Media Studies is the study of the constitution and effects of media. Media studies employ theories and methods from a number of fields which include political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, Media influence, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy, museum studies, art history/criticism, information theory, and economics. Accordingly Media Studies, a comparably young academic field, differ in the extent to which Media itself are thematic and to what extent a unified definition of Media is attempted. The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ... Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. ... Sociology (from Latin: socius, companion; and the suffix -ology, the study of, from Greek λόγος, lógos, knowledge [1]) is the systematic and scientific study of society, including patterns of social relationships, social action, and culture[2]. Areas studied in sociology can range from the analysis of brief contacts between anonymous... Social theory refers to the use of abstract and often complex theoretical frameworks to explain and analyze social patterns and large-scale social structures. ... Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. ... In psychology, communication theory and sociology, media influence or media effects refers to the theories about the ways in which the mass media affect how their audiences, think and behave. ... Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for analyzing, among other things, the film image, narrative structure, the function of film artists, the relationship of film to reality, and the film spectators position in the cinematic experience. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... For other uses, see Philosophy (disambiguation). ... Museology (also called museum studies) is the study of how to organize and manage museums and museum collections. ... This article is about the academic discipline of art history. ... Art criticism is the study and evaluation of art. ... Not to be confused with information technology, information science, or informatics. ... Face-to-face trading interactions on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. ...

Media Studies in the tradition of empirical sciences like communication studies, sociology and economics generally focus on Mass Media, their political, social, economic and cultural role and impact in creating and distributing content to media audiences. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Sociology (from Latin: socius, companion; and the suffix -ology, the study of, from Greek λόγος, lógos, knowledge [1]) is the systematic and scientific study of society, including patterns of social relationships, social action, and culture[2]. Areas studied in sociology can range from the analysis of brief contacts between anonymous... Face-to-face trading interactions on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. ... Popular press redirects here; note that the University of Wisconsin Press publishes under the imprint The Popular Press. Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. ...

Media Studies in the tradition of humanities like literary theory, film/video studies, cultural studies and philosophy focus on the constitution of media and question in how far they shape what is regarded as knowledge and as communicable. Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. ... Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for analyzing, among other things, the film image, narrative structure, the function of film artists, the relationship of film to reality, and the film spectators position in the cinematic experience. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... For other uses, see Philosophy (disambiguation). ...

History of media studies

Main article: History of media studies

This article outlines the history of media studies. ...

Key themes in media studies

In addition to the interdisciplinary nature of the academic field, popular understandings of media studies encompass: Interdisciplinary work is that which integrates concepts across different disciplines. ...

• media content production
• audience studies and media influence
• mass communication
• journalism
• political economy
• interpersonal communication
• cultural sociology

Although most production and journalism courses incorporate media studies for contextual purposes (see Fourth estate), the terms are not interchangeable. Creative Industries (or sometimes Creative Economy) refers to a set of interlocking industry sectors, and are often cited as being a growing part of the global economy. ... Media audience studies is the academic study of media audiences, connected with the academic disciplines of sociology, psychology and media studies. ... In psychology, communication theory and sociology, media influence or media effects refers to the theories about the ways in which the mass media affect how their audiences, think and behave. ... Mass communication is the term used to describe the academic study of various means by which individuals and entities relay information to large segments of the population all at once through mass media. ... Journalism is a discipline of gathering, writing and reporting news, and broadly it includes the process of editing and presenting the news articles. ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ... Interpersonal communication is the process of sending and receiving information or communication with another person. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... In modern times, television reporters are part of the fourth estate. ...

Separate strands are being identified within media studies, such as audience studies, producer studies, television studies and radio studies. Film studies is often considered a separate discipline, though television and video games studies grew out of it, as made evident by the application of basic critical theories such as psychoanalysis, feminism and Marxism. Media audience studies is the academic study of media audiences, connected with the academic disciplines of sociology, psychology and media studies. ... Television studies is an academic discipline that deals with critical approaches to television. ... Film theory seeks to develop concise, systematic concepts that apply to the study of film/cinema as art. ... Today psychoanalysis comprises several interlocking theories concerning the functioning of the mind. ... Feminists redirects here. ... Marxism is both the theory and the political practice (that is, the praxis) derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ...

