Course Syllabus

MDST 2000

Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan

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

Online, asynchronous course to be done on your own time.

Zoom office hours and conference times: Thursdays 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. and by appointment.

 

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

There is no such thing as "attendance" but you will not be able to complete the exams until you have read, watched, and listened to everything assigned.

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.

Assignments and grading

Every day there will be a five-point quiz consisting of multiple-choice and true/false questions based on the reading and lectures for the day. After 20 meetings there will be 100 total points available from these quizzes. There will be four exams, all to be done on your own time via Canvas and due every Saturday. 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. 

 

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. 1 online resource vols. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2023. 

Ouellette, Laurie. Keywords for Media Studies. New York [New York] : New York University Press, 2020.

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

 

Class schedule

See Modules for daily assignments and details

May 20 Introduction 

May 26 First exam due 11:59 p.m.

June 2 Second exam due 11;59 p.m.

June 9 Third exam due 11:59 p.m.

June 15 Final exam (on Canvas) 11;59 p.m.

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