New Mexico State University’s Department of Journalism and Media Studies will create a new social media minor for students to choose from next fall semester.

Hwiman Chung, head of the journalism department, explained his reasoning behind forming the new miner.

“I was in charge of creating the minor because social media is a very important medium for all students,” Chung said. “My plan is to have social media management as a common core course for students.”

Chung expressed the importance of social media for the branch of media studies.

“Journalism is about writing and reporting facts, but in media studies we do all kinds of media-related communications. We have public relations, statistical communication and publicity,” Chung said. “As such, social media is becoming a very important medium to use. That is why in this country universities are trying to offer more social media courses.

Social media, according to Chung, is a useful medium used in various ways by journalists and media scholars. In journalism, for example, the medium is used to “spread news,” Chung said.

“But mostly I want to focus on public relations and statistical communications,” Chung said. “Social media is really great for reaching individuals. This is why the public opinion, the political side and the communications use social media as a main tool to promote the dissemination of news.

With the presence of social media, there is a wider range of possible communications between individuals. Chung noted that the current revolutionary use of the medium can be linked to “the arrival of television in the 1950s”.

“Situationally, it’s a bit different, but the importance of media is, I think, becoming more important than TV,” Chung said. “Because this generation doesn’t watch TV. You do everything on social media.

In an article written by The New York Times in 2017 regarding their plans for 2020, seven New York Times reporters expressed pride in their newsroom serving as the “first subscription business.” With this responsibility, The Times uses social media and media platforms to distribute its articles to subscribers.

With social media becoming an innovative tool for journalists and media specialists, Chung thinks the university would benefit from creating courses that teach students about its benefits and uses.

“Once we hire more faculty, we will offer social media analytics and social media insights. With these two classes, we are thinking of making it a ‘G’ [general education] class on the road. It will take some time, but I believe we have to do it in some sense,” Chung said. “This way, the university can have more diverse ‘G’ communication courses, and students have the flexibility to choose from a variety of courses in this category.”

According to Chung, the provision of a new social media minor will benefit the journalism and media studies department by “attracting more students and faculty.” He will also stress the importance of “individualized communication rather than mass communication”.

“I believe it will increase the number of students and generate more interest among students in terms of media communication,” Chung said.

The Department of Journalism and Media Studies is currently working to revamp the program, so the social media minor won’t be available until the fall semester, according to Chung.

The public is not tired of it, journalists are struggling to keep up to date: information on the coronavirus seems to be the only subject that matters at the moment. Can we really afford to take screen breaks at a time like this?

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The coronavirus is undoubtedly the most important topic at the moment. Audiences seem unable to put down their smartphones for fear of missing the latest update, and journalists may feel unable to take screen breaks from their work as they try to keep up.

The last thing on our minds right now is deactivating our social media accounts, or at least restricting their use. But while we sit in isolation, a digital detox could be the way to feel less overwhelmed by world events.

In this week’s podcast, we talk about Trine Syvertsenprofessor of media studies at the University of Oslo, about his new book “Digital Detox: the policy of disconnectionwhich will be published next week. She offers practical examples from her research on what motivates people to disconnect from the digital world, how this is possible and what prevents people from truly disconnecting.

Whether you’re guilty of checking your work email on your day off or just glued to your news app, Syvertsen tells you when it’s time to self-regulate your digital habits.

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J. Richard Stevens is an associate professor of media studies in the College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he studies popular culture, new media theory, and digital media skills. He contributed to the book “Articulating the Action Figure: Essays on the Toys and Their Messages”, which came out in March. Recently, Stevens attended Denver Comic Con, where he participated in several panels and attended events with CMCI graduate students. The following conversation has been edited for style and clarity.

How many times have you attended the convention and what sets this year’s event apart?
I’ve attended Denver Comic Con since it first appeared in 2012. So I guess that makes this year the sixth trip. I used to watch shit in college, mostly science fiction. Denver Comic Con began as a crossroads of research, education, and popular culture. Its host organization, pop culture class, is a non-profit group dedicated to improving children’s literacy through comics and pop culture. The research conference integrated into Denver Comic Con was originally hosted by area academics, but now has a national draw. And of course, Denver was recently named the Indie Comics Capital of North America, making popular culture a strong natural offering with plenty of local talent. Denver Comic Con is also unusual for the large amount of children’s programming it offers.

