#mass comm is still an area i find fascinating

[not-poignant]

hello pia! feel free to delete this if it’s too personal but i’d love to hear about your degree, what you learned from it, and how you think it has informed the way you write (whether it has or hasn’t!). i’m studying for a different degree, still humanities, but i’d love to hear about your degree since i.. well when i was in hs i didn’t know that it was an option. also if the above is too personal, please recommend some texts to learn abt mass comms .. thank you!

Hi anon,

I did my degree/s (Media Studies + Mass Communications majors, Scriptwriting (Drama, Film, Short Film) + Creative Writing (Poetry, Short Story, Literature, SFF) minors) back in 1999, so honestly, some of the information I learned then is out of date, and you're definitely better off looking at a university curriculum now for decent texts on mass communications. Even the Masters I did over 10 years ago, lol. I am an old.

You have to understand when I was in university for Mass Comm, the internet as we know it, and social media, literally didn't exist. And though 'Rupert Murdoch still owns a ton of Telcos' is still true, things like Wikipedia didn't exist, lol. The 'please don't use Wikipedia as a reference' didn't exist as a sentence, because Wikipedia just...didn't exist.

The media landscape has changed.

I've kept up with aspects of media studies that interest me (representations of mental health in the media, for example), but since the university texts still often cost hundreds of dollars, I can't get a ton of them every year and read them. You might be surprised what you can find in university bookstores in the clearance section, because books aren't in the curriculum anymore but are still likely to be 15 years more up-to-date than what I was taught with, lol.

I don't really know how to answer your specific questions though. There were a lot of different units within the degree, so I learned a lot from it, I don't know how to condense that down.

Probably the most important things I took with me are that media (fiction) does not have a 1:1 correlation with reality, and that we are not all mindless vessels with an inability to negotiate the media we watch (otherwise we'd buy everything in advertising ever), people who believe 'high art' is better than 'low art' are elitist ignorant dicks who don't actually understand art at all (if you've ever disparaged reality TV or soap operas, you are in this category, with soap operas giving you a side order of heavy misogyny to boot), media literacy is crucial and needs to be taught and prioritised on par (if not higher than) english fiction literacy (kids engage in more media than books, they should have more media literacy than book literacy), and that it's always important to know the politics and values of the people who own the news media you're watching (and that almost all news media is homogenised).

The biggest gift it gave me was to entirely remove my shame over watching or consuming any kind of media. I don't know what a guilty pleasure is, because guilty pleasures are a sign that you have some more work to do on unpacking your issues (often internalised misogyny believe it or not) over watching certain shows or listening to certain music etc. and finding joy in it. I feel NO shame in anything I watch, rewatch, love, get the most out of. Anon, I have done assignments on Big Brother and gotten high distinction/s for it. I've watched Misfits and gotten high distinction/s for it. I'm in the Golden Key Society because I watched a lot of Studio Ghibli and a lot of romcoms. Media studies does what creative writing doesn't - unpacks all your shame over enjoying different genres (sadly creative writing teaches a lot of that shame and can genre shame as well, it's extraordinarily outdated in many curriculums in that way).

It is so liberating to just watch whatever the fuck I want, and listen to whatever music I want, and not give a shit whoever knows I watch or listen to it. Like, I just... literally who cares. It's all art. It all means something and then I get to choose its further meaning. I get to decide what media I won't consume and why (usually around the politics and actions of the creator/s or actor/s, JKR can go to hell, or just not liking the show - I also feel no shame not liking things that everyone else likes), but it's never a choice based in shame or guilt. It is...truly, such a wonderful feeling when you realise there's literally no reason on this earth to have a guilty pleasure if you can think for yourself and understand why you've been conditioned to feel 'ashamed' for watching certain genres (surprise, it's usually racism or xenophobia or misogyny!)

Like, I did a unit called Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Psych Psych and Cinema as we called it), which was a tremendous amount of fun and let me know that psychology is literally in everything but that representations of psychology in literally everything tends to be not great lmao. I did a unit called Postmodern Wetlands which literally analysed the relationship between swamp representation in mass media (particular horror films as relating to the monstrous feminine) and what that means for environmentalism which changed my entire relationship to my body and the environment permanently. Idk how to describe that unit to anyone who hasn't taken it, but it was literally life-changing, lol.

It definitely influences my writing style, partly because I write serials based off of like... scriptwriting techniques I was taught for television drama back then. In terms of how media studies influences it - well mass communications probably not so much, and then media studies a whole lot, lol. (Mass Comm =/= Media Studies. One focuses on telecommunications/telcos/ISP providers/internet cables even, politics and the vehicles with which we spread mass media, the second one focuses more on the analysis of the products/works/pieces of art that end up on that mass media. One is a lot more discussion of 'which television stations do China / Fairfax / Murdoch own' or 'how are those internet sea cables going and how's the terrorism around that?' vs. 'what messages does the TV on each of these stations send').

But media studies influences my writing a ton, but I couldn't tell you how anon, aside from those two units I specifically mention above lol. Oh and the fact that we had to take a mandatory philosophy unit called Critical Thinking, which should be mandatory for every degree. That definitely taught me how to think critically, which...a lot of people don't know how to do! I probably couldn't even tell you the rest of how it influenced me, if you asked me 2 decades ago when I was actively studying it. I'd like to think it just makes me a more nuanced writer, and absolutely Teflon when it comes to fanpol / antis / anti-shippers, lol. But who knows!

I still think looking at current university curriculums for Media Studies (also known as Media Analysis in some other countries) is probably the best place to find recs. But you can also check out the books on media in my Goodreads list and go by star rating.

#asks and answers #pia on media studies #media studies and mass comm #they're both very different #you can do media studies and not know anything about mass comm #and vice versa #but they do go hand in hand #mass comm is still an area i find fascinating #because it's where the big politics are in the world #and also where the terrorism etc. is #but it can get heavy very quickly for that reason