MCO 426: Digital Media Literacy II 2026 Spring B

Have you ever opened Instagram or Facebook and just sat there for a second and tought…why am I seeing this? No, seriously. Not in a casual way, but in a real, almost unsettling way. It’s as if something changed in the background and your entire feed now feels slightly different. That’s not you being paranoid.

I actually got to leave my mark on the internet, in a good way, by contributing to a Wikipedia article. Before this assignment, I never gave too much thought about how Wikipedia actually operates behind the scenes. Like most people, I’ve always used it as a quick source of information, but I never considered the

For this assignment, I used ChatGPT to generate a short blog post about political apathy in the United States. At first glance, the response actually seemed pretty solid. It was structured well, stayed on topic, and covered some of the main reasons people don’t engage with politics, like distrust in government, lack of education, and

In this video, I explore how both algorithms and collaborative platforms like Wikipedia shape the way we experience information online. One of the biggest things I realized while working on this assignment is that the internet isn’t as neutral or random as it feels. A lot of what we see is actually being influenced behind

As I’ve been working through this course, one of the biggest questions that keeps coming up is this: who is actually the creator when AI is involved? To explore that question, I decided to look at creativity from three different angles using images. First, I included a stock image of a woman painting on a

Freedom of expression has always existed in tension with public order. It sits on a narrow line between liberty and what the state labels as extremism, obscenity, or danger. Historically, whenever expression pushes society into discomfort, the government responds with regulation. The question is not whether regulation exists, but when it becomes excessive and who

In 1988, a group of young black men from Compton, California grabbed microphones and challenged the national conversation. When N.W.A. dropped Straight Outta Compton, the sound of hip hop exploded into something raw, unfiltered, and impossible to ignore. Their most infamous track, “F* Tha Police,”** wasn’t just a song; it became a public outcry, a

We live in a world saturated with media messages, and whether we realize it or not, those messages shape how we see ourselves and others. Most of the time, when we talk about negative portrayals of men, the focus tends to land on toxic masculinity, the stoic, aggressive, hypersexual archetype that’s been criticized for years.

Birtherism is the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore was not eligible to serve as president. On the surface, it seems like just another wild internet rumor, but its impact on American politics has been enormous. As the first Black president, Obama represented progress, but birtherism weaponized