This year’s event had the highest attendance ever – although it will be a few weeks before we get the final numbers – and I understand attendance could approach that of New York Comic Con, which is the second largest such event, after San Diego Comic Con.

Several CMCI students came. What types of majors did these students have? Were they all from the same department or were there students from different fields?
We had several CMCI students involved in the research component of the convention. Page 23 is a comic-con-integrated research conference that brings together scholars from across the country interested in the study of popular culture. Graduate students from media studies and journalism departments presented their research to an audience of academics and amateurs. Additionally, some graduate students from the English department presented research.

I also saw undergraduate and masters students in the audience for some of the research panels. I saw some of my information science colleagues at one of my panels and met one of the advertising, public relations and media design faculty members on the floor . CMCI and CU were therefore quite present at the convention.

What is the benefit of attending the conference for CMCI students?
Benefits vary by discipline. My home department is media studies, and we emphasize public engagement in our research activities, using knowledge to facilitate social exchanges and bridges to community. Popular culture events are great places for this type of work, where a researcher must learn to be able to code-switch between communicating with peers and with audience members in the same room. It helps students learn to demystify their expertise in order to create shared knowledge with the public. And that, in turn, gives us the ability to bring our knowledge to the communities that can use it.

It is also a good place to see the development of culture happening in the wild. Many of the theories and constructs we apply to examine social issues can quickly be grounded in passionate fan disagreement.

And finally, it exposes our students to the difficulties of communicating with willing but inexperienced communicators. Many of the fan conflicts that permeate our culture owe as much to miscommunication as to differences in values ​​or opinions. Learning to mediate disputes and help participants in a conversation reach agreement, even if only on terminology, is valuable experience for students.

Have students participated in panels or made other contributions that stood out?
I thought several were great. It is difficult to choose individual personalities, because it is impossible to see all the panels.

One of our students, Rachel Watson, participated in both the academic track and a fan track. It takes a lot of courage, because talking about science fiction in front of popular audiences is more difficult than talking about it to academic peers. But all of our students have contributed interesting work on popular culture issues.

It looks like your son joined you on a panel about superhero toy franchises. What was the benefit of including children in this discussion?
It was an experience for me. Chris Bell and I have been working on a book about Hasbro and its relationship with media companies. The book examines the political economy involved in creating culture in order to sell toys, but it also explores fan involvement in these texts. So we thought we’d host a fan panel to discuss some of the different ways fans interact with Hasbro properties.

We brought lots of toys, showed advertisements, cartoon and movie clips and comic strips. We’ve traced the narrative histories of the GI Joe and Transformers franchises over the past 40+ years. We used a bit of theory and put a simple analysis in layman’s terms for the audience.

Part of the point in doing this was to propose that while we all gravitate to the brands that Hasbro pushes, our narrative connections are quite different from each other, due to different media experiences, exposure to different eras of programming and many other variables that influence values ​​and attitudes. So after Chris and I briefly explored the differences in our own readings of the original texts, we asked the kids to do the same.

My son and daughter were on stage with us, and after presenting a selection of media and analyzing it, our children explained their own interpretations of the text: what they liked and what it meant to them.

It was fun to involve my son in this experiment, although I think we’ll work on some more microphone etiquette before trying something like this with him again.

What’s been the craziest outfit you’ve noticed this year?
Oh, there were several. Maybe my favorite was the star wars/The beauty and the Beast mixing group. There were great costumes that caused a stir. I especially liked the families who wore coordinated costumes.

I can’t cosplay when I attend because I often have to switch to academic presentation mode. My son wore his Lego Batman costume for half the day on Saturday, and it was fun to see him getting compliments.

What’s the best part of attending Denver Comic Con?
Well, the best is stimulation. Not only do I have a dozen new ideas for research projects, but engaging with fans gives me insight into why so many of these texts become so powerful for so many people. It’s great to also interact with those who produce this culture and dig into their thought processes and values.

It was a bittersweet moment for media studies scholars recently when a top journalist admitted that the UK media was too elite aligned.

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in late August, and with the Grenfell Tower tragedy in mind, Jon Snow of Channel 4 called on the media to renew their obligation to understand and connect with the lives, concerns and the needs of ordinary people.

