Studies of media globalization analyze communications technologies and infrastructures that ford national borders and intensify connections across planetary space. Media make global processes—everyday trading to emergency alerts—operational: we would not come to know about global pandemics, if it weren’t for disease surveillance technologies; there would not be global fashion or global fandom without expansive communications infrastructures (cellphone grids, underwater cables, satellites); nor would political uprisings such as BLM reverberate if symbolic transmissions (tweets to music videos) did not translate across contexts as shared historical experience. As globalizing media forms and formats, platforms and infrastructures, deepen connectivities and penetrate everyday life, predictably, tensions and conflicts arise around them. This backdrop frames the two main questions of this course:

• How are media global? Where and how do they increase and intensify their reach? What media enable global circulations (of money, affects, ideas, etc.)? Do media forms and formats change as they traverse historical differences (cultural/linguistic/national)? What are the effects of inhabiting a media geography (like the Netflix empire or twitterverse)
• How is the global medial? What media forms (like world maps), technologies (like cellphones or apps), and infrastructures (underwater cables, satellites) make it possible to live globally? When we think or feel globally, what media shape our perceptions?

Thinking along these two tracks—media as global, and the global as medial—we will read a series of media scholars, view/listen to relevant media texts, and discuss our findings to unpack “global media.” Students are required to view posted lecture modules, listen to podcasts and watch films/shows/talks, and post questions for further discussion.