The ubiquity of social media has already consolidated in every aspect of contemporary everyday life, and most recently, social media has become synonymous with the different mediums of audio-visual mediums (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Niconico and Bilibili) as opposed to the declining predominantly text-based mediums such as Twitter/X. In this course, students will be encouraged to overcome the binary of pessimistic/optimistic views on social media and study the emergence and evolution of audiovisual-based social media from the perspectives of technology (e.g. interface design, algorithm curation, and infrastructure of data streaming), aesthetics (this is not simply from the perspective of contemporary art but also the broader debates on the contemporary internet-native notions of aesthetics), culture (e.g. cultural analytics and communities of practice). The course does not presuppose that social media platforms represent a radical rupture from previous media; by contrast, it situates the study of audio-visual social media in a broader media history and theoretical lineage in studying music, television and cinema as well as their criticisms. As a course that builds upon the notion of medium-specificity, it also encourages student experimentation with the aforementioned technicities of audio-visual social media platforms and practice medium-specific criticism. In a semester-long guided student project, the course’s knowledge production is not in the traditional form of written essays, but through producing essayistic audio-visual works that formulate a critique of works and sub(cultures) on social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok (and beyond) within their own conventions of screen ecologies, socio-technics (e.g. editing conventions), and readymade materials—YouTube criticism is practised within the medium of YouTube, utilising both theoretical knowledge and practical know-how.