Media Studies

The nature of communication between media and messages of mass communication. Audiences mass communication. The nature of communication effects. Social effects. Public option and politics. Innovation and change. The technological future of mass communication. Helped define the field, partly by claiming Paul Lazarsfeld, Harold Lasswell, Carl Hovland, and Kurt Lewin as its founding forefathers.

First published in 1955, "Personal Influence" reports the results of a pioneering study conducted in Decatur, Illinois, validating Paul Lazarsfeld's serendipitous discovery that messages from the media may be further mediated by informal "opinion leaders" who intercept, interpret, and diffuse what they see and hear to the personal networks in which they are embedded. This classic volume set the stage for all subsequent studies of the interaction of mass media and interpersonal influence in the making of everyday decisions in public affairs, fashion, movie-going, and consumer behavior. The contextualizing essay in Part One dwells on the surprising relevance of primary groups to the flow of mass communication. Peter Simonson of the University of Pittsburgh has written that "Personal Influence was perhaps the most influential book in mass communication research of the postwar era, and it remains a signal text with historic significance and ongoing reverberations...more than any other single work, it solidified what came to be known as the dominant paradigm in the field, which later researchers were compelled either to cast off or build upon." In his introduction to this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Elihu Katz discusses the theory and methodology that underlie the Decatur study and evaluates the legacy of his coauthor and mentor, Paul F. Lazarsfeld.

Based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions, here is a notable contribution to our understanding of ourselves, using theatrical performance as a framework. This book explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and control the impressions they form of him, and employs certain techniques in order to sustain his performance, just as an actor presents a character to an audience.

A leading American anthropologist analyzes the many vitally important ways in which people "talk" to one another without the use of words. "The Silent Languageshows how cultural factors influence the individual behind his back, without his knowledge."-Erich Fromm The pecking order in a chicken yard, the fierce competition in a school playground, every unwitting gesture and action-this is the vocabulary of the "silent language." According to Dr. Hall, the concepts of space and time are tools with which all human beings may transmit messages. Space, for example, is the outgrowth of an animal's instinctive defense of his lair and is reflected in human society by the office worker's jealous defense of his desk, or the guarded, walled patio of a Latin-American home. Similarly, the concept of time, varying from Western precision to Easter vagueness, is revealed by the businessman who pointedly keeps a client waiting, or the South Pacific islander who murders his neighbor for an injustice suffered twenty years ago.

A discussion of how modern advertising attempts to control our thoughts and desires in order to make us buy the products it produces. Exploring the use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including subliminal tactics, this book shows how advertisers secretly manipulate mass desire for consumer goods and products. In addition, Packard also discusses advertising in politics, predicting the way image and personality rapidly came to overshadow real issues in the televised age.

"Since the end of the last century," Walter Benjamin wrote, "philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the 'true' experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Towering above this literature is Henri Bergson's early monumental work Matter and Memory." Along with Husserl's Ideas and Heidegger's Being and Time, Bergson's work represents one of the great twentieth-century investigations into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Arguably Bergson's most significant book, Matter and Memory is essential to an understanding of his philosophy and its legacy. This new edition includes an annotated bibliography prepared by Bruno Paradis.

André Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism. Although Bazin made no films, his name has been one of the most important in French cinema since World War II. He was co-founder of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, which under his leadership became one of the world's most distinguished publications. Championing the films of Jean Renoir (who contributed a short foreword to Volume I), Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini, he became the protégé of François Truffaut, who honors him touchingly in his forword to Volume II. This new edition includes graceful forewords to each volume by Bazin scholar and biographer Dudley Andrew, who reconsiders Bazin and his place in contemporary film study. The essays themselves are erudite but always accessible, intellectual, and stimulating. As Renoir puts it, the essays of Bazin "will survive even if the cinema does not."

