COURSE 1: MEDIA EFFECTS & THE AGE OF DIGITAL INFLUENCE - FROM EARLY COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS TO THE INTERNET: EFFECTS ON INDIVIDUALS, SOCIETY, AND NATIONS Communication → mass media → film/television → internet → platforms → algorithms → attention → identity → social psychology → social media → AI/immersive environments Module 1 — Information as a Human Imperative: Why People Seek and Share Information This module explores the fundamental human drive to seek, interpret, and share information and why communication has been essential to human survival and society. Students examine how uncertainty, curiosity, emotion, identity, belonging, social learning, and decision-making influence what information people seek and why they pass it to others. The module establishes the psychological foundation for understanding why information has always carried the potential to influence human behavior. Module 2 — From Pre-Modern Communication to Mass Communication This module traces the evolution of human communication from smoke signals, flags, visual signaling, and animal messengers to the printing press and early newspapers. Students examine how distance, speed, access, and reliability once constrained the movement of information and how technological innovation progressively transformed those limitations. The module explores how print enabled information and narratives to reach mass audiences at unprecedented speed and scale, contributing to sensationalism and the emergence of mass influence. Module 3 — Telegraph, Radio & Broadcast Power: The Centralization of Influence This module examines how the telegraph and radio fundamentally changed the speed, reach, and structure of human communication, allowing information to travel rapidly across vast distances. Students explore the rise of centralized broadcasting, mass audiences, media gatekeepers, agenda-setting, propaganda, and public information. The module considers how control over powerful communication technologies increasingly meant the ability to shape what entire populations could see, hear, and understand about the world. Module 4 — Television, Film & the Psychological Shaping of Perception and Culture This module examines how television, news, film, and entertainment can shape perceptions, attitudes, social expectations, and culture. Students explore foundational media-effects concepts including framing, priming, agenda-setting, cultivation, narrative transportation, parasocial relationships, stereotypes, repetition, familiarity, and emotional engagement. The module demonstrates how media can affect individuals and societies not only through explicit messages, but also through the stories, characters, images, and representations people repeatedly encounter. Module 5 — The Internet & Networked Information Environment This module explores how the internet transformed communication from predominantly one-to-many mass media into an interconnected environment in which billions of people can simultaneously produce, consume, and distribute information. Students examine search, social platforms, user-generated content, declining traditional gatekeeping, information abundance, the attention economy, influencers, memes, virality, and social contagion. The module considers how networked technology transformed not only the speed and scale of information, but also who has the power to create and distribute it. Module 6 — The Individual Under Algorithmic Influence This module examines what happens to the individual within an information environment increasingly organized by algorithms and designed around attention and engagement. Students explore recommender systems, personalization, selective exposure, confirmation bias, information overload, cognitive load, attention fragmentation, social comparison, digital identity, anonymity, online disinhibition, and debates surrounding problematic technology use and addiction. The module also examines how notifications, infinite scroll, gamification, recommendations, and other elements of persuasive design can shape what people notice, consume, and do online. Module 7 — Platforms, Data & Society This module moves from the individual to society, examining how digital platforms, behavioral data, algorithms, and technology companies can affect groups, institutions, and collective behavior. Students explore surveillance capitalism, data brokers, profiling, privacy, algorithmic amplification, echo chambers, polarization, social identity, conformity, social proof, mobilization, and in-group/out-group dynamics. The module considers the broader implications of data-driven platforms for privacy, social cohesion, democracy, collective action, and social control. Module 8 — Networked Social Media, Immersive Technology & AI This module examines the rapidly evolving relationship between social media, multimedia, immersive technologies, AI, and human behavior, using the Arab Spring, terrorism, and the Russia–Ukraine War as real-world cases of networked communication and mobilization. Students explore VR/AR, the metaverse, avatars and digital identity, generative AI, synthetic media, AI-mediated communication, anthropomorphism, automation bias, trust in AI, AI companions, and emerging human-machine relationships. The module concludes Course 1 by considering how increasingly immersive, intelligent, and personalized technological environments may affect individuals, relationships, societies, and nations. COURSE 2: APPLIED CYBERPSYCHOLOGY - TECHNOLOGY, HUMAN BEHAVIOR & NATIONAL SECURITY Module 9 — Perception, Reality & Disinformation This module explores how people perceive, select, organize, and interpret information, and why individuals can encounter the same information yet understand it differently. Students examine how attention, memory, cognitive biases, prior beliefs, framing, repetition, and context shape perception and belief formation. They then apply these concepts to misinformation and disinformation, exploring why false or misleading information can be persuasive and why