Media Origins

Module Code: MS1011

Media Origins takes a temporal journey through the last two centuries of media culture, to understand when and where the media we are familiar with today originated. Each week you are introduced to the historical emergence of a medium and the ways in which it grew and developed within its context of social, cultural and technological change. We place the emergence of the media in its social and cultural contexts, in order to make sense of what was going on in those particular times and places.

Topics covered

• Doing media history
• Press in the 19th century
• Advertising and mass culture
• Cinema and modernity
• Radio
• Television and national identity
• Broadcast news
• Video games and boyhood
• Histories of the internet