What does the Frankfurt School have to say about the creative industries? Does the spread of Google prove we now live in an information society? How is Madonna an example of postmodernism? How new is new media? Does the power of Facebook mean we're all media makers now? This groundbreaking volume – part reader, part textbook - helps you to engage thoroughly with some of the major voices that have come to define the landscape of theory in media studies, from the public sphere to postmodernism, from mass communication theory to media effects, from production to reception and beyond. But much more than this, by providing assistance and questions directly alongside the readings, it crucially helps you develop the skills necessary to become a critical, informed and analytical reader. Each reading is supported on the facing page by author annotations which provide comments, dissect the arguments, explain key ideas and terminology, make references to other relevant material, and pose questions that emerge from the text. Key features: Opening chapters: ‘What is theory?’ and ‘What is reading?’ bring alive the importance of both as key parts of media scholarship Pre-reading: substantial Introductory sections set each text and its author in context and show the relevance of the reading to contemporary culture Post-reading: Reflection sections summarise each reading’s key points and suggests further areas to explore and think about 4 types of annotations help you engage with the reading – context, content, structure, and writing style .... as well as questions to provoke further thought Split into 4 sections – Reading theory, Key thinkers and schools, Approaches and Media Theory in context New to the second edition: New chapters on New Media, and Audiences as Producers Reading Media Theory will assist you in developing close-reading and analytic skills. It will also increase your ability to outline key theories and debates, assess different case studies critically, link theoretical approaches to a particular historical context, and to structure and present an argument. As such, it will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, the sociology of the media, popular culture and other related subjects.

Teach middle school students to become savvy consumers of the TV, print, and online media bombarding them every day. In this timely book copublished by Routledge and MiddleWeb, media literacy expert Frank W. Baker offers thematic lessons for every month of the school year, so you can engage students in learning by having them analyze the real world around them. Students will learn to think critically about photos, advertisements, and other media and consider the intended purposes and messages. Topics include: Helping students detect fake news; Unraveling the messages in TV advertising; Looking at truth vs propaganda in political ads and debates; Revealing how big media influences the news we read; Understanding how pictures changed America during the Civil Rights Movement; Exploring the language of film and the symbols of costume design; Thinking about how media appeals to our emotions; Examining branding, product placement, and the role of celebrity; Reading and interpreting iconic news images; And much, much more! In addition, the book¿s lesson plans contain connections to key standards and step-by-step activities you can use immediately. With this practical book, you¿ll have all the tools and ideas you need to help today¿s students successfully navigate their media-filled world.

Renee Hobbs provides the first empirical evidence of the impact of media literacy on the academic achievement of adolescents. This pioneering book chronicles the practice of high school teachers who prepared their students to critically analyze all aspects of contemporary media culture. To do so, they developed an innovative curriculum that incorporates popular media, television, journalism, film, and new media into the required English curriculum. This book examines the processes they used to design and implement the new curriculum as well as the specific, measurable impact that the program had on students. Book Features: Documents how a media literacy course significantly improved reading comprehension, writing, critical analysis, and other academic skills. Offers practical information for teachers attempting to bring media literacy into their classroom, including lesson plans and activities. Examines how media literacy education increases motivation and builds citizenship skills with teens.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed and powerless after watching the news? Does it make you feel sad about the world, without much hope for its future? Take a breath – the world is not as bad as the headlines would have you believe. In You Are What You Read, campaigner and researcher Jodie Jackson helps us understand how our current twenty-four-hour news cycle is produced, who decides what stories are selected, why the news is mostly negative and what effect this has on us as individuals and as a society. Combining the latest research from psychology, sociology and the media, she builds a powerful case for including solutions in our news narrative as an antidote to the negativity bias. You Are What You Read is not just a book, it is a manifesto for a movement: it is not a call for us to ignore the negative but rather a call to not ignore the positive. It asks us to change the way we consume the news and shows us how, through our choices, we have the power to improve our media diet, our mental health and just possibly the world.

The work of writing closed captions for television and DVD is not simply transcribing dialogue, as one might assume at first, but consists largely of making rhetorical choices. For Sean Zdenek, when captioners describe a sound they are interpreting and creating contexts, they are assigning significance, they are creating meaning that doesn t necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. And in nine chapters he analyzes the numerous complex rhetorical choices captioners make, from abbreviating dialogue so it will fit on the screen and keep pace with the editing, to whether and how to describe background sounds, accents, or slurred speech, to nonlinguistic forms of sound communication such as sighing, screaming, or laughing, to describing music, captioned silences (as when a continuous noise suddenly stops), and sarcasm, surprise, and other forms of meaning associated with vocal tone. Throughout, he also looks at closed captioning style manuals and draws on interviews with professional captioners and hearing-impaired viewers. Threading through all this is the novel argument that closed captions can be viewed as texts worthy of rhetorical analysis and that this analysis can lead the entertainment industry to better standards and practices for closed captioning, thereby better serve the needs of hearing-impaired viewers. The author also looks ahead to the work yet to be done in bringing better captioning practices to videos on the Internet, where captioning can take on additional functions such as enhancing searchability. While scholarly work has been done on captioning from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective, and from a technical perspective, no one has ever done what Zdenek does here, and the original analytical models he offers are richly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, media studies, and disability studies."

When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.

In this book we ask students to do three things: (l)To keep a media journal in which they reflect on the uses they make of the voices and images of popular culture; (2) to read and respond to the work of other media critics, to test their own views and experiences against those of the writers included in these pages, and (3) to try their hands at writing media criticism themselves. All three kinds of work ask students to find and write about texts from the media culture around them, to think critically about what they see and hear on their television sets and radios, in magazines and newspapers, on city streets and shopping malls, at the movies, and at concerts and clubs. To put it another way, we believe that a book such as this can provide only some of the materials for a course on writing about popular culture, that the remaining materials must always come from the media themselves and the experiences students have with them. Our aim is not to inculcate students with a certain set of critical methods or terms or to introduce them to the academic study of popular culture, but to offer them opportunities to rethink and write about their own experiences with the media, to come to their own understandings of our common culture.

This updated Second Edition of Media Literacy introduces the fascinating world that operates behind visible media messages. This accessible edition includes updated figures and information about computers and the Internet. Media Literacy helps the reader to establish knowledge structures from which they can consciously filter out negative media effects, while acknowledging the positive instructional and entertainment value of media. The author provides the details necessary to facilitate media literacy, rather than merely surveying why it is needed; integrates theory with practice; includes exercises to help readers improve media literacy; emphasizes examples and exercises that support the key ideas of any media studies; and invites students to think like a psychologist, an economist, an advertiser, a journalist, a media critic, a producer, and a policy maker.

Leading authority on media literacy education shows secondary teachers how to incorporate media literacy into the curriculum, teach 21st-century skills, and select meaningful texts.