Communication 397SE - ST-Social Media/Everyday Life

Taking a comparative and grounded approach, this class explores the diverse and transformative consequences of social media as they become ubiquitous and taken for granted in our everyday lives. It takes as a starting point people?s everyday engagement with social media and analyzing the cultural patterns and social outcomes of practices such as memes, selfies, Facebook friending, social media fundraising, and digital mourning. Drawing from global case studies from QQ and WeChat in China to dating apps in the Philippines to webcam in Trinidad, the class analyzes how "logics" and values of social media infrastructures interact with old and enduring cultural norms that reshape contemporary sociality, kinship and intimacy.

Open to Senior and Junior Communication majors only.