This course examines the relationship between mass media technologies and the idea of "reality" with an emphasis on the electronic and digital forms that dominate the discourse of "reality" in contemporary media culture, television, and the Internet. It will explore such questions as: How do shifting aesthetic conventions of realism, "reality" programming, and documentary inflect both theoretical and historical understandings of what constitutes reality? And how do our ideas of media technology inform these conventions and the understandings they produce?