Social Media, and social media platforms, play an integral role in society, and in our lives, today. Love them or hate them, we can’t live without them. We use social media to communicate, to share, to shop, to start businesses, grow brands, and to explore the world around us. Studying social media is a relatively new phenomenon and is often misunderstood. The study of social media is more than simply playing with social media, more than simply posting on Instagram or Tik Tok. Studying social media is about understanding the social media platforms of today, so we’re ready to be the content creators of tomorrow.<br><br>The Digital and Social Media Specialization gives students an opportunity to learn, explore, analyze and create media in the current digital media landscape. Students are introduced to a process based approach to media making – which we call media design – that includes design thinking, design making and design breaking and is fundamental to the media making and consuming experience.<br><br>Courses in this major are all project based. Your projects will be in the form of a digital artefact – public facing work on a social media platform. You’ll be using Instagram, or Tik Tok, or YouTube, or Twitch, to build a project that you design, about a topic of your choosing. These projects start very small, at the beginning of your degree, but you have the opportunity to work on them across subjects, across trimesters, even across years. These projects are designed to give you real-world experience, and often replicate the type of work you would do as a social media manager, content creator, copywriter, brand ambassador, digital marketer, entrepreneur, or small business owner.