Critical media theory looks at how the corporate ownership of media production and distribution affects society, and provides a common ground to social conservatives (concerned by the effects of media on the traditional family) and liberals and socialists (concerned by the corporatization of social discourse). The study of the effects and techniques of advertising forms a cornerstone of media studies.

Contemporary media studies includes the analysis of new media with emphasis on the internet, video games, mobile devices, interactive television, and other forms of mass media which developed from the 1990s. Because these new technologies allow instant communication across the world (chat rooms and instant messaging, online video games, video conferencing), interpersonal communication is an important element in new media studies. Another factor influencing contemporary media studies is globalization: the debate of globalization as a historical event or as a social construction rages on ^[1]. New Media is the marriage of mediated communications technologies with digital computers. ... This article is about computer and video games. ... A Handheld device (also known as handheld computer or simply handheld) is a pocket-sized computing device, typically utilising a small visual display screen for user output and a miniaturised keyboard for user input. ... Digital TV set-top box Interactive television describes a number of techniques which allow viewers to interact with television content as they view it. ... Popular press redirects here; note that the University of Wisconsin Press publishes under the imprint The Popular Press. Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. ... Year 1990 (MCMXC) was a common year starting on Monday (link displays the 1990 Gregorian calendar). ...

It has been argued that media studies has not fully acknowledged the changes which the internet and digital interactive media have brought about, seeing these as an 'add-on'. David Gauntlett has argued for a 'Media Studies 2.0' which fully recognises the ways in which media has changed, and that traditional boundaries between 'audiences' and 'producers' has collapsed. David Gauntlett (b. ... Media Studies 2. ...

Political communication and political economy

From the beginning, media studies are closely related to politics and wars (Guo & Wu, 2005, p. 276) such as campaign research and war propaganda. Political communication mainly studies the connections among politicians, voters and media. It focused on the media effects. There are four main media effects theories: magic bullet, two-step flow of communications (Lazarsfeld, 1948), limited effects (Lang & Lang, 1953), and the spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1984). Also, many scholars studied the technique of political communication such as rhetoric, symbolism and etc. The hypodermic needle model is a model of communications. ... The two-step flow model was propounded by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. ... The spiral of silence is a political science and mass communication theory propounded by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. ...

In the last quarter century, political economy has played a major part in media studies literature. The theory gained notoriety in media studies particularly with the publication of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, published in 1988. In the book, the authors discuss a theory of how the United States’ media industry operates, which they term a “propaganda model.” The model describes a “decentralized and non-conspiratorial market system of control and processing, although at times the government or one or more private actors may take initiatives and mobilize co-ordinated elite handling of an issue." ^[2] The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ... Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. ... Avram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew: אברם נועם חומסקי Yiddish: אברם נועם כאמסקי) (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. ...

Media Studies in Germany

In Germany two main streams of Media Studies can be identified. The older stream and dominant stream is comparable to Communication Studies in the anglo-saxon world. Pioneered by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in the 1940s this stream studies mass media, its institutions and its effects on society and individuals. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (born December 19, 1916) is a German political scientist. ...

Since the 1980s a second stream of Media Studies has developed. Emerging from Germanic and Literature Studies and pioneered by Friedrich Kittler, Hartmut Winkler, Georg Christoph Tholen, Norbert Bolz and Bernhard Siegert Media are investigated as means of representation of knowledge. Often applying historical research and utilizing and criticizing post-structuralist french theory media are investigated in their structural function in enabling and forming knowledge and its communication. Discourses are analyzed for their underlying medial a priori (German: 'mediales apriori') Friedrich A. Kittler (born 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony) is a literary scientist and a media theorist. ... Bernhard Siegert (b. ...

