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.
When reading media criticism and trying to relate it to the net, it often seems the case that, like many political commentators, they are fighting the last war.
Similarly, Horkheimer and Adorno's enormous rant about modern media being, first and foremost, an instrument of deception and control seems to assume that all media are mass media, e.g., one-to-many, noninteractive, broadcast-oriented, and that any media that are not are nonetheless completely co-opted by those that are.
It's not clear whether reader-response theory [1 2 3 4 5] is a help or a hindrance to analyzing networked forms of communication.
Media is thus ideologically encoded to maximize the willing consent of the consumer and "have-nots" to "keep with the program" and perpetuate the status quo of power and wealth distribution.
The most fundamental macro-question in communication, mediatheory, and cultural theory is the nature of mediation: we are always already in language, in symbolic systems, and we know our lived-in world by language, discourse, and signs, not by immediate access to "things in themselves" (Kant).
Wittgenstein at first held a "picture theory" of logical and scientific propositions that represent, in the way that language can, a world of facts, or, in his terms, "whatever is the case," in the world.
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