Hailed as the definitive work upon its original publication in 1975 and now extensively revised and updated by the author, this vastly absorbing and richly illustrated book examines film as an art form, technological innovation, big business, and shaper of American values. Ever since Edison's peep shows first captivated urban audiences, film has had a revolutionary impact on American society, transforming culture from the bottom up, radically revising attitudes toward pleasure and sexuality, and at the same time, cementing the myth of the American dream. No book has measured film's impact more clearly or comprehensively than Movie-Made America. This vastly readable and richly illustrated volume examines film as art form, technological innovation, big business, and cultural bellwether. It takes in stars from Douglas Fairbanks to Sly Stallo≠ auteurs from D. W. Griffith to Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee; and genres from the screwball comedy of the 1930s to the "hard body" movies of the 1980s to the independents films of the 1990s. Combining panoramic sweep with detailed commentaries on hundreds of individual films, Movie-Made America is a must for any motion picture enthusiast.

How films are conceived, planned, and produced leaves a mark upon the films, directly and structurally. The relations between film style and mode of production are, according to the authors, reciprocal and mutually influencing. The authors trace such topics as style, economics, and technology over time, demonstrating how significant changes occurrred in Hollywood from the earliest days through the sixties.

A revolutionary work in philosophy and a book about cinema that identifies three principal types of image-movement using examples from the work of a diverse group of filmmakers including Griffith, Eisenstein, Cassavetes, and Altman.

A pioneer in the field, Christian Metz applies insights of structural linguistics to the language of film. "The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinéma: langue ou langage?'"--Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement "Modern film theory begins with Metz."--Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura "Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a reference to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [Film Language] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."--Stephen Heath, Screen

Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan's late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are differentiated. This is the matrixial realm, a shareable, psychic dimension that underlies the individual unconscious and experience.  Concerned with collective trauma and memory, Ettinger's own experience as an Israeli living with the memory of the Holocaust is a deep source of inspiration for her paintings, several of which are reproduced in the book. The paintings, like the essays, replay the relation between the visible and invisible, the sayable and ineffable; the gaze, the subject, and the other.  Bracha Ettinger is a painter and a senior clinical psychologist. She is professor of psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the University of Leeds, England, and Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem.  Judith Butler is professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Griselda Pollock is professor of fine arts at the University of Leeds. Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal.

In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy offers an engaging overview of an important trend--the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World, and other displaced individuals living in the West. How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora translate into cinema is a key focus of Naficy's work. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, the films themselves exhibit stylistic similarities, from their open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and transgression of identity. The author explores such features while considering the specific histories of individuals and groups that engender divergent experiences, institutions, and modes of cultural production and consumption. Treating creativity as a social practice, he demonstrates that the films are in dialogue not only with the home and host societies but also with audiences, many of whom are also situated astride cultures and whose desires and fears the filmmakers wish to express. Comparing these films to Hollywood films, Naficy calls them "accented." Their accent results from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative production modes, and their style. Accented cinema is an emerging genre, one that requires new sets of viewing skills on the part of audiences. Its significance continues to grow in terms of output, stylistic variety, cultural diversity, and social impact. This book offers the first comprehensive and global coverage of this genre while presenting a framework in which to understand its intricacies.

This fourth edition of our bestselling text has been comprehensively updated and revised to include contemporary film analysis and recent films. With a focus on contemporary popular cinema and examples from Classical Hollywood, Graeme Turner examines the social and cultural aspects of film from audiences and ideologies to exhibition and technology. This fourth edition now includes: new sections dealing with debates about spectacle and special effects an extended treatment of sound and its contribution to cinema film theory's discussion of the representation of race and ethnicity a thorough update of individual film references a revised applications chapter that includes new contemporary examples new illustrations from contemporary popular cinema. Students of film studies, film practice and film theory will find this a welcome addition to their degree course studies.

Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism (1977), this is "a brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking of the world and ourselves over the lost 140 years."-Washington Post  BOOK WORLD

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume--and the last book he published--finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium.

Eleven studies made between 1958 and 1960 gathered information about the conditions under which children seek out television and under which TV has an effect on them. This book describes these studies and reports and interprets their results. In the first few chapters, some of the changes TV has made in the child's world are described, and essential facts and figures are provided on the amount and kind of TV children make use of at different ages and times and what it means to them. Other chapters develop and test some theory as to how and why children use TV, analyze the chief elements in a child's life and personality that determine the use he makes of TV, and consider the chief suppositions that have been made about TV's effects. A final chapter summarizes the findings, and concludes with questions addressed to broadcasters, teachers, parents, and researchers. Statistical evidence is appended.

