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Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has become the second most visited website in the world, with more than 1 billion monthly users. It has influenced the worlds of entertainment, politics, and business alike. It has launched the careers of A-list celebrities while also creating an entirely new celebrity ecosystem. It has become a crucial political tool for presidential candidates and political subcultures alike. In the process, it has upended the entertainment industry and much of its business model. From the beginning, it has also been a source of controversy, raising questions about its role in promoting cyberbullying, radicalization, and harmful content. This course will provide an overview of the platform's cultural history. Drawing on communication studies, media theory, and science and technology studies, we will explore how the platform has evolved in its seventeen years of existence, and how it has influenced, and been influenced by, its cultural and social environment. Students will be introduced to concepts such as participatory culture, microcelebrity, and platform politics. We will grapple with questions such as: how have YouTube's new technological features shaped the culture of the platform, and vice versa? How does community function on the platform, and how has that changed over time? And how have YouTube's content policies affected each of these dynamics? As we address these questions, we will come to grapple with the broader concerns of what it means to be a platform online and why a history of platforms matters.

Deception has been around since the start of human history, but technology has affected the process of deceiving and being deceived in profound ways. This course provides an introduction to understanding deception as it is mediated by modern technologies. We will begin by reviewing theories and frameworks from psychology and interpersonal communication to build a basic understanding of how deception is produced and consumed, and how people determine what and whom to trust. The class will primarily focus on using these perspectives to understand contemporary online deception - including phenomena like mis/disinformation, deepfakes, scams, fake reviews, and more. We will also explore a number of potential solutions to lessening the prevalence and impact of online deception on society (e.g., interventions to reduce the spread of misinformation).

The rise of personalization technologies has disrupted domains ranging from political campaigns to fashion with reverberating societal consequences. People who use digital media platforms leave behind a data trail that can be used to peer into their minds and make inferences about their psychological characteristics. These inferred psychological characteristics, in-turn, can be used to dynamically customize messages to individual users at a granular scale. Personalization technologies operate with the goal of maximizing persuasive appeal of messages by creating a psychological fit between mediated content, the characteristics of individual users and the context(s) in which people are receiving the message. In this course, we will examine (1) the basic psychological mechanisms underlying personalization technologies, (2) the role played by big data and machine learning techniques in facilitating persuasion and (3) the ethical issues associated with the rise of modern-day personalization technologies. By combining a big data lens with socio-cognitive psychological research, we will understand how, why and when personalization technologies work. We will pay close attention to generative artificial intelligence technologies like ChatGPT and DALL-E in the context of facilitating persuasion. We will also spend time formulating the future of persuasion technologies while considering the broader societal repercussions that might originate from their continued widespread adoption.

This course is about the interrelationship between science and the public, where "science" is understood in a broad way including both social and natural sciences. It examines how communication about science (in classrooms, in the news media, etc.) influences how the public thinks and acts when it comes to scientific issues. This course explores public perceptions, representations, and assessments of science by drawing together studies from psychology, communication, political science, and environmental science.

Focus is on how politicians and government learn what Americans want and how the public's preferences shape government action; how surveys measure beliefs, preferences, and experiences; how poll results are criticized and interpreted; how conflict between polls is viewed by the public; how accurate surveys are and when they are accurate; how to conduct survey research to produce accurate measurements; designing questionnaires that people can understand and use comfortably; how question wording can manipulate poll results; corruption in survey research.

Qualifies students to conduct communication research. Student must apply for department honors thesis program during Spring Quarter of junior year.

Individual research for coterminal Media Studies students.