Social Influence

It's an undeniable fact.  Persuasion and influence are extremely important in each and every one of our lives.  It doesn't matter where we are.  Today we are exposed to more persuasion than ever before, and what's more, we are willing participants in this process.     

In CAS 302, that is exactly what we are studying.  CAS is a major at Penn State Berks. The acronym stands for Communication Arts & Sciences.  We are looking at theories of influence as well as the pragmatic application of these theories.

For our first post, we thought we'd introduce ourselves and the kind of topics we will be examining this semester.  Communication theory is so attractive to many scholars because of the diverse range of topics discussed.  One of the most important topics in any communication theory course is ethics because human communication involves choice.

Along with ethics, we will also be discussing rhetoric and other perspectives of persuasion; including psychological and sociological perspectives.  The book we are using is called Persuasion and Influence in American Life.  As of right now, we are not too far into our studies, but we have learned about ethics in communication.  For our group's first post, we thought that ethics was important to talk about because of our blog.  As we construct our posts each week, we are attempting to incorporate the concepts we have learned about in relation to ethical communication.

Our class was assigned to create a blog because it is one of the many types of social media that we see every day.  Our blog will be about different subjects each time we post.  However, the post will relate back to social influence. Each group gets to choose what they want to post about each time.  This will give each group the chance to express what they believe fits in with social influence and our class discussions.  As a group, we decided that our blog's topics would be geared toward 18 - 29 year olds.  We believe this project will extend past our class and future classes will pick up where we left off.

For more information about our program, please visit the Penn State Berks CAS website.  Our website will help you to understand more about who we are and what we do at Penn State Berks. 

The inspiration for our blog is a student-created blog at University of North Carolina Wilmington.  Our professor had us look at this blog to get an idea of what our blog might look like one day.

We hope that this blog will give you insight about what we are learning.  Additionally, we believe this blog will help people learn about social influence and how it works within our society.

~Victoria Johnson, Brittany McGee, Austin McCue, William Wagner

Posted in: CAS, Ethics, PSU Berks