Reading Television was the first book to push the boundaries of television studies beyond the insights offered by cultural studies and textual analysis, creating a vibrant new field of study. Using the tools and techniques in this book, it is possible for everyone with a television set to analyze both the programmes, and the culture which produces them. In this edition, Hartley reflects on recent developments in television studies, and includes suggestions for further reading. His new foreword underlines the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of contemporary culture.

This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining 'Why Fiske Still Matters' for today's students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Ron Becker, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steve Classen, Elana Levine, Jason Mittell, Greg Smith and Pam Wilson on 'John Fiske and Television Culture'. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of contemporary media and popular culture. Television is unique in its ability to produce so much pleasure and so many meanings for such a wide variety of people. In this book, John Fiske looks at television's role as an agent of popular culture, and goes on to consider the relationship between this cultural dimension and television's status as a commodity of the cultural industries that are deeply inscribed with capitalism. He makes use of detailed textual analysis and audience studies to show how television is absorbed into social experience, and thus made into popular culture. Audiences, Fiske argues, are productive, discriminating, and televisually literate. Television Culture provides a comprehensive introduction for students to an integral topic on all communication and media studies courses.

Understanding Social Media provides a critical and timely conceptual toolbox for navigating the evolution and practices of social media. Taking an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach, this book provides a clear and concise explanation of the key concepts but also goes beyond specific brands, sites and practices to show readers how to place social media more critically within the changing media and cultural landscape. As an aid to understanding, key concepts in each chapter are illustrated by case studies to give real-world examples of theory in action. Cutting across the many dimensions of social media, from the political, economic and visual, this book explores the industries, ideologies and cultural practices that are increasingly becoming part of global popular culture.

Now more than ever, we need to understand social media - the good as well as the bad. We need critical knowledge that helps us to navigate the controversies and contradictions of this complex digital media landscape. Only then can we make informed judgements about what's happening in our media world, and why. Showing the reader how to ask the right kinds of questions about social media, Christian Fuchs takes us on a journey across social media, delving deep into case studies on Google, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia. The result lays bare the structures and power relations at the heart of our media landscape. This book is the essential, critical guide for all students of media studies and sociology. Readers will never look at social media the same way again.

An illuminating investigation into a class of enterprising women aspiring to "make it" in the social media economy but often finding only unpaid work Profound transformations in our digital society have brought many enterprising women to social media platforms—from blogs to YouTube to Instagram—in hopes of channeling their talents into fulfilling careers. In this eye-opening book, Brooke Erin Duffy draws much-needed attention to the gap between the handful who find lucrative careers and the rest, whose "passion projects" amount to free work for corporate brands. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, Duffy offers fascinating insights into the work and lives of fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and designers. She connects the activities of these women to larger shifts in unpaid and gendered labor, offering a lens through which to understand, anticipate, and critique broader transformations in the creative economy.

In Empowered Sarah Banet-Weiser examines the deeply entwined relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny as it plays out in advertising, online and multimedia platforms, and nonprofit and commercial campaigns. Examining feminist discourses that emphasize self-confidence, body positivity, and individual achievement alongside violent misogynist phenomena such as revenge porn, toxic geek masculinity, and men's rights movements, Banet-Weiser traces how popular feminism and popular misogyny are co-constituted. From Black Girls Code and the Always #LikeAGirl campaign to GamerGate and the 2016 presidential election, Banet-Weiser shows how popular feminism is met with a misogynistic backlash of mass harassment, assault, and institutional neglect. In so doing, she contends that popular feminism's problematic commitment to visibility limits its potential and collective power.

In this classic evaluation of play that has become a "must-read" for those in game design, Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga defines play as the central activity in flourishing societies. Like civilization, play requires structure and participants willing to create within limits. Starting with Plato, Huizinga traces the contribution of Homo Ludens, or "man the player" through Medieval Times, the Renaissance, and into our modern civilization. Huizinga defines play against a rich theoretical background, using cross-cultural examples from the humanities, business, and politics. Homo Ludens defines play for generations to come.

Explores effects of digital environments, multimedia interactivity, and computer technology on storytelling and narrative.

