CTV 1302: Media and Culture

Course Description

This course explores the key technologies, industries, cultures and critical approaches of media in the United States. It provides a broad overview of the media—including television, film, sound recording, radio, advertising, journalism, and the Internet—as industrial, social, and cultural institutions, so that students gain an understanding of how these media systems developed and how they function today. Students will examine a wide-ranging array of issues that have shaped our mediated world, including why Facebook matters, why most pop songs are under four minutes long, why advertisers are the real primary audience of television, how movie theaters still make money, and why journalism is currently facing an existential crisis. While the course is designed as an introduction for Cinema-Television majors and minors, non-majors will also take away a critical grounding in media aesthetics, economics, history, and theory.

Instructor Biography

Derek Kompare is an Associate Professor in the Division of Cinema-Television in the Meadows School of the Arts. An SMU faculty member since 2004, he has taught courses on media and culture, television history, media globalization, media theory, new media platforms, science fiction, crime-based television, and comics. Professor Kompare received his PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, and his research has focused on the formation of media forms, genres, industries and cultures. He is the author of two books: Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (Routledge, 2005), and a just-published study on the crime drama CSI (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He has also written several articles for anthologies and journals on topics including DVD box sets, reality television, and the evolving online relationship between media fans and producers.

Learning Outcomes and Benefits

• Understand the relationships between media and culture
• Understand the basic development of key media forms
• understand the key concepts in the study of media and culture
• Understand the basic economics of contemporary media
• Understand our individual and social roles in relation to media and culture