Program Overview

Unit Overview

The unit MEDA104, Screen, Sound and Society, is designed to encourage critical reflection on the role of mediated representation in establishing and maintaining personal values and beliefs. The unit explores a century of milestones in the evolution of mass media, introducing key theorists who have contributed to the understanding of media's impact on society.

Unit Rationale and Description

The unit aims to provide students with a critical and ethical lens to analyze the media's role in social organization and meaning-making. It traverses the emergence of mass communication technologies, empirical and cultural approaches to media investigation, and the ideological mechanisms through which media construct realities.

Learning Outcomes

To successfully complete this unit, students will be able to:

1. Identify and discuss the major traditions in media analysis and outline the value of each approach.
2. Discuss the roles media communication play in the organization and control of human society, especially in Western democratic societies.
3. Analyse the power of myth in the construction of media narratives.
4. Analyse the processes involved in the construction of meaning in established and emerging media.

Unit Content

Topics will include:

• Human symbolic communication from the emergence of mass communication technologies in the 19th century to the public-private spaces of social media.
• Empirical and cultural approaches to the investigation of mass media will be explored in the context of their origins in North America and Europe.
• The unit will focus particularly on the ideological mechanisms through which media are able to construct realities as normal, natural, or 'just the way things are'.

Assessment Strategy and Rationale

Each assessment task is designed to provide students with a distinct vantage point from which to apprehend the relationships between the theories traversed in the unit and the socio-political contexts from which they emerged.

Assessment 1: In-class Analysis

• Weighting: 10%
• Learning Outcomes: LO1, LO3 The in-class analysis will introduce students to foundational techniques of textual analysis needed for subsequent work completed in MEDA104.

Assessment 2: Ideological Analysis

• Weighting: 40%
• Learning Outcomes: LO1, LO2, LO3 This task focuses students' evolving analytic skills on the topic of ideology, which is a body of theory used to talk about the intervention of power in representation.

Assessment 3: Media Research Project

• Weighting: 50%
• Learning Outcomes: LO2, LO3, LO4 The media research project is a summative task that encourages students to draw upon the theoretical frameworks explored in MEDA104 to interrogate a contemporary media practice or output.

Learning and Teaching Strategy and Rationale

The unit will explore theories that seek to explain the media's role in social organization and meaning-making, considering key debates and questions in the field. Each theoretical encounter will provide new tools in the analytic tool kit necessary to answer these questions and to critique pre-existing understandings about the methods and approaches used in media analysis.

Representative Texts and References

• Baran, S & Davis, D 2021, Mass Communication Theory: Foundations, Ferment, Future, 8th edn, Oxford University Press, New York.
• Berger, A 2019, Media Analysis Techniques, 6th edn, Sage, California.
• Cunningham, S & Turnbull, S (eds.) 2014, The media & communications in Australia, 4th edn, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest.
• Curran, J & Hesmondhalgh D 2019, Media And Society, 6th ed, Bloomsbury Academic.
• Hodkinson, P 2017, Media Culture and Society, 2nd edn., SAGE, London.
• O'Shaughnessy, M & Stadler, J, Casey S 2016, Media and Society, 6th edn., Oxford University Press, South Melbourne.
• Paxson, P 2018, Mass Communications And Media Studies, 2nd ed, Bloomsbury Academic Pavlik, J & Pavlik, J & McIntosh, S 2019, Converging Media: A New Introduction To Mass Communication, 6th edn., Oxford University Press, New York.
• Sullivan, J 2020, Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, And Power, 2nd edn., SAGE, Thousand Oaks.

Credit Points and Year

• Credit points: 10
• Year: 2026