This stream of Media Studies has become institutionalized during the second half of the 1990s when numerous departments for media studies and media history have been established at German universities.

Media Studies in the UK

In the UK, media studies developed in the 1960s from the academic study of English, and from literary criticism more broadly. The key date, according to Andrew Crisell, is 1959: English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S., Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, India, South Africa, and the Middle East, among other areas), English linguistics (including English phonetics, phonology... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ...

when Joseph Trenaman left the BBC's Further Education Unit to become the first holder of the Granada Research Fellowship in Television at Leeds University. Soon after in 1966, the Centre for Mass Communication Research was founded at Leicester University, and degree programmes in media studies began to sprout at polytechnics and other universities during the 1970s and 1980s.^[3] The University of Leeds is a major teaching and research university, one of the largest in the United Kingdom with over 32,000 full-time students. ... University of Leicester seen from Victoria Park - Left to right: the Department of Engineering, the Attenborough tower, the Charles Wilson building. ... The term polytechnic, from the Greek πολύ polú meaning many and τεχνικός tekhnikós meaning arts, is commonly used in many countries to describe an institution that delivers vocational or technical education and training, other countries do not use the term and use alternative terminology. ...

Cultural Studies

Main article: Cultural studies

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was founded by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall at the University of Birmingham in 1964. As the appeal of Marxism waned in the 1960s, the CCCS took critical theory in new directions, raising questions about media and power. There was the shift of paradigm from ethnography to Hall's semiology. The CCCS was pivotal in developing the field, producing a number of key researchers. Under the directorship of Stuart Hall, who wrote the seminal Encoding/Decoding model, the centre produced key empirical research about the relationship between texts and audiences. Amongst these was The Nationwide Audience by David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon.^[4] Cultural studies revamped the definition of culture. The definition of culture changed from culture being viewed as good/bad to an overall view of social interests and relations.^[5] This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham. ... Richard Hoggart (born September 24, 1918) is a British sociologist, widely known for his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy. ... Stuart Hall (born 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a cultural theorist from the United Kingdom. ... Website http://www. ... Semiotics (also spelled Semeiotics) is the study of signs and sign systems. ... A central concept in science and the scientific method is that all evidence must be empirical, or empirically based, that is, dependent on evidence or consequences that are observable by the senses. ... The Nationwide Project was an influential media audience research project conducted by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ...

Media Studies & Educational Websites

Main article: Media Studies & Educational Websites

Sites like Mediaedu are now actively supporting secondary school staff and students with GCSE and A Level media education in the UK. Mediaedu.co.uk is a collaborative website designed by qualified Media Studies teachers. Some of its content is written by senior examiners and professionals in the industry.

Criticism of Media Studies in the UK Media

In the UK, Media Studies is regularly the victim of jokes and cynical attitudes, often being labelled as a Mickey Mouse subject.^[6][7] It receives many of the criticisms directed at sociology scholars during the 70s and 80s.^[8] Mickey Mouse degrees is the dysphemism given by the national tabloids of Great Britain, nearly always in the summer the low point of the news cycle, to university degree courses deemed worthless or irrelevant. ...

In 2000, England's Chief Schools Inspector, Chris Woodhead suggested that media studies is a "one way ticket to the dole queue." There is, he says, a "profound scepticism as to whether these courses teach students the skills and understanding they want".^[8] Christopher Woodhead (born 1947) was the Chief Inspector of Schools in England from 1994 until 2000 and is one of the most controversial figures in debates on the direction of British education policy. ...