corrections do not always change beliefs. Module 10 — Technology, Information Manipulation & the Psychology of Distrust: The Russia Case This module examines how Russia uses digital technologies both internationally and domestically to shape information environments, influence perceptions, and exercise social control, while exploring the psychological effects of these environments on individuals and societies. Using the Russia–Ukraine War as a major case study, students examine how Russia and Ukraine have leveraged social media, digital platforms, bots, coordinated networks, synthetic media, AI, and other technologies in pursuit of their respective objectives, alongside Russia’s domestic use of censorship, surveillance, platform controls, and information management. The module considers how these technologies can affect trust, uncertainty, cynicism, perceived consensus, information overload, and behavior, while looking ahead to how emerging technologies may further transform Russia’s domestic and international information environment. Module 11 — AI, Mass Surveillance & Digitally Mediated Society: The China Case This module examines how China uses AI, surveillance systems, digital platforms, behavioral data, and information technologies domestically and internationally, while comparing its approach with the Russian model examined in the previous module. Students explore mass surveillance, facial recognition, social-credit and blacklist systems, censorship, synthetic media, and technologically mediated social control, while also examining the rapidly emerging phenomenon of AI companionship and human–AI romantic relationships in China and Japan and their implications for intimacy, attachment, expectations of human partners, loneliness, identity, and changing social norms. The module considers how AI and other digital technologies can transform human behavior and relationships at the individual, interpersonal, and societal levels, while also examining privacy, autonomy, trust, and China's expanding international technology footprint. Module 12 — Technology, National Security & Civil Liberties in the United States This module examines how the United States uses AI, surveillance, social media, data collection, facial recognition, automated license-plate readers, drones, and other emerging technologies to support national security, law enforcement, and public safety. Students explore cases including Flock camera networks and facial-recognition systems while examining how expanding technological capabilities affect privacy, anonymity, behavior, trust, and expectations of surveillance, as well as the constitutional questions surrounding the First and Fourth Amendments and other civil-liberties protections. The module considers the central challenge of a technologically advanced democratic society: how institutions can use powerful technologies to address legitimate security threats while maintaining oversight, accountability, individual rights, and public trust. Module 13 — Digital Networks, Extremism & Illicit Communities: Terrorists and Cartels This module examines how digital environments can affect group formation, identity, belonging, and collective behavior, using terrorist and cartel networks as case studies. Students explore research on online radicalization and recruitment, social reinforcement, anonymity, deindividuation, memes, gamification, encrypted platforms, algorithmic exposure, and the relationship between online and offline identities. The module also examines the limits of existing evidence, including why exposure to extremist content alone should not be assumed to cause radicalization. Module 14 — When Digital Systems Are Attacked: Cyberattacks & Societal Resilience (Estonia, Ukraine, Sony) This module examines how cyberattacks against governments, critical infrastructure, and private organizations can disrupt the technologies upon which modern societies depend, using Estonia, Ukraine, and the Sony Pictures hack as major case studies. Students explore attacks involving government services, banking, energy infrastructure, corporate networks, sensitive data, and private communications, examining their effects on security, privacy, trust, behavior, and organizational and societal resilience. The module then examines how governments and organizations responded and what these cases reveal about cybersecurity, preparedness, redundancy, incident response, public-private cooperation, and building more resilient digital societies. Module 15 — Smart Cities, Digital Twins & the Psychology of Connected Environments This module explores how smart cities, digital twins, sensors, connected devices, AI, and algorithmic systems are transforming urban environments, using Singapore and South Korea as major case studies. Students examine how real-time data, intelligent transportation, surveillance technologies, automated services, and digitally designed environments can affect human behavior, privacy, trust, mobility, decision-making, and expectations of convenience and autonomy. The module considers how the architecture of a connected city can subtly shape what people see, where they go, and how they behave, while examining the broader tradeoffs between efficiency, security, technological innovation, privacy, and individual agency. Module 16 — Human–AI Futures: Ethics, Governance, Immersive Technology & Cyberecology This module examines the evolving relationship between humans, AI, and increasingly immersive digital environments, including human-AI interaction, automation bias, trust, anthropomorphism, AI companions, synthetic identities, avatars, AR/VR, and emerging brain-computer interfaces. Students explore the psychological, ethical, governance, privacy, autonomy, and security questions created as technology becomes more integrated into human decision-making and everyday life. The course concludes with cyberecology, examining humans as part of an interconnected ecosystem of people, AI, algorithms, platforms, sensors, institutions, information, and physical environments.