This course reviews how both old and new media interact with politics and elections, drawing in particular on examples from the United States and United Kingdom over the past 40 years. We track the evolution from traditional media such as newspapers and television towards social media, including Meta platforms (Facebook/Instagram etc), Google (e.g. YouTube), and micronews (e.g. X/Twitter, BlueSky) as well as the growing influence of podcasting. This is a chance for people entering an IT career to see in real time how an IT-driven transformation of the industry has affected our politics, including raising questions of ethics and also how media narratives that once united regions or entire countries have tended to rearrange and “silo” populations into communities of a shared ideological or social interest. It’s a particularly good preparation for anyone with an interest in social or traditional media from an IT perspective, but more generally useful in terms of the implications of information technology’s impact on people’s lives.
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August 2025
34 assignments
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