3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course will highlight the change from a culture of mass media to social media in the recent media history. As examples of how story telling is affected throughout this paradigm shift, we will be taking into account such phenomena as AI storytelling, Video Vines, and News Feeds. In the age of Mass Media, spanning the rise of TV culture in the 1950s to the end of the 20th century, media had a unifying effect on American culture. With the rise of Cable TV in the 1990s to the ubiquity of internet entertainment sources to the invention of the iPhone and the rise of social media, this cultural unanimity had been shattered. In some ways this has caused a positive effect, as the forms of storytelling have proliferated and diversified, and there is more room for different voices and perspectives today than every before. In other ways the effects have been more insidious, with some critics pointing to social media as one of the main factors in the rise of our post-truth age. The age of social media has also certainly increased a sense of insecurity (FOMO) and attention deficit disorder in the millennials.