I have taught courses on media twice–or two-and-a-half times. The first time was way back in 2005 when students in my Doing Things With Words class wanted to talk about nothing but the then-new app: Instant Messenger. They wrote a collective piece about it. I remember when the hashtag was a novelty; in another course a student wrote about that. In 2010 I taught a course called New Media, and students did their best to make sense of what was new then—iPads, and apps.

This third time, in 2021, things feel a bit different. Media are in the news all the time; students can major in this field. There are jobs everywhere for experts in digital marketing, brand management, social media communications, web design, SEO–while the “old” media like writing, radio, photography, TV, movies are still plugging away. Heads of Facebook and Twitter testify in Congress. Every few weeks a new alarm sounds, and all the while we are bathed in communicative media.

I designed this class when I was teaching remotely during the height of the pandemic year, 2020-21. I titled it Zoom Text Talk Insta Sing Chat: Media and Modalities of Interaction. You see the marketing ploy, and also the academic responsibility. At the core is the field of linguistic anthropology, but also a serious goal of trying to make sense of what was all around us, using conceptual tools beyond the obvious. In addition, I really wanted to think through the very powerful experiences so many of us had while engaging differently during that year.

In Fall 2021, we were back in person, though masked. (Our university had been in person about 80 percent even during 2020-21; I had requested and been granted an exemption. Masking was up to the discretion of individual faculty in 2021.)  About twenty students signed up, from all over campus.

This class has been a joy to learn with. Students at first reluctantly and later enthusiastically worked our way through various forms of media, beginning with the very profound change that led to our species, Homo sapiens sapiens—spoken language—through the invention of writing in its several different origins, and through printing. Students thought this would all be pretty obvious and boring. They discovered it wasn’t either of those!

By the time we encountered the revolutionary idea of connecting the world simultaneously without physical connection—the telegraph—students realized that the history of the world wasn’t exactly what they expected.

We roamed around critiques of radio and television, and saw how the internet was generated from ideas of encyclopedias and catalogues, made completely different through the invention of “search” (see chapter 3, “Panic! At The Search Engine”). We interrogated our own texting and social media practices. We even started a class Instagram account.

Throughout the semester we’ve been mulling over a few key ideas: each medium has “affordances” and “constraints.” Each new medium, from Socrates’s critique of writing to the contemporary charge that Instagram is responsible for a rise in teenage suicides and eating disorders, tends to be accompanied by “moral panic” (See chapter 2, “Moral Panics: Genuine Concern or Social Tool?”). And various media enter an ecosystem in which each medium gets a particular set of expectations about what it does, and how. Different media have come to be associated with different norms of interaction, playfulness, political seriousness, and more.

We have had a lot of questions. Some were the ones the students began with. Many emerged as the class unfolded. Some of them are:  Who controls each medium? Who profits? What are the common dangers? What are the benefits? Is the medium the message? Marshall McLuhan claimed it was. We call this “technological determinism.” But just because someone said it–even someone famous–does that make it true? We’ve been thinking about this idea all semester.

*

Students formed teams. Each team led class twice. They wrote in their Reflection Journals, either on their own, prompted by their classmates, or by me. Periodically we brainstormed about ideas for the final project. Eventually students brainstormed on their own, presented a three-item version of their idea (What? How? So what?) and put a phrase on Jamboard. Then students combined their topics into related groups.

Each group met in our lovely, flexible classroom, and talked about their interests. At the end of each class session after our fall break, we worked on the project. Each writing team created a Google folder and worked on their documents, planning for whatever genre they decided to use. It was what I called “format freedom”–they could use any genre they wanted–but they had to decide, for good reasons, what genre they thought would suit their topic, and then look at examples of that genre to see what constituted the strengths of the examples they liked.

Right before Thanksgiving they workshopped their “pre-drafts” with a set of questions, such as “Would it be convincing to someone who has not had our class? Do they explain everything they need to, for the random public reader? Would it be interesting for them? What would they learn?,” “What is their evidence? Did they use their own research? Were the methods sound?,” “Did they take alternative explanations into account? Or did they just begin with a conclusion and then try to support that?,” and “What concepts and theoretical terms are they using to explain their position? Is it more sophisticated than just ‘We have this experience here and I want to talk about myself’?” They kept planning, working on pieces, and brainstorming about their research methods, especially the groups planning to conduct ethnographic research or to administer surveys or interviews. Some of the groups merged, over time; we ended up with groups of two, three, four, and five–depending on their shared interests.

The topics that compelled them had to do with moral panics (chapter 2, “Moral Panics: Genuine Concern or Social Tool?” and chapter 3, “Panic! At the Search Engine”), and the effects of social media. Some topics were prominently in the news during the semester as Facebook became “Meta” and whistleblower Frances Haugen testified about research that Facebook had suppressed about the harmful effects of Instagram on teenage girls  (chapter 5, “Social Media’s Impacts on Adolescents”). Some groups discovered the overriding power of search engines, often seen as part of the unseen background, but contributing to what has come to be called, ominously, “The Algorithm”  (chapter 3, “Panic! At The Search Engine.”) Some wondered who is using mobile devices, in what way, and for what purpose (chapter 4, “Mobile Device Usage across Ages”). One group wanted to know how activism intersects with media, including social media (chapter 6, “New Media, New Activism: How Twitter & Instagram Have Impacted Social Movements in the 21st Century”). One group took the long view and asked about the truly foundational question of how the all-important dimension of emotion is conveyed through the arbitrary and lifeless representation of speech in writing (chapter 1, “The Weight of a Word: Emotions in Writing”). In the process, some other interests had to be bracketed, but the learners got very absorbed in their work and had a lot of fun writing.

The freedom they experienced in choosing both their topics and their formats allowed us to be very reflective—meta-reflective—about all the ways that knowledge is conveyed. In a world of multiple forms of information, just like multiple platforms, apps, devices, we always have to make choices about which choice to make, for which reason, in which moment, and what the effects are likely to be.

I couldn’t be happier about the work these students—from all different majors, different years of college, different levels of familiarity with anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and media studies—have done.

We hope you find this work interesting, informative, thought-provoking, and enjoyable. The authors worked very hard to tell the world something they thought was important about the pervasive ways our species mediates our experience, through communicative mediums, as one mind, body, and spirit tries to reach another. We don’t read minds. But we read the signs that people give, and give off, both consciously and unconsciously. We are exquisitely attuned to each other, whether a glance or an emoji. This is the stuff of friendship and enmity, of intimacy and world politics.

It’s around us all the time.

And having tools to notice not only the obvious but the underlying patterns, powers, and perils is what education at its best can provide.

These students learned well.

We offer this story of their learning to you.

Sources

• Heyer, Paul, and Peter Urquhart. 2019. Communication in History: Stone Age Symbols to Social Media, 7th edition. London and New York: Routledge.
• Jones, Rodney H., and Christoph A. Hafner. 2021. Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
• Leaver, Tama, Tim Highfield, and Chrystal Abidin. 2020. Instagram. Cambridge: Polity.
• Poe, Marshall T. 2011. A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.