10 cp
Prerequisites Nil
Teaching Organisation Lectures and tutorial group discussions with a viewing and analysis of selected videos and reports of surveys.

Symbolic communication, for that is what media communication is, has existed since human society emerged. Only with the industrial revolution, the urbanisation of human communities, the spread of literacy in the nineteenth century and technological innovation on a scale unprecedented in human history, did mass communication become both possible and necessary to human society. This unit offers students an insight into those developments and into the ways that media communication can be analysed, and provides a language for that discussion. It provides a critical framework within which the practices taught in this course can be understood and critiqued.