From computer games to hypertext fiction, Aarseth explores the aesthetics and textual dynamics of digital literature. Can computer games be great literature? Do the rapidly evolving and culturally expanding genres of digital literature mean that the narrative mode of discourse--novels, films, television series--is losing its dominant position in our culture? Is it necessary to define a new aesthetics of cyborg textuality? In Cybertext, Espen Aarseth explores the aesthetics and textual dynamics of digital literature and its diverse genres, including hypertext fiction, computer games, computer-generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. Instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of electronic writing and interactive fiction, however, Aarseth situates these literary forms within the tradition of "ergodic" literature--a term borrowed from physics to describe open, dynamic texts such as the I Ching or Apollinaire's calligrams, with which the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence.

According to Roger Caillois, play is "an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money." In spite of this—or because of it—play constitutes an essential element of human social and spiritual development. In this classic study, Caillois defines play as a free and voluntary activity that occurs in a pure space, isolated and protected from the rest of life. Play is uncertain, since the outcome may not be foreseen, and it is governed by rules that provide a level playing field for all participants. In its most basic form, play consists of finding a response to the opponent's action--or to the play situation--that is free within the limits set by the rules. Caillois qualifies types of games-- according to whether competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo (being physically out of control) is dominant--and ways of playing, ranging from the unrestricted improvisation characteristic of children's play to the disciplined pursuit of solutions to gratuitously difficult puzzles. Caillois also examines the means by which games become part of daily life and ultimately contribute to various cultures their most characteristic customs and institutions.

A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world, but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game. In this thought-provoking study, Jesper Juul examines the constantly evolving tension between rules and fiction in video games. Discussing games from Pong to The Legend of Zelda, from chess to Grand Theft Auto, he shows how video games are both a departure from and a development of traditional non-electronic games. Locating video games in a history of games that goes back to Ancient Egypt, Juul argues that there is a basic affinity between games and computers. Just as the printing press and the cinema have promoted and enabled new kinds of storytelling, computers work as enablers of games, letting us play old games in new ways and allowing for new kinds of games that would not have been possible before computers.

Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast--and in some cases, almost unlimited--array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the "algorithmic culture" created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde.

An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties. Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion.

We used to think that video games were mostly for young men, but with the success of the Nintendo Wii, and the proliferation of games in browsers, cell phone games, and social games video games changed changed fundamentally in the years from 2000 to 2010. These new casual games are now played by men and women, young and old. Players need not possess an intimate knowledge of video game history or devote weeks or months to play. At the same time, many players of casual games show a dedication and skill that is anything but casual. In A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul describes this as a reinvention of video games, and of our image of video game players, and explores what this tells us about the players, the games, and their interaction.

Making News is Gaye Tuchman's exploration into the study in the construction of reality. The Professor of Sociology at Queens College and City University of New York, Tuchman's latest work is one to cherish. As described by Todd Gitlin of Contemporary Sociology, Making News is "simply the most comprehensive book on the social construction of news by an American sociologist to date."

"The whole world is watching!" chanted the demonstrators in the Chicago streets in 1968, as the TV cameras beamed images of police cracking heads into homes everywhere. In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement. Drawing on his own experiences (he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64) and on interviews with key activists and news reporters, he shows in detail how the media first ignore new political developments, then select and emphasize aspects of the story that treat movements as oddities. He then demonstrates how the media glare made leaders into celebrities and estranged them from their movement base; how it inflated the importance of revolutionary rhetoric, destabilizing the movement, then promoted "moderate" alternatives--all the while spreading the antiwar message. Finally, Gitlin draws together a theory of news coverage as a form of anti-democratic social management--which he sees at work also in media treatment of the anti-nuclear and other later movements.

In this classic text, James W. Carey maintains that communication is not merely the transmission of information; reminding the reader of the link between the words "communication" and "community," he broadens his definition to include the drawing-together of a people that is culture. In this context, Carey questions the American tradition of focusing only on mass communication's function as a means of social and political control, and makes a case for examining the content of a communication--the meaning of symbols, not only the motives that originate them or the purposes they serve. He seeks to recast the goal of communication studies, replacing the search for deterministic laws of behavior with a simpler, yet far more challenging mission: "to enlarge the human conversation by comprehending what others are saying."

