This module examines the history and political economy of mechanized mass media, beginning principally with cinema and exploring subsequent forms including radio, television, and the convergent media of the digital age. It examines state policies across different state systems (e.g in liberal democratic states, in authoritarian states, or in the kinds of ideological state systems that proliferated across the twentieth century); the emergence of a corporate media system financed through advertising; the alternatives to that increasingly dominant system (e.g. public service broadcasting, or state control of media networks); and the (potentially) radical shifts of the digital age and the emergence of new forms of convergent and social media. How have powerful institutions – such as states, or corporations – sought to use media? What policies have shaped how media functions? What roles have media played in the orchestration of modern forms of power? How has media been regulated and censored? What public spheres are framed and shaped by media? What alternatives to dominant media forms and systems have been established, and what can we learn from those texts and histories? The course will seek to explore these varied questions drawing on examples from across the globe and history. It will examine media texts and policies in the context in particular of histories of the global capitalist system from the late nineteenth century onwards.

The course examines media systems – including ownership, profit imperatives, state regulation and control – and the ideologies and government policies that sustain these arrangements. It takes a historical and comparative approach, examining the emergence of new forms of mechanized mass media from the late-nineteenth century onwards – up to contemporary forms of digital and social media – and the different media systems and policy frameworks that develop across the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The course will examine also alternative forms of media and media policy, assessing in particular the possibilities presented by new forms of digital media and media networks. It does all this on the assumption that educating our students about the ways in which media has been shaped and deployed is essential to the urgent task to create new forms of global social, political, and economic justice. No meaningful transformation of a profoundly destructive and exploitative global political economic reality is possible without transforming our media systems. This class is offered as a small contribution to that urgent imperative.