This document provides an overview of key concepts from a media analysis course, including learning objectives and topics to be covered. The objectives are to use critical analysis techniques to interpret media texts and culture, analyze the interdependence of media institutions and audiences, and explain the central role of digital technologies and the internet as information sources. The document discusses Marshall McLuhan's influential ideas about media, including that media extends human capacities, electronic media extends the nervous system, and the medium's impact is more important than its content. It outlines McLuhan's four questions about any new medium and provides potential extra credit assignment topics, such as analyzing a medium using McLuhan's framework or illustrating a critical theory with examples.

1. MEDIA ANALYSIS:
Using critical analysis tools to examine the world.

2. Learning Objectives for this course
 Use a variety of critical analysis techniques, such as semiotic and
sociological, to interpret media texts and human culture.
 Analyze the function and interdependence of media makers, institutions,
texts, and audiences as major components of mass communication.
 Explain and provide examples that illustrate the centrality, fluidity, and
inextricable links between the Internet and digital technologies as sources
of information in our world today.

4. MEDIUM

6. MEDIUM

10. Marshall McLuhan

11. Marshall McLuhan
http://tinyurl.com/jg9zntrWatch:

12. CLASS 3.23.16

13. What is “THE MEDIA”
We gave elements of a definition that include Marshall McLuhan's ideas.
Your quiz will be about the chapter in your text (Second text, Understanding Media), “The Written
Word,” and the quiz questions we developed in class.

14. Elements of ”The Media” or media.
Mass communications
Classroom definition:
Professor’s note:
That is, extending the ability to communicate over
distance and to many people.

15. Media extends some capacity of human beings.
Elements of ”The Media.”
Classroom definition:

16. Marshall McLuhan.
“any matter or force that amplified man’s five physical senses by
any means or modes.1”
1http://chir.ag/papers/mcluhan.shtml

17. McLuhan.
Electronic media is an
extension of the central nervous system.

18. McLuhan.
We are blind to the effects
of the currently dominate medium.

19. McLuhan.
The impact of the medium is
more important than the content.

20. McLuhan.
The content of the new medium is the old media.
For instance, the content of the movies is plays, the
theater. Or perhaps more precise: narrative - stories.

21. McLUHAN
The four laws (questions) of media.
1. What does it enhances or
intensify?
2. What does it render or
obsolete or displace?
3. What does it retrieve that
was previously
obsolesced?
4. What does it produce or
become when pressed to
an extreme?

22. McLUHAN
1. What does it enhances or intensify?
2. What does it render or obsolete or displace?
3. What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?
4. What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?

23. EXTRA CREDIT WORK TOPICS
In the coming classes we will discuss the parameters of
possible extra credit work. You will be able to earn up to
12% of your grade by doing extra credit work.

24. EXTRA CREDIT WORK TOPICS
Pick a medium and use McLuhan’s ideas to do an
analysis. For instance, email.

25. Pick a critical theory and find examples to illustrate its
applicability in media. For example, psychoanalytic
theory; show how certain political theories are mythical.
EXTRA CREDIT WORK TOPICS

26. Create a blog, list quotes and relate them to a critical
theory. Min 25 quotes.
EXTRA CREDIT WORK TOPICS

27. Interview students about media consumption.
Present three logs of daily media usage.
EXTRA CREDIT WORK TOPICS

28. Collect text conversations. Download and print and
analyze them.
EXTRA CREDIT WORK TOPICS

29. Trace the arc of an emerging media story (for instance
something in the news). Use Propps functions (see
chapter on semiotics in Berger textbook) to analyze the
narrative.
EXTRA CREDIT WORK TOPICS

30. Next week
 Thesis paragraph due.
 Revised D-brad paper due. [Alternate: one page on a topic from your sequence]
 Quiz on the chapter in Understanding Media, “The Written Word.”
 We sill discuss EDUCATION AS MEDIA. I will send an email to explain this.