This reading-intensive seminar focuses on anthropological approaches to the process of mass mediation, with specific reference to critical theories of technology and semiotics. The course combines "classic" theoretical texts drawn from a range of disciplines with more empirical accounts of how communicative processes are integral to large-scale social formations, and how such processes influence our current understanding of mass politics, publicity, "big data," racialization, militarization, digitalization. This year, the course will focus in particular on considering the information regime of imperial and colonial formations. Placing our understanding of media technologies within the more encompassing concept of mediation, this course asks what ethnographic or cultural accounts can offer to the interdisciplinary field of media studies.