Digital Media

Overview

Digital Media scholarship emphasizes the production and reception of mediated messages designed to inform, persuade, educate, and entertain both historically and in contemporary society; the social cultural political, legal, economic, professional, and ethical implications of mediated messages; and the convergence that is both altering and reproducing historical assumptions about mass communication.

We are committed to understanding media broadly. We are interested in the relationships between people and media as well as media messages, uses, representations, and reception both historically and in contemporary life. 

Through critical dialogue, interpretations change as historians seek to deepen our understanding of the past as well as the evolution of today?s salient issues. Through the study of contemporary media including journalism, visual media, and social media we emphasize the myriad ways media play significant roles in society.

The Digital Media program at University of Utah includes scholarship devoted to history, journalism, broadcast, photography, media technologies and social media. Faculty have studied public broadcasting, historical leadership in the black press, historical coverage of nuclear testing, first amendment cases, how visuals operate in contemporary and historical media systems, and a variety of forms of social practice such as hacking, modding, networking, programming, and interface design. 

We explore questions such as: how is identity performed, shaped, and maintained in new social media systems? How are mobile and social media used in social movement, health communication, and strategic communication? How does unequal access to digital technology affect the culture, policy, and economics of new media? How do new technologies mediate our relationship with the environment? How are fields such as journalism and education adapting and being shaped by new technologies and modes of media production?

Graduate Workshops

A regular slate of graduate workshops is offered each year to all graduate students to ensure their socialization, professionalization, intellectual development, and success navigating the program and the discipline. 

Workshop topics include but are not limited to writing; conference submission and presentation; publishing; grantwriting; “Brown Bag” sessions with individual faculty; and navigating various stages of the job market