About Our School

The School of Information and Communication was opened in 2004 as an interdisciplinary department bringing together humanities and social sciences, as well as natural sciences to consider the roles of people and society in the coming age of advanced information society.

Our advanced information society continues to evolve while being driven by increased computerization of society and unstoppable globalization. In the 20th century, information society was spurred by media technology that spread information further than ever before, and was often seen as the ideal democratic and free society where free speech and unrestricted trade practices took place. It was even being portrayed as cyber-utopia. Fast-forward to the new century, and we now know that the advanced information society has brought innumerable negative ramifications in addition to those benefits: the unchecked rise of market principles and decline of public-mindedness; the rapid increase of hacking, computer viruses and other cyber crimes; and the complex issue of copyright control, to name but a few.

We at the School of Information and Communication strive to view and understand the computerization of society and the new stage it has entered from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective so that we may examine the positive and negative aspects within a big-picture framework, and thus work to address the issues of the times.

To that end, we offer a curriculum based on the following principles.

1. Creation of a new academic discipline: information and communication
   A new field of study is needed to tackle the diverse range of complex problems facing our information society. We need people with the ability to pose new hypotheses and come up with new methods of researching them, while building upon the existing disciplines. That is why we at the School of Information and Communication propose the establishment of a new, wide-ranging discipline which we call information and communication. The Department of Information and Communication offers four unique courses as part of a learning structure that incorporates multiple aspects and perspectives: Social Systems and Public Nature , Organization and People, Language and Culture, and Media and People.
2. Emphasis on seminars
   One of the main aspects of our voluntary study structure is the holding of exercise-based seminars throughout the four-year period. First-year seminars focus on effective methods of collecting and searching materials, discussion methods, as well as presentation methods and other vital areas of student literacy. In the second year, seminars are aimed at encouraging students to sharpen their areas of interest, and assist them to set up study themes. Then, in the third and fourth years, seminars help students give concrete shape to the study themes they had set up earlier, in the form of theses and other works.
3. Cooperation with other schools
   Students can attend classes in the other schools of Meiji University (up to 40 credits can be used to fulfill graduation requirements), to give them a wider view and allow them the opportunity to investigate their areas of interests in greater depth.