Course Syllabus

 

MDST 2000

Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan

Please contact me through Canvas messages. I will not respond to email for course matters.

Drop-in office hours (in Wilson 219): Mondays 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Drop-in office hours (by Zoom): Thursdays 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.

 

 

From the intimate to the mundane, most aspects of our lives—how we learn, love, work, and play—take place within media. Taking a global perspective, this survey course covers what it means to live in, rather than with, media. The course focuses on lived experience—how people who use smartphones, the internet, and television sets make sense of their digital environment—to investigate the broader role of media in society and everyday life.

Introduction to Media Studies uses relatable examples and case studies from around the world to illustrate the foundational theories, concepts, and methods of media studies. 

The course is structured around eight core themes: 

• How media inform and inspire our daily activities; 
• How we live our lives in the public eye; 
• How we make distinctions between real and fake; 
• How we seek and express love; 
• How we use media to effect change; 
• How we create media and shared narratives; 
• How we seek to create well-being and flourishing within media. 
• How we use media to strengthen or weaken democracy
• How we think about changing technologies in our lives.

 

By highlighting diverse voices and radically embracing the everyday and mundane aspects of media life, this course encourages students to find new ways to think, talk, and write about media.

 

Learning objectives

By completing this course students will:

• Understand and describe the breadth of the field of media studies.

• Understand and explain how humans shape media ecosystems and how media ecosystems shape human behavior and interactions.

• Understand and be able to explain the relationship between media and democracy.

• Understand and be able to explain the various theories of technology in society.

 

Illustrative Case Studies

1. Should the United States ban TikTok?

2. Should we restrict all smart phones for children and teens?

3. What is generative artificial intelligence like Chat GPT doing to reading, writing, learning, and working?

Policies

1. Attendance

This is a hybrid course. We will meet on Tuesdays in the lecture hall, Nau 101. For the Thursday session you must listen to a prepared audio lecture posted in each module. Attendance in each discussion section is REQUIRED and will be taken. 

There will be no course meeting for the first lectures, August 27 and 29. Instead there will be a brief video lecture posted here and the usual audio lecture posted under the Week One module on Canvas. 

So our first in-person meeting of the lecture will be Tuesday, September 3. 

There will be no meetings of the discussion sections until the third week, that of September 9. 

 

2. Honor

I expect every student to conform to the UVA honor code. For information on how accusations of honor violations are considered, please see this FAQ:

 

4. Generative artificial intelligence use

Generative artificial intelligence tools—software that creates new text, images, computer code, audio, video, and other content—have become widely available. Well-known examples include ChatGPT for text and DALL•E for images. This policy governs all such tools, including those released during our semester together. You may not use generative AI tools on assignments in this course. If you choose to use generative AI tools in violation of this policy (or in another class that permits them), please remember that they are typically trained on limited datasets that may be out of date. Additionally, generative AI datasets are trained on pre-existing material, including copyrighted material; therefore, relying on a generative AI tool may result in plagiarism or copyright violations. Finally, keep in mind that the goal of generative AI tools is to produce content that seems to have been produced by a human, not to produce accurate or reliable content; therefore, relying on a generative AI tool may result in your submission of inaccurate content. It is your responsibility—not the tool’s—to assure the quality, integrity, and accuracy of work you submit in any college course. If you use generative AI tools to complete assignments in this course, in ways that I have not explicitly authorized, I will submit a complaint to the Honor Committee. Please act with integrity, for the sake of both your personal character and your academic record.

 

5. Writing and style

There are three common methods of citing sources in the humanities and social sciences: University of Chicago; American Psychological Association (APA); and Modern Language Association (MLA). For this course, as in most academic writing in media studies, we use MLA style. That means all sources of information must be cited in the text itself, with parentheses. And there must be a works-cited list at the end of the essay or paper. Here is the best, simple guide to using MLA style. It should work for you through many courses you take. 

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_general_format.htmlLinks to an external site.

 

Assignments and grading

Most weeks there will be a five-point quiz consisting of multiple-choice and true/false questions based on the reading and lectures for the week. There will be 12 quizzes for a total of 60 points. There will be four exams, all to be done on your own time via Canvas. See due dates below. Each exam will be worth 25 points. Each exam will be a series of essay questions. There is a 10 percent deduction for each day the exam is late. In discussion sections you will do in-class "free writing" on paper with a pen. That will serve as a record of attendance and participation. You must complete 10 of these at four points each to earn up to 40 possible points. There are 200 points up for grabs in this course and your final grade will be based on a percentage earned of that 200 points.

 

Grading scale:

A+	100
A	95
A-	90
B+	87
B	83
B-	80
C+	77
C	73
C-	70
D+	67
D	63
D-	60
F	0

 

Books

(All these are available via UVA Bookstore Inclusive Access via Canvas.)

Croteau, David, William Hoynes, and Clayton Childress. Media/Society: Technology, Industries, Content, and Users. Seventh edition. Los Angeles, California: SAGE, 2022.

Deuze, Mark. Life in Media: A Global Introduction to Media Studies. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2023. 

Sinnreich, Aram. The Secret Life of Data. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2023.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017.

boyd, danah, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2015.

 

Class schedule

See Modules for weekly assignments and details

September 27 Introduction (video and audio -- no class meeting)

October 4 First exam due 11:59 p.m.

October 31 Second exam due 11;59 p.m.

November 21 Third exam due 11:59 p.m.

December 12 Final exam (on Canvas) due 11;59 p.m.

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