This book presents the results of an interdisciplinary study of the press coverage of ethnic affairs. Examples are drawn mainly from British and Dutch newspapers, but data from other countries are also reviewed. Besides providing the reader with a thorough content analysis of the material, the book is the first to introduce a detailed discourse analytical approach to the study of the ways in which ethnic minorities are portrayed in the press. The approach focuses on the topics, overall news report schemata, local meanings, style and rhetoric of news reports. Highly original, accomplished and penetrating, the book is the fruit of a decade of research into the question of racism and the press, important for ethnic studies, mass communication and media studies, sociology and linguistics.

In Public Opinion, what is widely considered the most influential book ever written by Walter Lippmann, the late journalist and social critic provides a fundamental treatise on the nature of human information and communication. Public Opinion is Walter Lippmann's is of enduring significance for communications scholars, historians, sociologists, and political scientists.

Long seen as a bedrock of democracy and freedom, the media have in fact become a significant antidemocratic force in the United States and around the world. The corporate media explosion has set off a corresponding implosion of public life that characterizes a perilous present--and threatens our future. Robert McChesney's acclaimed analysis of corporate media and its undermining of democracy challenges the myths and assumptions that, at bedrock, serve corporate elites and their political allies. McChesney chronicles the waves of media mergers and acquisitions in the late 1990s. He reviews the corrupt and secretive enactment of public policies surrounding the Internet, digital television, and public broadcasting and argues that the major beneficiaries of the so-called Information Age are wealthy investors, advertisers, and a handful of enormous media, computer, and telecommunications corporations. As McChesney shows, powerful myths limit our ability to grasp the real nature and logic of the media system. To guarantee our freedoms, citizens must organize politically to restructure the media in ways that secure the independence of a free press and reaffirm its connection to democracy.

Ubiquitous news, global information access, instantaneous reporting, interactivity, multimedia content, extreme customization: Journalism is undergoing the most fundamental transformation since the rise of the penny press in the nineteenth century. Here is a report from the front lines on the impact and implications for journalists and the public alike.

The ideal of a neutral, objective press has proven in recent years to be just that--an ideal. In Governing with the News, Timothy E. Cook goes far beyond the single claim that the press is not impartial to argue that the news media are in fact a political institution integral to the day-to-day operations of our government. This updated edition includes a new afterword by the author, which pays close attention to two key developments in the twenty-first century: the accelerating fragmentation of the mass media and the continuing decline of Americans' confidence in the press.

A timely new edition of the classic journalism text, now featuring updated material on the importance of reporting in the age of media mistrust and fake news--and how journalists can use technology to navigate its challenges. More than two decades ago, the Committee of Concerned Journalists gathered some of America's most influential newspeople and asked them, "What is journalism for?" Through exhaustive research, surveys, interviews, and public forums, the committee identified the essential elements that define journalism and its role in our society. The result is one of the most important books on media ever written--winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard, a Society of Professional Journalists Award, and the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism from Penn State University.

Media Literacy teaches students how to navigate through the overwhelming flood of information found in today’s media-saturated world. Drawing from thousands of media research studies, author W. James Potter explores key components to understanding the fascinating world of mass media. Potter presents examples and facts to help students understand how the media operate, how they attract attention, and how they influence the public. Chapters conclude with exercises to help readers apply the material to everyday life and improve their media literacy. The Tenth Edition integrates a stronger focus on digital media, features a streamlined organization, and updates facts to keep readers informed on the rapidly changing media phenomenon.

In this edition of his award-winning introduction, John Storey presents a clear and critical survey of competing theories of, and various approaches to, popular culture. Its breadth and theoretical unity, exemplified through popular culture, means that it can be flexibly and relevantly applied across a number of disciplines.

A remarkable continuation of Dudley Andrew's classic, The Major Film Theories, this work focuses on the key concepts in film study: perception, representation, signification, narrative structure, adaptation, evaluation, identification, figuration, and interpretation. Beginning with a lucid introductory chapter on the current state of film theory, Andrew goes on to build an overall view of film, presenting his own ideas on each concept, and giving a sense of the interdependence of these concepts. By providing lively explanations of theories that involve perceptual psychology and structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and genre study, Andrew offers unique observations on these often obscure topics, allowing readers to acquire the background they need to enrich their understanding of film—and of art.

