Remember:

            Prepare

            Attend

            Engage

Your success as a college student depends on doing these things.

This course is about the mass media – what they do, how they work, what effect they have on you. Media is a plural noun; medium is singular.

Course designed to prepare majors for their curriculum in the mass media; non-majors to be better media consumers.

You will come to class with certain knowledge and even beliefs. Chances are, you're not completely correct. Open your mind to new ideas and beliefs. That's what education is about. Prepare to be challenged, even occasionally offended. That's the kind of society that we live in.

Our emphasis here will be on news and information. Why?

Important for you as students to engage – not just in what pleases you but in what is important to society at large. You should keep up with news events and develop a sense of historical context for evaluating those events. You're not knowing history – and occasionally your open distain for it – marks you as intellectually immature. You have an erroneous belief that nothing that happened before you came along matters very much. History is not bunk; history is pretty much everything.

Principles and beliefs:

-- Media are extremely important to our lives. Why?

-- Media can rarely be described in just one way; the media are too diverse, and there are too many people involved with them to do this. Be careful – and very skeptical – of people who talk about "the media" or "the news media" as one entity, particularly if they are using the terms liberal, conservative, etc.

-- Understanding the mass media and how they work is crucial to achieving your goal (I hope??) of being an educated person.

-- Media and media organizations will grow in their importance. You may think that you're into personal communication (IM, email, iPods, cellphones, etc.) now, but your dependence on media and news organizations will grow as you mature.

-- Your need to evaluate the media will grow. It is already crucial, but chances are you don't fully understand that yet.

-- Media have not always been like they are today. History is important. Believe it! In colonial times, people got information from the church or the tavern. Newspapers did not contain local news. Why?

Terms such as convergence, interactivity are ones you didn't hear just a few years ago.

So, what are the factors to consider in understanding and evaluating the media:

Content – this is what we are likely to concentrate on first. What's there? What does it have for us? Is it what I want? Is it what I need?

            What are the messages, manifest and covert?

            What is the form of the message?

            Who is creating these messages?

            Are these messages useful, trustworthy, entertaining?

Purpose of messages – why are these messages being sent to you?

            Information

            Entertainment

            Persuasion

            And . . . economic viability of the medium

Audience – to whom are the messages directed

            How do we talk about these groups of receivers?

            Who's in control?

Structure of the channel (medium) – It's important to know how media channels have evolved, why they are different, how they work.

            Economics – how do the media sustain themselves?

            What is their future?

Effect – what role do the media play in our society; in our individual lives? How do they change the political and social settings?

Technology – by what means do the media operate? How does this affect their messages, their operators and their content?

Mass media seem to be in a constant state of change. Tracking that change will be one of our goals in this course.

Questions?