This course is intended for students pursuing research projects at the Media Laboratory. Topics include Media Lab research areas, documenting research progress, ethical issues in research; patents, copyrights, intellectual property, and giving oral, written, and online presentations of results. A final oral presentation is required. Enrollment limited with preference given to students in the Media Arts and Sciences freshman program.

Introduction to Sociology 2e adheres to the scope and sequence of a typical, one-semester introductory sociology course. It offers comprehensive coverage of core concepts, foundational scholars, and emerging theories, which are supported by a wealth of engaging learning materials. The textbook presents detailed section reviews with rich questions, discussions that help students apply their knowledge, and features that draw learners into the discipline in meaningful ways. The second edition retains the book’s conceptual organization, aligning to most courses, and has been significantly updated to reflect the latest research and provide examples most relevant to today’s students. In order to help instructors transition to the revised version, the 2e changes are described within the preface.

Describe the evolution and current role of different media, like newspapers, television, and new mediaUnderstand the function of product advertising in mediaDemonstrate awareness of the social homogenization and social fragmentation that occur via modern society’s use of technology and media

This course offers an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of videogames as texts through an examination of their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while reading current research and theory from a variety of sources in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and industry. Assignments focus on game analysis in the context of the theories discussed in class. Class meetings involve regular reading, writing, and presentation exercises. No prior programming experience required. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.

This course explores the ways in which humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. It examines how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally. It describes the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, sound recording, and the globalized travel of these technologies. Students address questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing. There is a particular focus on how the sound/noise boundary is imagined, created and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples will be provided. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication provided. At MIT, this course is limited to 20 students.

This class develops the abilities of students to communicate science effectively in a variety of real-world contexts. It covers strategies for dealing with complex areas like theoretical physics, genomics and neuroscience, and addresses challenges in communicating about topics such as climate change and evolution. Projects focus on speaking and writing, being an expert witness, preparing briefings for policy-makers, writing blogs, and giving live interviews for broadcast, as well as the creation of an interactive exhibit for display in the MIT Museum.

The "small wonders" to which our course will attend are moments of present time, depicted in the verbal and visual media of the modern age: newspapers, novels and stories, poems, photographs, films, etc. We will move between visual and verbal media across a considerable span of time, from eighteenth-century poetry and prose fiction to twenty-first century social networking and microblogging sites, and from sculpture to photography, film, and digital visual media. With help from philosophers, contemporary cultural historians, and others, we will begin to think about a media practice largely taken for granted in our own moment.