Social Media and Communication

Course Description

COM3471 studies social media as a communication phenomenon — not how to post, but what these technologies do to the way people communicate with one another.

Florida's statewide description, which FIU uses almost verbatim, is precise about the angle: the course "will examine social media from a communication perspective; with a focus on how media technologies influence the way we communicate (verbally and nonverbally) with others."

UWF's version is broader in scope and more foundational in purpose: an "introduction to the history, theory, technology, and uses of social media… Students will consider the role of individual choice, social influence, technological influence, and how these perspectives can be seen in social media communication. Students will also explore the implications of social media for personal relationships, organizations, and culture."

⚠⚠ Both are recognisably the same course. What differs is the function it serves in the degree — at one institution it is a standalone elective about effects, at the other it is the second step of a four-course professional sequence. That changes what comes after it, and it is worth knowing which one you are in. See Special Information.

⚠ A caution about expectations, because students consistently arrive with the wrong one. This is a communication theory course, not a marketing course and not a how-to. It asks what a platform's affordances do to self-presentation, how weak ties behave differently from strong ones, why context collapse makes people misjudge their audience, and what happens to nonverbal communication when a face is replaced by a reaction icon. ⚠ Students who want campaign execution want COM4561; students who want to run a team want COM4564. This is the course that explains why any of it works.

Two Florida public institutions carry it, both at three credits.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Define social media in communication terms — as technologies enabling creation, collaboration, sharing and audience contact — rather than by listing platforms.
• Trace the history of networked communication and explain what each generation of technology changed.
• ⚠ Apply communication theory to social media: uses and gratifications, social presence, media richness, social information processing, and network theory.
• Explain affordances — persistence, visibility, spreadability, searchability — and how each shapes behaviour.
• ⚠ Analyse self-presentation and identity online, including context collapse and the imagined audience.
• Explain how nonverbal communication is reconstructed online — emoji, reaction, timing, silence — and what is lost.
• Analyse relationship formation and maintenance, and distinguish strong from weak ties in effect.
• Explain the role of algorithmic curation in what a user sees, and its consequences for attention and belief.
• Analyse misinformation, virality and the mechanics of spread.
• Analyse organisational uses of social media and the shift in who controls an organisation's message.
• Examine privacy, surveillance and data as communication problems.
• ⚠ Evaluate research evidence on social media and wellbeing, distinguishing what is established from what is contested.
• Apply ethical reasoning to participation, disclosure and platform design.

Optional Outcomes

• Conduct a small content or network analysis of real platform data.
• Examine political communication, activism and social movements.
• Examine influencer culture and the creator economy.
• Examine cross-cultural and multilingual platform use.
• Examine platform governance, moderation and regulation.
• Build a professional online presence deliberately.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Defining social media; the history of computer-mediated communication.
• Theoretical foundations — uses and gratifications, social presence, media richness, social information processing.
• Affordances and platform architecture.
• Identity and self-presentation; context collapse; the imagined audience.
• Nonverbal communication online.
• Networks, strong and weak ties, homophily.
• Algorithms, feeds and attention.
• Virality, misinformation and correction.
• Relationships — formation, maintenance, conflict, dissolution.
• Organisations and social media — voice, crisis, employee speech.
• Privacy, data and surveillance.
• Wellbeing research and its genuine disagreements.
• Ethics and platform responsibility.

Optional Topics

• Political communication, activism and movements.
• Influencers, creators and the attention economy.
• Moderation, governance and regulation.
• Cross-cultural and global platform use.
• Content and network analysis methods.
• Professional presence and personal branding.

