Università Roma Tre

The course is included in the programme of the Research Master in "Cultural Leadership" (University of Groningen). It can also be attended by Italian or Erasmus students.

The teaching materials and assigned readings will be uploaded on Moodle:
https://filosofiacomunicazionespettacolo.el.uniroma3.it/course/view.php?id=543

Content of the Course

Media shape culture; digital media are reshaping culture today. This module introduces a combination of perspectives on media objects and practices of use: historical, cultural, sociological, aesthetic, and curatorial. Media technologies are studied as tools for research (digital humanities), for education, and as curatorial tools used for presentation and mediation. The course is divided into three parts: 1) Media as systems of representation; 2) Media as cultural industries; 3) Media as technologies. Each part is addressed first in theoretical terms and subsequently explored through selected cases studies.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course unit, students are able to:
• Use the main theoretical and methodological approaches in analysing the relationship between media and culture, with particular reference to Sociology and Cultural Studies.
• Understand the key role of media in “shaping culture” and in the process through which culture and its (both symbolic and material, tangible and non tangible) expressions are assigned meaning and (aesthetic, social, economic, etc.) values.
• Understand how the role of media in “shaping culture” has changed with the diffusion of digital technologies/environments, user-generated contents, the shift from “broadcast cultures” to “participative cultures”.
• Deconstruct media representations of culture and its expressions, and uncover the functioning of discourses on culture that are reproduced by media.
• Understand the role and functioning of media as a cultural/creative industry, whose products are forms of culture in their own right (notion of “cultural reflexivity”).
• Develop their own analysis of media texts.
• Effectively use media technologies and languages in cultural sector-related professions: as tools for research (digital humanities), for education, and as curatorial tools.

Alexander, N., Catered to your future self: Netflix’s “predictive personalization” and the mathematization of taste, in K. McDonald and D. Smith-Rowsey (Eds.), The Netflix effect: Technology and entertainment in the 21 century, New York, NY, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 81–98.
Arvidsson, A., “The Crisis of Digital Capitalism”, in A. Arvidsson, Changemakers: The Industrious Future of the Digital Economy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2019, pp. 16-38.
Bolin, G., “Introduction”, “Media production and cultural industries”, and “New Organisational Forms of Value Production”, in G. Bolin, Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets, Taylor and Francis, London and New York, 2016.
Brown, Jeffrey A., Girl Revolutionaries. Neoliberalist, Postfeminist, and Feminist Heroines, in J. A. Brown, Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2016, pp. 167-196.
Carah, N. and Louw, E., “Introduction”, in N. Carah and E. Louw, Media and Society. Production, Content and Participation, Sage, London, 2015, pp. 1-12.
Carah, N. and Louw, E., “Meaning, representation and power”, in N. Carah and E. Louw, Media and Society. Production, Content and Participation, Sage, London, 2015, pp. 13-38.
Carah, N. and Louw, E., “The industrial production of meaning”, in N. Carah and E. Louw, Media and Society. Production, Content and Participation, Sage, London, pp. 39-57.
Georgiou, M., “Diaspora in the Digital Era: Minorities and Media Representation”, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, Vol 12, No 4, 2013, 80-99.
Guba, E. G. and Lincoln, Y. S., Competing paradigms in qualitative research, in N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 105-117.
McQuail, D., “The rise of Mass Media”, in D. McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 6th edition, Sage, London, 2010, pp. 23-48.
McQuail, D., “Concept and models for Mass Communication”, in D. McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 6th edition, Sage, London, 2010, pp. 52-75.
McQuail, D., “Mass Communication and Culture”, in D. McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 6th edition, Sage, London, 2010, pp. 111-131.
McQuail, D., “New Media – New Theory?”, in D. McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, 6th edition, Sage, London, 2010, pp. 136-159.
Striphas, T., Algorithmic culture, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2015, 18(4-5): 395-412.
Van Dijck, J., Poell, T. and de Waal, M., "Introduction" and "Chapter 1", in J. Van Dijck, T. Poell and M. de Waal, The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018.