Main Body
Introduction and Course Narrative
Introduction
Whether out of desire or necessity, billions of people have immersed themselves in electronic media and algorithmically optimized communication networks. This trend has inspired a scholarly interest in the effects on people where their interface with their friends, family, community, commerce, religion, culture, race, nation, and the world is predominantly through mediated systems and devices.
Recent scholarly research has studied the influence of modern communication systems upon the human construction of social worlds, the perception of reality, and personal sense-making strategies.
Students, as agents of Communications in the American social fabric, need to examine this phenomenon and interrogate the potentially destabilizing effect of synthetically generated media and text driven by artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of this course is to develop advocates of caution in a society where advancements in technology far outpace our ability to comprehend their effects and where regulation and corporate accountability of any kind is typically lagging.
Your goal in this course is to envision the challenges of these issues as a problem (or set of problems) that can be addressed according to it being a certain kind of problem, which would be prerequisite to actually apprehending it as such.
Ultimately, the educational outcome of COM 743 is that you will be able to speak intelligently about the topics we cover in this course under any situation: professional, academic, or personal.
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 su