However, Paul Smith, professor of media and culture at the University of Sussex says that the rising number of media studies programmes is not "dumbing down", but reflects changes in the real world. "In the current cultural, social and political circumstances that we live in, the media is so pre-eminent, that some way of understanding it is fairly crucial for an informed citizenship. We are trying to understand how [the media] operates, what kind of structures it has and the cultural impact it has."^[8] Boris Johnson, the UK shadow minister for higher education has also supported the subject: "[media studies] is an excellent preparation for the real thing, by the way" ^[9] and has cited media studies as an example of a degree thought by some journalists to be "complete rubbish" but which was often "a good way of getting employment."^[10] The University of Sussex (also known colloquially as Sussex Uni) is an English campus university which is situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, and is four miles from Brighton. ... Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson(born 19 June 1964, New York City)[2] is a British Conservative Party politician, journalist and former editor of The Spectator. ...

Its relation to polytechnics, and subsequently the post-1992 New Universities, are also a target for ridicule. The now annual moral panic in the UK every August when GCSE and A-level results are released normally focuses upon Media Studies as an example of the alleged dumbing down of education.^[11] In the UK, the Post-1992 universities or Modern Universities are the former polytechnics or colleges of higher education that were given the status of universities by John Majors government in 1992 or colleges that have been granted university status since then: Post-1992 or Modern Universities Abertay University... Moral panic is a sociological term, coined by Stanley Cohen, meaning a reaction by a group of people based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. ... “GCSE” redirects here. ... The A-level, short for Advanced Level, is a General Certificate of Education qualification in the United Kingdom, usually taken by students during the optional final two years of secondary school (Years 12 & 13, commonly called the Sixth Form), or at a separate sixth form college or further education college... Dumbing down is viewed either as a pejorative term for a perceived over-simplification of, amongst other things, education, news and television, or as a statement of truth about real cultural trends in education and culture. ...

See also

• Anthropology of media
• Media ecology
• Mass media
• Hot and cool media
• Mass communication
• Multimedia literacy
• Journalism
  • Yellow Journalism
• Transparency (humanities)
• Behavioural sciences
• Political Economy
• Virtual ethnography
• Time- and space-bias
• Marshall McLuhan's tetrad of media effects
• Cultural sociology

Anthropology of media (also anthropology of mass media, media anthropology) is an area of study within social or cultural anthropology that emphasizes ethnographic studies as a means of understanding producers, audiences, and other cultural and social aspects of mass media. ... Media ecology is an interdisciplinary field of media theory involving the study of media environments. ... Popular press redirects here; note that the University of Wisconsin Press publishes under the imprint The Popular Press. Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. ... The concept of hot and cool media was developed by media theorist Marshall McLuhan. ... Mass communication is the term used to describe the academic study of various means by which individuals and entities relay information to large segments of the population all at once through mass media. ... Multimedia literacy is a new aspect of literacy that is being recognised as technology expands the way people communicate. ... Journalism is a discipline of gathering, writing and reporting news, and broadly it includes the process of editing and presenting the news articles. ... Nasty little printers devils spew forth from the Hoe press in this Puck cartoon of Nov. ... In the physical sciences, specifically in optics, a transparent physical object is one that can be seen through. ... Behavioural sciences (or Behavioral science) is a term that encompasses all the disciplines that explore the activities of and interactions among organisms in the natural world. ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government. ... Virtual ethnography is a new development in the field of Ethnography. ... The terms time-bias and space-bias describe concepts that anchor communication theorist Harold Inniss understanding of dominant communication technologies in history. ... “McLuhan” redirects here. ... In Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989), published posthumously, Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

References

Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 335th day of the year (336th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 335th day of the year (336th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display full 2000 Gregorian calendar). ... is the 62nd day of the year (63rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 335th day of the year (336th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

• Theory.org.uk: media studies website by David Gauntlett
• Mediaedu.co.uk A new Media Studies website offering blogging, podcasts, interactive forums, online quizzes, photo resources, writing frames, competitions, useful links and managed content. This is a collaborative site aimed at supporting the needs of staff and students working in KS4 and KS5 Media Studies.
• MANA - the Media Alliance for New Activism
• LanguageMonitor: Media Metrics and Analysis
• MediaStudies.com Links to a variety of news and other media sites.