Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Media studies is a broad academic discipline that seeks to understand the nature, content, history, and social impact of various media, including mass media such as film and television. As practiced in the field of communication, media studies is but one of the many disciplines in the humanities to be revolutionized by the “New” Critical theory and by recent new approaches to studying culture. However, critical/cultural media studies has a long history. Before its encounter with contemporary cultural studies, media studies (incorporating related fields such as television studies, film studies, cyberspace studies, and journalism studies) was shaped by rhetorical theory and criticism, influenced by German critical social theory and largely defined in opposition to a sociologically oriented behavioral research methodology. The result, then, is that critical/cultural media studies in communication is a complex domain, articulating difficult problems of production, textuality, and audience in interesting and unique ways. Part of the complexity rests in the disunity of the area, disunity exemplified in an often uneasy conjunction of three dominant methodologies and theoretical paradigms – the mass communication, the media environment, and the historical/interpretive – which struggle for compatibility. For most of the twentieth century, the dominant paradigm of contemporary media studies ... log in or subscribe to read full text