Media and culture in modern societies

This course is a response to the ‘cultural shift’ taking place in society and social sciences in the last few decades. The ‘cultural shift’ points to the increasing centrality of media and culture in social life and in approaches to understanding social life. This shift is revealed in the momentous changes like globalisation of consumer and cultural industries, and the expansion of media and communication technologies in modern societies. There is now a quest to understand social life that is more about what culture does rather than what culture is. This understanding of cultural practices and collective representations, nowadays fundamentally circulated through the media, is valuable in and of itself as everyday life has fundamentally transformed, from the acts on selves to mutation of bodies.

We shall focus on a selected range of media representations and cultural practices in modern society, dissect the experiences and account for the dynamics underlying them. The topics are arranged more or less in a micro-to-macro manner, starting from the changing notions of childhood, to feelings of intimacy, to the ideals of beauty, body and gender, to work ethics, art and culture, modern cityscape and finally to issues of national identity, systemic risk and the future of modernity. Our discussion concentrates on the plural paths and possibilities of media styles and cultural habits in modern societies, with examples and studies from various parts of the world which possess the core features of modern societies.