YouTube Criticism, or How We Write about Social Media
Despite their ubiquity, we often fail to see beyond the surface of social media platforms. Perhaps
we see them as a natural part of twenty-first century life, or perhaps we do not want to jeopardize
the immediate comfort they sometimes offer us in our chaotic world. Today, it is more important
than ever to challenge our assumptions about the digital networks that structure our lives, and to
learn how to clearly articulate our ideas and beliefs about them. This course will challenge you to
both take seriously your own personal experiences with social media and push you to think
beyond them. We will engage a range of methodologies from Production Studies to Media
Philosophy to explore questions such as, what are different ways to study and understand social
media? How are platforms structured and regulated and by whom? and how do social media
figure into beliefs about the power of digital communications technologies more broadly? By the
end of this course, you will be able to integrate a variety of approaches to the study social media
in a piece of critical, argumentative writing about a research topic of your choice. Although we
will examine several platforms and associated technologies, we will always return to YouTube as
our primary object of focus for our analyses. Drawing upon contemporary scholarship and
YouTube content itself, we will nuance our understanding of the intersections between media,
technology, and society.