We are currently in the midst of a profound media transition as digital media offer us more exciting technical opportunities and serious ethical challenges every day. As we grapple with the implications of these changes, it is useful to consider that we are not the only ones who have struggled to come to terms with the effects of media change on individuals and on society. A little over 300 years ago, citizens of Britain also foundthemselves experiencing a brave new media world as a “new” medium -- print -- began to play a more dominant and more pervasive role in the mediascape than ever before, "wiring" them, as it were, to life beyond their neighbourhoods and even beyond their nation. In the words of Clifford Siskin and William Warner, “print” came to take “center stage” within an “already existing media ecology of voice, sound, image, and manuscript writing” in the early eighteenth century. In this course, you will go back in time in order to study the effects of media change. You will explore a range of early eighteenth- century works, attempting to understand how “new” (print) media transformed attitudes to traditional (oral and manuscript) media, but also how those traditional media continued to play an active role in culture and shaped how people comprehended their relationship to the new medium. You will learn how to work with and analyze primary materials from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), the English Broadside Ballad Archive, the Burney Collection of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Newspapers, and the Eighteenth-Century Media Online (EMO) database. You will also gain practice in reading and analyzing critical articles on the history of media. And . . . you will engage with eighteenth-century media materially through participating in a lab for each of the three modules: listening to and singing ballads for the module on Oral Culture; handwriting with quill pens for the module on Manuscript Culture; and experimenting with letter-press printing for the module on Print Culture. You will (I hope) come away with a new appreciation for the complexity of mediation in the past – and a deeper perspective on our relationship with media in the present.