This wide-ranging and innovative book develops an original theory of the media and their impact on the modern world, from the emergence of printing to the most recent developments in the media industries.

A wide ranging, interdisciplinary exploration of media time and mediated temporalities. The chapters explore the diverse ways in which time is articulated by media technologies, the way time is constructed, represented and communicated in cultural texts, and how it is experienced in different social contexts and environments.

Clearly structured in five thematic sections this fascinating and readable book, from best-selling author David Morley, presents a set of interlinked essays which discuss and examine the key debates in the fields of media and cultural studies.

What role have communication media played in the formation of modern societies? How should we understand the social impact of new forms of communication and information diffusion, from the advent of printing in fifteenth-century Europe to the expansion of global communication networks today? In this major new work, Thompson addresses these and other questions by elaborating a distinctive social theory of communication media and their impact. He argues that the development of communication media has transformed the spatial and temporal constitution of social life, creating new forms of action and interaction which are no longer linked to the sharing of a common locale. The consequences of this transformation are far-reaching and impinge on many aspects of our lives, from the most intimate aspects of personal experience and self-formation to the changing nature of power and visibility in the public domain. Combining breadth of vision with sensitivity to detail, this book situates the study of the media where it belongs: among a set of disciplines concerned with the emergence, development and structural characteristics of modern societies and their futures.

Public deliberation is essential to democracy, but the public can be fooled as well as enlightened. In three case studies of media coverage in the 1990s, Benjamin Page explores the role of the press in structuring political discussion. Page shows how the New York Times presented a restricted set of opinions on whether to go to war with Iraq, shutting out discussion of compromises favored by many Americans. He then examines the media's negative reaction to the Bush administration's claim that riots in Los Angeles were caused by welfare programs. Finally, he shows how talk shows overcame the elite media's indifference to widespread concern about Zoe Baird's hiring of illegal aliens. Page's provocative conclusion identifies the conditions under which media outlets become political actors and actively shape and limit the ideas and information available to the public. Arguing persuasively that a diversity of viewpoints is essential to true public deliberation, this book will interest students of American politics, communications, and media studies.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), one of the most original and perceptive thinkers of the twentieth century, offered a unique insight into the profound impact of the media on modern society. Jaeho Kang’s book offers a lucid introduction to Benjamin’s theory of the media and its continuing relevance today. The book provides a systematic and close reading of Benjamin’s critical and provocative writings on the intersection between media - from print to electronic - and modern experience, with reference to the information industry, the urban spectacle, and the aesthetic politics. Bringing Benjamin’s thought into a critical constellation with contemporary media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, the book helps students understand the implications of Benjamin’s work for media studies today and how they can apply his distinctive ideas to contemporary media culture. Kang’s book leads to a fresh appreciation of Benjamin’s work and new insight into critical theoretical approaches to media. The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers not only in media and communication studies but also in cultural studies, film studies and social theory, who are seeking a readable overview of Benjamin’s rich yet complex writings.

This collection offers a range of cultural studies perspectives on the ways gender and modernity intersect in media produced in the Asia-Pacific region. It spans different ideas about modernity in the region, different approaches to cultural analysis, and different media forms: from Taiwanese lifestyle television to avant-garde Indian cinema, from the emergence of a Chinese youth culture in online social networks to the alienation of country girls as imagined by Australian soap opera, and from the fantastic politics of migrating bodies in Korean cinema to the masculine mimicry of fighting women in South-East Asian action movies. Together, these essays explore the ways that media both records and helps produce images and experiences of modernity and the integral role gender plays in those processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

This book adopts a polemical stance. It approaches the problems raised by the media by way of a set of arguments with the two dominant paradigms now current for thinking about the mediaDSpost-modernism and Information Society theory. It argues that the media are important because they raise a set of questions that have been central to social and political theory since the Enlightenment. In a series of probes into different sets of questions raised by the media, the argument of the book focuses on the problem raised by what Kant called the unsocial sociability of human kind. Under what conditions could autonomous, free individuals live in viable social communities. Or to put it another way what are the related scope for, and limits on, human reason and emancipation. In conducting this argument the book first argues for a necessarily historical perspective. It then goes on to examine the implications for emancipation of seeing the media as cultural industries within the wider systems world of the capitalist market economy; of seeing the media as technologies; of the specialisation of intellectual production and of the separation and increasing social distance between the producers and consumers of symbols. It then goes on to argue, against current ethnographic trends in audience research and against the focus on everyday life, for a reinstatement of interest in the statistical reality of audiences and effects, and for a recognition through a return to the Hegelian roots of commodity fetishism, and the symbolic interactionist creation of identities, that an active audience can be actively involved in its own domination. The argument then turns to the problem of how we evaluate the symbolic forms that the media circulate and whether such evaluation can be anything more than a matter of personal taste. It is argued that evaluation is in practice unavoidable and without some standards that are more than just subjective any criticism of the medias performance is impossible. Via an examination of the debate between the sociology of art and aesthetics it argues for the ethical foundations of aesthetic judgement and for the establishment of agreed standards of aesthetic judgement via the discourse ethic that underlies the argument of the entire book. This foregrounding of the discourse ethic then leads on to a discussion of the media and politics. Here the argument is that arguments about the media and politics are at the heart of arguments about politics itself. These arguments focus, it is argued, upon the shifting division between the public and the private. Here the book returns to the roots of public sphere theory in Rousseaus arguments for the centrality of public spectacle and Kants argument for the centrality of public reason in the practice of democratic politics.

This text offers an all-inclusive assessment of the rapidly changing world of mass communications. Including coverage of global communication and ethics; a meaningful study of evolving media economics in the individual media chapters; and a stronger focus on media history.

Throughout the modern era, the figure of the child has consistently reflected adult concerns about industrialisation, consumerism and technology. Drawing on case studies of Wallace and Gromit, Teletubbies, Horrible Histories and more, this book explores how media products for children navigate understandings of childhood and child audiences.