In his beautifully balanced, clear and broad-ranging account of a fast-changing field, Paul Hodkinson has successfully brought together myriad perspectives with which to critically analyse today's media culture and media society. Clearly organized, systematic and combining a critical survey of the field with a finely judged assessment of cutting edge developments, this book provides a must-have contribution to media and communication studies.

Gender, Race, and Class in Media provides students a comprehensive and critical introduction to media studies by encouraging them to analyze their own media experiences and interests. Editors Bill Yousman, Lori Bindig Yousman, Gail Dines, and Jean McMahon Humez explore some of the most important forms of today's popular culture—including the Internet, social media, television, films, music, and advertising—in three distinct but related areas of investigation: the political economy of production, textual analysis, and audience response. Multidisciplinary issues of power related to gender, race, and class are integrated into a wide range of articles examining the economic and cultural implications of mass media as institutions. Reflecting the rapid evolution of the field, the Sixth Edition includes 18 new readings that enhance the richness, sophistication, and diversity that characterizes contemporary media scholarship.

The Gender and Media Reader is an essential text for those interested in gender and media studies, its main topics, debates, and theoretical approaches. The primary objective of this collection is to expand readers' knowledge of how gender operates within media culture through engagement with foundational writings as well as more contemporary research in this field. Taking a multiperspectival approach that considers gender broadly and examines media texts alongside their production and consumption, The Gender and Media Reader enables readers' critical thinking about how gender is constructed, contested, and subverted in different sites within media culture. Along with the main introduction, individual section introductions facilitate readers' understanding of the development of gender and media studies by contextualizing the various topics, debates, and theoretical approaches that have shaped it, as well as by highlighting current trends.

MEDIA NOW, Eighth Edition, empowers you to think critically about the media and its effects on culture by providing a thorough understanding of how media technologies develop, operate, converge, and affect society. MEDIA NOW prepares you for encounters in the expanding fields of the Internet, interactive media, and traditional media industries through engaging, up-to-date material that covers the essential history, theories, concepts, and technical knowledge you need to thrive. Extensively updated in a new eighth edition, MEDIA NOW provides a comprehensive introduction to today's global media environment and ongoing developments in technology, culture, and critical theory that continue to transform this rapidly evolving industry and affect our daily lives.

Since publication of the first edition in 1974, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen's Film Theory and Criticism has been the most widely used and cited anthology of critical writings about film. Now in its seventh edition, this landmark text continues to offer outstanding coverage of more than acentury of thought and writing about movies. Incorporating classic texts by pioneers in film theory - including Rudolf Arnheim, Siegfried Kracauer, and Andre Bazin - and cutting-edge essays by such contemporary scholars as David Bordwell, Tania Modleski, Thomas Schatz, and Richard Dyer, the bookexamines both historical and theoretical viewpoints on the subject. Building upon the wide range of selections and the extensive historical coverage that marked previous editions, this new compilation stretches from the earliest attempts to define the cinema to the most recent efforts to place film in the contexts of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and toexplore issues of gender and race.

The Television Studies Reader brings together key writings in the expanding field of television studies, providing an overview of the discipline and addressing issues of industry, genre, audiences, production and ownership, and representation. The Reader charts the ways in which television and television studies are being redefined by new and 'alternative' ways of producing, broadcasting and watching TV, such as cable, satellite and digital broadcasting, home video, internet broadcasting, and interactive TV, as well as exploring the recent boom in genres such as reality TV and docusoaps. It brings together articles from leading international scholars to provide perspectives on television programmes and practices from around the world, acknowledging both television's status as a global medium and the many and varied local contexts of its production and reception.

Film is an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own. Since 1979, David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson and now Co-Author, Jeff Smith's Film Art has been the best-selling and most widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. Taking a skills-centered approach supported by examples from many periods and countries, the authors help students develop a core set of analytical skills that will enrich their understanding of any film, in any genre. In-depth examples deepen students' appreciation for how creative choices by filmmakers affect what viewers experience and how they respond.

