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Language and the Media

Course Number(s): COMM 3701
Semester: Spring 2012
Hours: 3

Today’s society is filled with copious amounts of information that we are expected to sort through and understand the choices we are offered.  However, many feel as if they lack the skills or confidence to fully understand the messages throughout our complex mediated environment.  The idea behind Language and the Media is that discourse citizens use in the public sphere is not just a complex abstract communication system of telephones, e-mail, magazines, leaflets, radio, television, posters, maps, and even such everyday media as notes left on the refrigerator.  Instead, the system itself can be deconstructed to reveal how the media represents language-related issues, what people do with language, how people use technologies, and how language and the media shape both our understanding of the world and our perceptions of our place in that world.  As citizens are called upon to put the “facts” together, it is now more important than ever to learn how to critically analyze rhetoric in these media.  Once you know how media messages attempt to persuade you to believe or do something, you will be better able to make your own decisions.  Language and the Media will help improve your oral and in writing skills to enable you to enhance your creative and critical judgments.  Students will develop a range of subject specific and transferable skills, including higher order conceptual and practical communication skills, such as creating research questions to be tested in analysis.  Developing one’s language analysis skills will improve your ability to critically analyze language in our mediated networks so that you are able to develop insightful responses to the arguments on social issues circulating in society.

Instructor(s):

Related Iniative(s):
Media of the Future