The Media Industries & Communication Major

In 2022, the film & television industry directly employed 930,000 people in the U.S. collectively earning more than $100 billion (an average salary of more than $110K/year). Publishing and journalism employ close to 100,000 Americans, while the advertising and PR business boasts nearly 500,000 more jobs. A significant portion of these positions–which seek knowledge workers who are well-educated and think creatively and critically–are located in Southern California.

But the media and communication industries are actually much broader. The old divisions between film, television, gaming, publishing, and technology are disintegrating. Content migrates from television to online publications to books to theme parks and back, with workers shifting between production, marketing, and business. Our major reflects this porous nature of contemporary media by covering multiple media, cultural, and tech industries. 

Our program, however, is NOT pre-professional and does NOT offer vocational training. Instead we prepare students for careers in the broadest sense, by providing the critical tools necessary for confronting a dynamic job market. We know how quickly media technologies change, how volatile the cultural marketplace is, and how complex communication and nonprofit sectors can be. We aim to prepare you for these challenges for the long term, by supporting your transformation into informed and media literate citizens, responsible and imaginative creators, and ethical future leaders in the fields of media, communication, technology, and culture. 

In the 21st century, the media landscape has grown exceedingly complex; it is more technologically advanced, more financialized, more global in nature, and more deeply embedded within political and economic struggles. It is more important than ever not only to understand different types of media content, but also to grasp the entirety of the system that produces, distributes, and consumes them. This means locating power and flows of power within industries and across governments, explaining how economics, legal systems, and policy shape popular culture, and describing the impact of mass communication on identity formation, representational practices, and the formation of institutional and democratic norms. 

So in addition to learning the basics of textual analysis, semiotics, and media history (traditional components of media programs), MIC Majors will learn about media economics, media law, media technology, algorithmic culture, platform infrastructure, communication regulation, globalization, creative labor, and worker- and organizational cultures (the elements that make our program unique).

• Identity. How both media representations and media systems construct racial, ethnic, and gender identity, impacting social experience, practices, discourses, and expectations as well as social groups, classes, and relations.
• Social Media & Advertising. How to discern and describe the social meaning of advertising and evaluate claims about the content, forms, and technologies of social media. How to use personal ambivalence about these forms to understand both the pleasure they provide as well as their exploitative structural tendencies.
• News Media & Misinformation. How contemporary publishing both sustains and undermines democratic life and culture via an understanding of the embeddedness of news media practices in social, economic and political conditions. 
• Labor & Working Conditions. How to recognize and respond to the changing shape of work in media industries that are increasingly reliant on flexible, freelance and “spec” labor, with widespread effects on organizational culture, unionism and labor relations, and workers’ experiences, working conditions, and professional mobility. Our students will enter these workplaces equipped to advocate for themselves, navigate the complexities of creative collaborative workspaces, and recognize the value of their own labor and that of the collective. 
• Business & Entrepreneurship. How to navigate the contemporary media landscape as a leader and/or a worker in ways that are ethical and oriented toward social justice. How to recognize the often asymmetric relationships between the rights of laborers, the public good, and the established economic imperatives and legal practices of media corporations.