Resources & Tools

• Social Media: Usage and Impact, The Social Media Reader, or a current social media and communication text — ⚠ check the edition date; nothing in this field ages faster.
• It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (danah boyd) — ⚠⚠ the best single book for this course. Free to download from the author, empirically grounded, and the source of the affordances and context-collapse framing most syllabi use.
• Custodians of the Internet (Tarleton Gillespie) — on moderation and platform governance.
• Pew Research Center — ⚠ free, methodologically sound survey data on American social media use, updated continuously. The right citation when you need a number, and the right antidote to confident claims from opinion pieces.
• Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society and Social Media + Society — ⚠ the last is fully open access, which makes it unusually usable for undergraduate work.
• Data & Society and the Berkman Klein Center — free research on platforms, moderation and misinformation.
• ⚠ Your own feeds, used as data. A short structured observation of what your own algorithm shows you over a week is a genuinely good assignment and a common one.

Career Pathways

• Social media coordinator, specialist and strategist — ⚠ in agencies, corporations, universities, non-profits, healthcare systems and government.
• Community manager — moderating and cultivating an online community, a distinct skill from publishing to one.
• Content strategist and digital communication specialist.
• Public relations and corporate communication, where social is now a core channel rather than an add-on.
• Social listening and analytics — ⚠ monitoring conversation, reporting on sentiment and reach. The analytical end, and better paid than posting.
• Trust and safety / content moderation policy — a growing field, and one that draws directly on the moderation and governance material.
• Political and advocacy communication, and crisis communication.
• Florida context — Miami is a major bilingual and Latin American digital media market; Orlando and Tampa carry large agency, hospitality, healthcare and theme park social operations; and every Florida county, school district and public agency now runs public-facing social accounts, particularly for emergency and hurricane communication, which is a genuinely serious Florida application of this subject.
• ⚠⚠ Realistic framing. "Social media manager" is a competitive entry-level title and often underpaid at the bottom. The people who advance are the ones who can measure and explain — which is why the analytics and research courses in this sequence matter more to a career than the posting does.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Same course, different FUNCTION — check what it leads to at your institution

The two carriers describe the same subject. What differs is the prerequisite chain around it, and that tells you more than the descriptions do.

	UWF	FIU
Its title	Fundamentals of Social Media Communication	Social Media's Impact on Communication
Prerequisite	⚠ COM2713 (professional writing)	none published
What it gates	⚠⚠ COM4561 → COM4564 — a professional sequence	nothing published
So it functions as	step 2 of a four-course professional track	a standalone elective on effects

⚠⚠⚠ This is the prerequisite-chain diagnostic doing something slightly different from usual. Normally the chain is read to settle whether two institutions teach different subjects. Here the subject is not in doubt and the chain reveals the course's ROLE instead — foundational at UWF, terminal at FIU. The word "Fundamentals" in UWF's title is not decoration; it is a statement about position.

What to do with that. ⚠ If you are at UWF and want the professional track, take this early — there are two more courses behind it and COM4564 additionally requires 75 completed credit hours. If you are at FIU, or transferring in, do not assume a follow-on course exists; check what your institution offers beyond this one before planning a concentration around it.

⚠ The statewide title carries a (U) marker, and it means only one thing

Florida's statewide title reads Social Media's Impact on Communication (U). ⚠ The (U) means upper division and nothing more. It does not indicate an alternate-level pair, a different version of the course, or any special status. Several numbers in this prefix carry it.

⚠⚠ Everything factual in this course has a short shelf life — and the course should say so

The theory is durable; the specifics are not. Platform names, feature sets, user numbers, ownership, moderation policies and even which platforms matter have all changed substantially within the span of a typical degree.

⚠⚠⚠ A specific and under-appreciated development worth knowing about: independent research access to platform data has contracted sharply. Several major platforms restricted or withdrew the research interfaces that academic studies of social media were built on. The practical consequence is that a good deal of the most-cited empirical work describes a data environment researchers can no longer access, and newer work is harder to do and sometimes depends on the platforms' own cooperation.

⚠ That is a live methodological problem, not a footnote, and a well-taught version of this course will raise it. When you read a study, check when the data was collected and whether the platform still works that way. Judge the reading list by its dates.

⚠ Handle the wellbeing material carefully — in both directions

The relationship between social media use and mental health is one of the most publicly discussed and most genuinely contested questions in communication research. ⚠⚠ The popular account — that it is straightforwardly and severely harmful, particularly to adolescents — is stated far more confidently than the research supports, and serious researchers disagree in print about effect sizes, causal direction and whether the measures capture anything stable.

