Subject Area: Media, Culture and Technology

This course examines the relations and connections between media and culture, with a particular focus on advertising and branding, commodities, cultural production, media culture and consumer culture. How are media and cultural institutions implicated in the management, regulation and production of cultural identity, cultural consumption, and socialisation?
While our tastes and values, our likes and dislikes, may seem entirely private and subjective, they are also social; a product of ‘learnt’ systems of judgment that shape our choices and responses. Our tastes and values, likes and dislikes, are fundamentally impacted in different ways and on various levels by media and cultural institutions.
The course will address a number of case studies, drawn from popular culture, advertising and branding, marketing, and consumer culture. Using the work of a number of key thinkers, a range of issues will be explored with a particular emphasis on concepts such as discourse, value, taste, consumption, cultural identity, and media/cultural capital.