Students examine the contested sites of popular culture leadership in a variety of industries - professional sports, technology, entertainment, retail, and politics. They learn to analyze and critique the complex linguistic and visual images that bombard them via digital and print media from these organizations and icons. Students learn how persuasive messages are designed and targeted to specific audiences through an analysis of a variety of popular culture genres - music videos, political speeches, advertisements, TED talks, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Finally, students acquire the knowledge and skills to distinguish disinformation, doublespeak and propaganda from factual and truthful messages by analyzing, discussing and creating multimodal messages. 3 Credits