Introduction and Course Narrative

Area of Interest and Thesis of the Course

All societies change over time.

However, it is fair to say that the speed and intensity of technological advancement in the past 25 years has surpassed any other 25 year period of advancement in human history. A thorough account of this journey is offered in Azeem Azhar’s book, The Exponential Age (2021).

The thesis of this course is a call to study the effects of modern communication according to a recently developed communication theory that seeks to redefine our social landscape as mediatized construction.

The tenets of this theory begin with a simple proposition: The human construction of reality in contemporary society is influenced by increased engagement with mediated communication systems. In practice, this means less direct interaction with real people and proportionately more interaction with information through mobile devices, the Internet, and the software applications that operate between people.

The degree to which this transformation has occurred is evident in the ways in which we have accommodated our lives to meet their affordances:

• There is no need to memorize something that you can just look up on Google.
• There is no need to learn one’s directional orientation while driving because a GPS-enabled smartphone application will tell us where to go.
• ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLM) eliminate the necessity to create, interpret, organize, and summarize information through human intelligence alone.
• Many forms of learning no longer require an in-person instructor.
• Parents can track their children’s whereabouts using tracking systems on mobile phones.
• We can select the form of entertainment we want, access it anytime we want, wherever we want.
• We can select as many channels of news information we want according to our particular interests and access that information at any time.
• There are no significant barriers to participation in a global network of information sharing and community building on any topic or interest.
• Creating media and sharing it to a global audience no longer requires specialized skills, equipment, or a cost to broadcast.
• The value of in-person expertise is diminished because expertise can be found through various online channels.
• All human events across the globe can be experienced in realtime, with pictures, sound, and video.
• Individuals can construct multiple separate identities within multiple virtual communities.
• Individuals can form emotionally connected relationships with virtual companions that do not exist in the real world.

These empowerments have become so commonplace as to feel like electronic extensions of our physical being. A metaphor for this is to imagine a pair of eyeglasses and how, at a certain point, you are no longer aware that you are wearing them. The eyeglass technology achieves a state of “transparency” where you are looking through them, not at them. A mediatized society, therefore, is one that is habituated to seeing itself and the rest of the world through technologies.

The next question then becomes, “What are we looking at and how did that content get there?”

The thesis of this course suggests that the communication systems in our society are not just benign tools or utilities, like a hammer or bicycle. Social media systems, virtual assistant/companion apps, LLMs, and commercial search engines are inherently designed according to business models intended to provide value to shareholders. They earn a profit through the extraction of user data for commercial purposes. The more personalized and subjectively optimized they make the user’s experience, the more the user will remain engaged with them and continue to generate data. The decisions made by “Big Tech” are not driven by a concern for the social good; they are driven by market share, revenue, and growth. (And there is nothing inherently wrong with that).

So why are we studying this phenomenon?

If the systems we study in this course were relatively minor aspects of our lives and society, perhaps the collateral effects of it might not pose much of a risk. However, given that the entire world has become utterly immersed in these systems, it is fair to say that they serve as the de facto public sphere of communication and engagement – our window to the rest of the world and the channels through which we assert our presence. Essentially, we have handed over the public sphere of discourse to private companies, which, in turn, have provided us with a large portion of the ingredients for our construction of reality.

We are studying this phenomenon because its collateral effects, on a large scale, pose potential risks: tribalism that influences people more towards extremist beliefs, the erosion of trust in institutions, the influence of external enemies to stir up conflict, and even risks to democracy itself when it is impossible to know whether anything you see or hear is credible.

Course Goals

Your goal in this course is not to solve this problem. Rather, your goal is to describe what kind of problem it is. Once you are able to describe this situation as a particular kind of problem, you can become more objective to it and better able to step back from it as an observer. And there are many ways to frame a given problem.

For example, during the emergence of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, it could have been approached as a crime and punishment issue, a medical technology issue, a psychological issue, or, as it actually turned out, it was addressed as a public health issue. Each approach had implications for the way the problem was solved: What resources would be employed? Who was responsible for producing positive results? What kind of data would be collected? And so on.

This course asks you to do the same thing: Encapsulate the systemic problem presented here according to a framework that matters to you. If you are a Communications major, how would you frame the problem from a Communications perspective? If you are a Management student, how would you frame the problem from a Business or Management perspective? If you are a Nursing student, how would you frame the problem as a public health issue?

What is meant by “Reality” in this course?

Last, we must clarify what is meant in this course by the word “reality.”

There is no singular “correct” reality in this course that you need to agree with. Rather, you are asked to view reality as a concept; a benchmark of personal perception that is reinforced collectively in the social context.  It is a general, intellectual sense of what is and what should be as shaped by our sensory perception of our surroundings, social constructs, and the continuing flow of information we encounter.

Which brings us full-circle back to the study of mediated communication as the dominant source of information from which we construct our reality. What is mediated communication? What is synthetic media? How does it work, and how has our engagement with it been exploited for social, political, and commercial purposes?

Let’s begin.