Introduction to Mass Communication, Cartography, and Media Systems

Class Logistics & Communication Protocols

• Email Guidelines & Formatting Rules:
  • Subject Line: Must explicitly state the issue or item of discussion. The subject line must be condensed into $4$ or $5$ words, as email clients obscure text beyond the first $35$ characters.
  • Message Body: Must explicitly state the student's specific class section (e.g., "morning class"), as multiple sections are taught daily.
  • Carbon Copy (CC) Requirements: Students must CC the Teaching Assistant, Brie, on all emails regarding access problems, LinkedIn posts, attendance, assignments, or general questions to ensure a faster response.
• Classroom Culture & Environment:
  • Open Access: Free coffee and free tea are provided during class sessions. Students are encouraged to invite friends or roommates and may stay for as little or as long as they wish.
  • Learning Model: Class structure operates as a $3$-way street where learning occurs mutually between the instructor, the TA (Brie), and peer-to-peer student interactions.
  • Four C's Framework: The course prioritizes Connection, Communication, Community, and Content. Instructors often overemphasize content (e.g., Medieval history in Great Britain from $10/12$ to $1412$) at the expense of community and connection.

Instructor Professional Background

• Nonprofit Organizations: Experience working with hospital foundations, March of Dimes, and the United Nations.
• Public Relations (PR): Strategic communication work for Harvard University, state governments (such as New Mexico), and serving as head of communications for a professional association.
• Journalistic Reporting: On-air reporting across multiple media markets, including NBC stations in Florida, as well as off-air reporting for ABC News.
• Politics & Government: Elected to public office at a very young age before transitioning out of government service early in career.

Course Timeline, Projects, and Assessment Structure

• Order of Events (OOE): The master schedule available on Canvas modules that dictates daily and weekly class agendas, readings, and assignment milestones.
• Curriculum Updates:
  • Traditional examinations have been completely removed from the course.
  • The former Facebook posting requirement has been migrated to LinkedIn.
  • The final project choice is broadened rather than strictly focusing on film production.
• Individual Assignments:
  • Media Fast Project: An individual experiential learning assignment.
  • Ad Project: An individual assignment (e.g., completed independently by students like Kelsey) accompanied by periodic check-ins.
• Team Project:
  • Group teams consist of approximately $10$ students, subdivided into smaller sub-teams.
  • Grading is assigned on a team basis; however, individuals who fail to contribute risk having their individual point totals lowered.

Deep Dive: The Media Fast Assignment

• Execution & Timeframe:
  • Students select a personal $24$-hour window to attempt complete abstinence from media consumption before the final due date of September $21$
  • The fast is contained temporally to fit individual student schedules and daily routines.
• Documentation & Note-Taking:
  • Students must take real-time notes throughout the $24$-hour period regarding observations, psychological reactions, triggers, and difficulties.
  • Notes serve as the raw material used to draft the script for the final video submission.
• Analytical Purpose & Media Slip-Ups:
  • Total media avoidance is virtually impossible outside an isolated wilderness setting.
  • Breaking the fast repeatedly (e.g., $30$ times versus $3$ times) provides richer qualitative material for analysis regarding personal reliance on media.
  • Cautionary Example: A former student attempted his fast while sleeping on a train ride home to Massachusetts after staying up all night working. This strategy failed because sleeping yielded zero analytical material or actionable insights.
• Permitted Exceptions:
  • Course textbooks required for other academic classes are strictly exempt.
  • Canvas access for academic purposes is strictly exempt.
• Video Presentation Requirements:
  • Formatted as a professional news broadcast (e.g., "Hey, this is Scott, this is the story of my media fast…").
  • Must include on-screen visual assets, including data graphs, key text points, photographs, and media artifacts, rather than solely showing a talking head.
  • Must conclude with an on-screen video wrap-up answering all specific Canvas prompts.

LinkedIn Platform Guidelines & Philosophical Media Prompts

• Cohort Integration: The official LinkedIn group combines both morning and afternoon class sections.
• Instructor Posts: Non-course updates, including local internship opportunities, job listings, and campus events (e.g., free ice cream notices), are shared directly to the LinkedIn group.
• Past LinkedIn Prompt: Students shared their favorite medium (e.g., music, movies, fashion, or custom stickers made by Kelsey) and explained their reasoning.
• Upcoming Philosophical Prompt: "If there is a TV set and it is either not turned on or not working, is that TV set a medium?"