The media industry very rarely admits that it needs to put its own house in order. Yet the relationship between media and power is something that media studies have analyzed for decades, since it actually began in the early days of television. Media studies as a discipline grew out of literary criticism and early cultural studies, and like sociology before it, another early influence, struggled to make a name for itself.

Aided by an industry that doesn’t understand why it should be studied let alone scrutinized, the public image of media studies has long been one of the subjects that corrupts our universities with innocuous lectures on the importation of soap operas and the celebrity cult. The academy, too, has traditionally struggled to see past the idea of ​​an impostor subject with a limited theoretical basis and an obsession with the popular.

Media studies are indeed often concerned with the popular, but this is one of its strengths. It is firmly embedded in society, in the communication, cultural understandings, concerns, and sometimes even manipulation, of the mass of ordinary people. Long before anyone else, media studies challenged the once utopian view of the internet, examining the representation of race and gender in the media and analyzing the economic and political power of new media moguls.

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Student Advice: What Can You Do With a Media and Communications Degree?

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All mass media content, from news and drama to advertising, video games and social media, is about the stories we tell about ourselves as a society and as individuals. So we must surely understand who produces it, how it is produced, what it says and what effect it has?

This is perhaps even more important in times of crisis or when society finds itself at a crossroads. As we struggle to understand how Brexit happened, how Donald Trump became president and why populism is on the rise, it’s no coincidence that the media is under scrutiny, especially in the new digital age.

Today, more than ever since the invention of the first true mass communication technology in the early 20th century, the media have a profound effect on our social, political and economic lives. As a result, media studies often take an interdisciplinary approach to their inquiry, encompassing politics, economics, and psychology, as well as law and ethics. While some may see this as a flaw, in our frenetically interconnected world, perhaps this should be recognized as another strength. The very fact that many other disciplines are now integrating the media into their own inquiry attests to their growing importance.

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Job vacancies: search our database for job vacancies in media studies

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Media studies scholars are also increasingly working with government, regulators and institutions as they belatedly and critically engage with the new digital age and its fallout. Likewise, the creative industries continue to be the fastest growing part of the UK economy, accounting for one in 11 jobs, further attesting to the need to study the impact of media and build a workforce with the skills to support it.

Professional training in universities can be controversial, but students don’t just learn to be journalists, or just to be filmmakers. They learn to critically evaluate their cultural production, to understand that it can be part of a system imbued with causes and consequences. They learn that communication and its changing landscape must be understood not only by them but by everyone if democracy is to remain healthy.

Ironically, while government and the media industry now encourage greater awareness of the role and impact of communication, they still fail to make the connection to media studies.

Like it or not, media studies is one of the defining subjects of our time, so isn’t it finally time to take it seriously?

Louise Byrne is a part-time lecturer in journalism and mass communication at Richmond, the American International University in London.

December 5, 2017

Media Studies Faculty Member Shannon Mattern Publishes New Book on Urban Media History

How were the media experienced in urban spaces before the digital technological revolution? Many people assume that the advent of digital media is where the story started. But as media studies Faculty member Shannon Mattern reveals in her new book that cities have been sites of mediated communication for thousands of years.

Mattern acts as a media archaeologist with Code and clay, data and dirt: five thousand years of urban media (University of Minnesota Press).

Going beyond historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions and the achievements of an elite, Mattern guides readers through a wide range of historical and geographical stories and takes media archeology to the streets of the city, revealing new ways of writing our urban, media and cultural stories.

“I have always been interested in how our intellectual architectures – our ways of thinking or organizing concepts and classifying things – are manifested in our built world: in media objects, furniture, buildings, cities and infrastructure. we design and design,” Mattern says. “Today we hear a lot about ‘smart’ objects, artificial intelligence and sensible cities, but we don’t always stop to consider the epistemologies implicit in these labels. I wanted to extend this line of questioning to other cultural contexts and time periods – to show that cities around the world, and throughout history, have long embodied networked “intelligences” and forms of ambient intelligence.

Mattern is an associate professor of media studies at the New School for Public Engagement. In addition to Code and clay, data and dirt: five thousand years of urban media, she is also the author of The new downtown library: designing with communities, and In-depth mapping of the media city.