This Program prepares CIC Members to take advantage of a wide range of career opportunities - in television, film, radio, print and online production, journalism, media law, sales and marketing, advertising, public relations, communications, campaign or advocacy, policy and research, fund-raising. Media studies is a discipline and field of study which deals with the content, history and effects of various media; in particular, the “mass media”. Media studies draws on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mainly from its core disciplines of mass communication, communication and communication studies. Researchers may also develop and employ theories and methods from other disciplines, such as cultural studies, rhetoric, philosophy, literary theory, psychology, political science, political economy, economics, sociology, anthropology, social theory, art history and criticism, film theory, feminist theory, and information theory. This is a very topical and “modern age” Program, with many important practical applications.
Major Topics Covered in this Diploma Program:
- Media professionals and the “politics” of representation: stars, personalities and celebrities.
- Dominant practices and forms of reality media: reality, truth, freedom, ethics, responsibilities.
- Media businesses, political economy of media; media business in the digital age.
- Regulation and public policy, issues and analysis. The impact of global media; global media production.
- Audiences: producing audiences, the range of activities of media professionals, propaganda and manipulation of audiences, media effects and moral panics, from ‘effects’ to influence.
- Identifying audience activity; from ‘effects’ to uses and gratifications, media, context and meaning.
- Researching media audiences, ethics and audience research. Media and power, conceptualization, ideology; discourse, power and media.
- Mass society, mass media and social change; theories of mass society, who the “masses” are.
- Modernists, modernism and media; postmodernism and post modernity, critiquing postmodernism.
- Configuring consumer society, historical context of consumerism and advertising; cultures of consumerism, theorizing the consumer society.
- Branding, identity and consumption.
- The organisation and practice of advertising in the digital age. Rejecting consumption as a modus operandi: adbusting and culture jamming. The future of advertising and marketing.