Media Analysis: Cartography, Globes, and Map Biases

• Globe History & Evolution:
  • Discussion Insights (Jude & Oliver): Earliest globes were luxury objects reserved exclusively for wealthy local merchants. Over time, globes shrank in size, lost exclusivity, and became common staples in children's bedrooms and home basements.
  • Globes function as media that embody and translate the specific historical time frame of their creation.
• Geopolitical & Mapping Biases:
  • Discussion Insights (Aubrey, Princess, Joey, & Robert): Historical maps can be dated using physical identifiers such as country existence and nomenclature (e.g., West Berlin).
  • Mapmaker choices reflect implicit biases: Western mapmakers traditionally enlarged Western landmasses (Europe and North America) while shrinking Africa and South America.
  • Dynamic Maps: Digital platforms like Google Maps continuously update naming conventions and geographical features (e.g., Lake Ontario designations).
• Physical Aesthetics & Nostalgia:
  • Discussion Insights (Rafael, Josie, Sadie, & Kelsey): Rafael noted a museum facade in Vienna featuring over $50$ perched globes, as well as his family's reliance on physical road atlases to evacuate Florida during hurricanes.
  • Gen Z exhibits a growing interest in tactile physicality and nostalgia, evidenced by paper maps, AAA road maps, non-smart flip phones, and physical objects over digital screens.
• Cartographic Distortions & Historical Errors:
  • Discussion Insights (Mathew & Jude): Projecting a $3$\text{-D}$sphere onto a$2$\text{-D}$ flat surface mathematically forces geometric distortion. The only $100\%$ accurate geographical map is an Earth-sized globe.
  • Mercator Projection Bias: Distorts landmass scale, displaying Greenland as equivalent in size to the entire continent of Africa. In reality, Africa encompasses $50$ nations and is vastly larger than Greenland.
  • Island of California Cartographic Error: For nearly two centuries during the $17\text{th}$ and $18\text{th}$ centuries, European mapmakers erroneously depicted California as an island, influenced by religious and terrestrial myths surrounding the Garden of Eden.

Academic Strategies & Course Platform Operations

• Top Performer Strategies:
  • Garrett: Takes handwritten notes with a pencil while reading and systematically reviews notes to reference material prior to attempting chapter quizzes.
  • Lily: Focuses note-taking specifically on bold key concepts and explicit vocabulary terms while filtering out narrative examples; distributes reading over multiple days.
• Cognitive Benefits of Handwriting:
  • Handwriting fosters significantly higher memory retention than keyboard typing.
  • Optimal Note-Taking System: Handwrite initial notes during reading, then transcribe/type those notes onto a computer. This creates a dual-exposure learning loop and builds a searchable digital database.
• Canvas & Sage Platform Mechanics:
  • Chapter Quizzes: Composed of $15$ multiple-choice questions. Students are allowed $2$ attempts, with the final recorded score being the exact average of both attempts.
  • Critical Thinking Checks: Consists of $5$ short-answer prompt checks per chapter, graded entirely on completion.
  • Interactive Features: Optional learning tools include digital flashcards, embedded video clips, and section checks.

Mass Communication Theory & Chapter 1 Concepts

• Four Levels of Communication:
  1. Intrapersonal Communication: Internal communication occurring within one's own mind.
  2. Interpersonal Communication: Direct communication occurring between two or more people.
  3. Group / Public Communication: One person communicating to a present, localized audience.
  4. Mass Communication: An individual or institution using technology to send a message to a large, mixed, highly differentiated audience.
• Models of Mass Communication (Section 1.3):
  • Transmission Model: Focuses heavily on the sender encoding a message through a channel to a receiver who decodes it, prioritizing message dissemination efficiency over receiver response.
  • Ritual Model: Treats media interaction as a shared representation, performance, and community-building experience.
  • Reception Model: Examines how audience members derive unique, differential meanings from media messages based on their personal background, decoding processes, and environmental noise.
• Distinctive Features of Mass Messages:
  • Mass communication operates primarily as a one-way stream directed at an audience too vast to permit immediate, bi-directional feedback (e.g., presidential addresses or corporate crisis press conferences).

Debate & Analysis: News Distortion, Margin-to-Center, and the Myth of Mainstream Media

• Seven Secrets / Principles of Media (Section 1.5):
  • Secret 3 - "Everything from the margin moves to the center": Cultural phenomena originating on the societal or political fringe eventually gain mainstream adoption, acceptance, and commercialization.
  • Examples: Punk rock moving from subcultural noise to mainstream commercial integration; The Rocky Horror Picture Show evolving from a niche midnight movie ritual into a recognized cultural institution.
  • Locational News Distortion: Media coverage over-indexes on negative, extraordinary events. For example, local news coverage of Portland during Black Lives Matter protests focused exclusively on unrest, causing outside viewers to incorrectly infer the entire city was in chaos.
• The Mainstream & Mass Media Debate:
  • Traditional Mainstream Definition: Historically rooted in the dominant broadcast network era (ABC, CBS, NBC) where limited viewing choices concentrated massive national audiences.
  • Mathematical Breakdown of "Mass Media": Prime-time cable news channels (e.g., Fox News) average approximately $2,600,000$ viewers during prime time. In a nation of $342,600,000$ people, over $340,000,000$ citizens ($> 99\%$ of the population) are not watching. Mathematically, niche cable networks fail to meet the standard of true "mass" reach.
  • Corporate Media Origins: MSNBC was originally established as a corporate joint venture between Microsoft ("MS") and NBC.
  • Political Punditry Institutions: Public affairs programs like Meet the Press (historically featuring moderators like Tim Russert, Chuck Todd, David Gregory, and Kristen Welker) derive influence from institutional access to political elites rather than mass audience saturation.