Introduction to Media Studies
Mass media gets examined as a system in this MIT course from Comparative Media Studies/Writing, covering books, film, video games, and online interaction as forms that carry information and ideas to large audiences. The course looks at how media shapes and is shaped by culture, tracing how messages travel between people and institutions and what changes when the channel changes from print to screen to network. Materials include the syllabus, readings, and assignments used in the MIT classroom version of the course, published through MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license. There is no instructor interaction and no certificate, just the course materials themselves: reading lists, assignment prompts, and the reasoning behind the syllabus structure, useful for anyone building their own study of how media systems operate at scale.