GSU

Media, Society, and Culture Lesson Module Seeing Isn’t Believing RepresentUs, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons: A synthetic Kim Jong Un warns Americans—evidence that our eyes/ears are no longer reliable gatekeepers. This video clip is a "deepfake" of Kim Jong Un created in 2020 by RepresentUs, a non-partisan non-profit organization that produced it to raise public awareness about fake news in the emerging age of generative AI. The footage itself is fully synthetic, yet it’s an amalgamation from genuine video footage and voice samples of the North Korean leader drawn from publicly available news archives. It was intentionally designed to look real enough to unsettle us, but still recognizable as “fake” for educational purposes. Since 2020, of course, deepfake technology has advanced by orders of magnitude, in terms of realism, accessibility, and speed of production. ...

Course: Media, Culture & Society 1. Introduction: Why Study the Internet Historically The Internet is not a naturally occurring technology, rather, it is a profoundly human artifact. To understand its current social and political implications, we must trace its origins to the Cold War, where the fear of nuclear mutual annihilation became the unlikely seedbed for the invention of the Internet. In this module, we will explore how military exigencies, scientific collaboration, and ideological visions of freedom and control intertwined to produce today’s Internet infrastructure. By the end of this lesson, you should be able to explain how rhetorical, political, and technological forces co-evolved in shaping the Internet’s materiality and discursive characteristics. ...

 Table of Contents What Do You See? Historical "Thickness" of Advertising Demonstrative and Associative Ads Advertising & Consumer Psychology Bandwagon & Anti-Bandwagon Effects Social Marketing & Exploitation Computational Rhetoric of Hyper-Personalization What Do You See? Let’s begin today’s lesson with a quick glance at these sets of images. What do they remind you of? ...