⚠ That is not a claim that there is no harm, and a course that swung to that conclusion would be as unbalanced as the popular one. The honest position — and the one this course should teach — is that the effects are real but heterogeneous, depend heavily on how a person uses the platform rather than how long, and are much harder to measure than headlines suggest.

⚠⚠ Two practical notes. This material lands personally for many students, and it is reasonable to find it uncomfortable; 988 (call or text) reaches the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and your institution's counselling centre is free to enrolled students. And being able to read a contested literature without collapsing it into a slogan is precisely the skill this course is for — it is a better outcome than any particular conclusion.

Offering Notes

Institution	Its title	Credits	Contact hours	Notes
University of West Florida (SUS)	Fundamentals of Social Media Communication	3	not published	⚠ Prerequisite COM 2713; may not be repeated for credit; gateway to COM4561 and COM4564; Department of Communication
Florida International University (SUS)	Social Media's Impact on Communication	3	not published	no prerequisite published; College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts

Both carriers award three credits, neither publishes contact hours, so the 45 hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit course with no C or L suffix. Florida's statewide record lists the prerequisite as NONE, which matches FIU and not UWF — ⚠ take your own institution's gate, not the state's.

Position in the curriculum and transfer

An upper-division course in a communication degree. It pairs naturally with media effects, interpersonal communication and public relations, and it is the conceptual foundation for the applied social media courses.

Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no Gordon Rule designation and no general-education category, and marks it for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit — ⚠ a marking every active COM number carries, so it is boilerplate.

⚠ COM is a heavily fragmented prefix — 370 live identifiers, 83% carried by a single Florida public institution. Two carriers is comparatively good coverage here.

AI Integration

⚠⚠⚠ This course is unusual: generative AI is not merely a tool a student might misuse, it is part of the SUBJECT MATTER. A course on how media technologies shape communication that ignores the largest change in those technologies in a decade would be incomplete.

Three developments belong in the content, and a current syllabus should cover them.

• ⚠⚠ Synthetic content at scale. Generated text, images, audio and video now circulate through the same networks the course studies. The affordances framework applies directly: persistence, spreadability and searchability were already the mechanics of virality, and the marginal cost of producing plausible content has collapsed. The interesting question for this course is not "can you spot a fake" but what happens to a communication environment when volume is no longer a constraint.
• Authenticity as the scarce good. ⚠ Social media's appeal rested substantially on the belief that a real person was on the other end. The rise of synthetic accounts and generated personas puts pressure on exactly that — and the self-presentation and identity material is where a student should work out what follows.
• Algorithmic curation was always the AI in the room. ⚠ The feed-ranking systems this course already studies are machine learning systems. Students frequently treat "the algorithm" as a single mysterious object; the course should make it concrete — an optimiser trained on engagement, with all the consequences that implies.

As a study tool, the ordinary uses apply: summarising a dense theoretical article, explaining a concept a second way, generating counterarguments to a position, and drafting and revising your own writing.

⚠⚠ Two failure modes specific to this subject.

First, and worst: this field's facts go stale faster than almost any other, and a model's training data is a snapshot. ⚠ Ask about a platform's features, ownership, user numbers or moderation policy and you will get a confident answer describing a state of affairs that may be years out of date. Go to Pew for numbers and to the platform's own current documentation for features.

Second: the wellbeing literature is contested, and generated summaries flatten it. ⚠ The popular framing dominates the text these models learned from, so a generated answer will tend to state the strong harm claim as settled. That is the exact error this course exists to correct. Read the studies, and note who disagrees and why.

⚠ And a point worth making to anyone heading into social media work: the professional risk is not using these tools, it is using them without disclosure or judgement. Organisations are writing policies on synthetic content, and the reputational damage from an undisclosed generated post or an invented statistic lands on the brand. Ask what the policy is; if there is not one, that is worth raising.