Introduction to Mass Communication : Media Literacy and Culture

While encouraging students to take more active roles as media consumers, this text gives them a deeper understanding of the role that the media play in both shaping and reflecting culture. Through this cultural perspective, students learn that audience members are as much a part of the mass communication process as are the media producers, technologies, and industries. This was the first university-level text to make media literacy central to its approach. The sixth edition includes a completely reorganized Chapter 13 (Theories and Effects of Mass Communication) that reflects recent historical and theoretical analyses, coverage of new models in music recording and distribution with special attention to Radiohead's "pay what you want" experiment, extended discussion of massive multiplayer online games (MMOs), and much more.

"On the whole this is a great text that I plan to use in the foreseeable future for my Mass Media & Society course and that I would strongly recommend to anyone teaching an introductory course on mass communication." Biswarup Sen, University of Oregon

"It is an excellent undergraduate text. I like how culture is contextualized up front and then is consistently referenced throughout the text with text call-outs highlighting contemporary issues." Lisa A. Stephens, University at Buffalo

"I really appreciate that Baran includes a chapter on video games, which is a big industry, very present in students' lives, and treated too cursorily by comparable texts." Cynthia Chris, College of Staten Island

Includes Media Literacy worksheets, PowerPoint® slides, a Web tutorial, chapter self-quizzes with feedback, key terms flash cards, hot links to media resources for the student, and more.

Provides an inside look at the daily operations of a television station, a radio station, a newspaper, a public relations company, and Vibe magazine. Archived NBC News and The Today Show video clips also help bring to life the concepts discussed in the text.

Stanley Baran earned his Ph.D. in Communication research at the University of Massacusetts after taking his M.A. in journalism at Pennsylvania State University. He taught for 4 years at Cleveland State University, eventually moving to the University of Texas. He led the Department of Radio-TV-Film's graduate program for 6 of his 9 years in Austin and won numerous teaching awards there, including the AMOCO Teaching Excellence Award as the best instructor on that 40,000 students campus, the College of Communication's Teaching Excellence Award as that college's outstanding professor, and Utmost Magazine's Student Poll for best instructor; Dr. Baran moved to San Jose State University in 1987 and served 9 years as chair of the Department of Television, Radio, Film, and Theatre. At SJSU he was named President's Scholar as the university's outstanding researcher. Now, he teaches at Bryant University, where he is the founding chairman of that school's Communication Department. Among the other experiences that helped shaped this book are his service as a judge for the Fulbright Scholar Awards and his many years of professional activity in audience research, writing for radio, and producing for television. Dr. Baran has published 10 books and scores of scholarly articles, and he sits or has sat on the editorial boards of five journals. His work has been translated into half a dozen languages. He is a skilled sailor and plays tenor sax in the Wakefield, Rhode Island, Civil Band. He is married to Susan Baran and has three very cool children, Simmony, Matt, and Jordan.