A message-centered Approach to Teaching a College-level Course in Popular Culture

Popular Culture, including mediated artifacts from film, television, music, and the internet, are prevalent in most people's lives but often eschewed in academic settings. This essay provides insights into studying and teaching a graduate level course in popular culture through the lens of the communication studies discipline. It provides a message-centered approach that critically examines both mediated and non-mediated artifacts, focusing on the verbal and nonverbal, discursive and nondiscursive symbols that comprise the rhetoric of popular culture. Beginning with background and definitions, the essay then summarizes the course structure including objectives, required readings, and course assignments and their weightings. The focus then moves to examine in greater detail two specialized theories/models taught in the course – Deanna Sellnow's Illusion of Life and Andrew Wood's Omnitopia. Following this, a description is provided of an online dialogue assigned to discuss media effects. In the dialogue, students compare and contrast the perspectives found in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. The paper concludes with feedback from students and the author's closing thoughts about the value of the course specifically and in studying popular culture in general.