A Balanced Approach to Theory Selection. We've written A First Look for students who have no background in communication theory. Its designed for undergraduates enrolled in an entry-level course, regardless of the students classification. The trend in the field is to offer students a broad introduction to theory relatively early in their program. But if a department chooses to offer its first theory course on the junior or senior level, the course will still be the students first comprehensive look at theory, so the book will meet them where they are. Our goal in this text is to present 32 communication theories in a clear and interesting way. After reading about a given theory, students should understand the theory, know the research that supports it, see useful applications in their lives, and be aware of the theory's possible flaws. We hope readers will discover relationships among theories located across the communication landscape-a clear indication that they grasp what they're reading.

Introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and histories, and offers a sense of the new frontiers emerging in the field of comics studies. Across more than fifty original essays, Keywords for Comics Studies provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for comics and sequential art. The essays also identify new avenues of research into one of the most popular and diverse visual media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Keywords for Comics Studies presents an array of inventive analyses of terms central to the study of comics and sequential art that are traditionally siloed in distinct lexicons: these include creative and aesthetic terms like Ink, Creator, Border, and Panel; conceptual terms such as Trans*, Disability, Universe, and Fantasy; genre terms like Zine, Pornography, Superhero, and Manga; and canonical terms like X-Men, Archie, Watchmen, and Love and Rockets. Essays demonstrate how scholars, cultural critics, and comics artists from a range of fields take up sequential art as both an object of analysis and a medium for developing new theories about embodiment, identity, literacy, audience reception, genre, cultural politics, and more.

Odessa - 1905. Enraged with the deplorable conditions on board the armored cruiser Potemkin, the ship's loyal crew contemplates the unthinkable - mutiny. Seizing control of the Potemkin and raising the red flag of revolution, the sailors' revolt becomes the rallying point for a Russian populace ground under the boot heels of the Czar's Cossacks. When ruthless White Russian cavalry arrives to crush the rebellion on the sandstone Odessa Steps, the most famous and most quoted film sequence in cinema history is born.

A simple, haunting musical phrase whistled offscreen tells us that a young girl will be killed. "Who Is the murderer?" pleads a nearby placard as serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann...In his harrowing masterwork M, Fritz Lang merges trenchant social commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodies the greatest strengths of the Italian neorealist movement: emotional clarity, social rectitude, and brutal honesty.

A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice, Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Four people give different accounts of a man's murder and the rape of his wife, which director Akira Kurosawa presents with striking imagery and an ingenious use of flashbacks. This eloquent masterwork and international sensation revolutionized film language and introduced Japanese cinema, and a commanding new star by the name of Toshiro Mifune, to the Western world.

There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.

A major work of American independent cinema, Kent Mackenzie’s revelatory fiction-documentary hybrid chronicles a night in the life of a group of twentysomething Native Americans who were relocated or forcibly removed from their reservations in the 1950s to live in the “blighted” Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Built around a scripted narrative based on interviews with its subjects-turned-actors, THE EXILES is an at once gritty and poetic depiction of Los Angeles after dark and a haunting, intimate record of life on the margins of mid-twentieth-century America.

A landmark fusion of feminism and formal experimentation that seeks to create a non-sexist film language. Its title figure, the legendary creature of antiquity, terrorized Thebes and self-destructed only after Oedipus correctly answered her riddle. Invoking and challenging traditional interpretations of the Oedipus story as a movement from matriarchal culture to patriarchal order, the film also probes representation in film itself. The central narrative section, about Louise, a middle-class woman, and her four-year-old daughter Ana, is an inquiry into the arbitrary nature of conventional film techniques that captures Louise's struggles with motherhood in a patriarchal society.

Do Not Track is a personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy.

In this highly anticipated sequel to his groundbreaking, Advertising at the End of the World, media scholar Sut Jhally explores the devastating personal and environmental fallout from advertising, commercial culture, and rampant American consumerism. Ranging from the emergence of the modern advertising industry in the early 20th century to the full-scale commercialization of the culture today, Jhally identifies one consistent message running throughout all of advertising: the idea that corporate brands and consumer goods are the keys to human happiness. He then shows how this powerful narrative, backed by billions of dollars a year and propagated by the best creative minds, has blinded us to the catastrophic costs of ever-accelerating rates of consumption.