This course in critical media literacy examines how we come to understand ourselves and our world, and learn to feel, evaluate, and act, through the simulative mediation of information and communication technologies. The aim is to provide students with a deeper understanding of the dynamic symbolic environment that surrounds them and in which they participate as both audience and producer. The approach is multidisciplinary, drawing not only from psychology but a broad range of influential perspectives in the social sciences and humanities. The topics explored reveal how developments in the world of media are central to understanding changing forms of public and private life in the 21st century.