This course will explore the proposition that we are witnessing a ‘demotic turn’ in media culture: the development of a broader, possibly even a new, field of relations between media and culture in which the participation of ordinary people has become a more fundamental component than ever before. Rather than necessarily signifying the rise of a democratic politics or a process of media democratization, the politics of that participation are contingent and instantiated rather than determined in advance.  The course will explore how this politics of participation actually plays out in a range of contemporary media ‘hot spots’ – reality television, user-generated content online, debates about the future of journalism in an online environment heavily populated by bloggers and citizen journalists, the connection between the commodification of celebrity and the construction of social identities, utopian and dystopian readings of the potential of new media, and populist formations of talk radio.