Film Studies 220NC - Social Media: Networked Cultr

Social media connect communities, inform us about friends' lives, and give us a platform on which to share ideas and form identities. Beyond that, social media play an increasingly conspicuous role in national and transnational politics, from Arab Spring to the viral spread of fake news around the 2016 US election. While social media connect people across the globe to an unprecedented degree, this course will explore how they also reveal divisions and borders, as well as alarming transgressions of borders, that complicate any utopian visions of a "global village." Throughout, we will be attuned to how corporate and governmental interests shape and are shaped by social media communities.