigating televison's social, political, commercial, and cultural dimensions. Readings and assignments require students to apply critical perspectives to television programming and to the analysis of individual television texts.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
Normally open only to mass communications majors who have already completed 12 units of upper division work in the major. Advanced study in mass communications with topics to be announced each semester.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page
Under the supervision of the instructor, students will work toward preparing scholarly theses in the field, basing their work on theoretical considerations and, where applicable, analyzing empirical data.
Score: 11.122693 Details | Listing | Web page