Media Environments

Media Environments is based on a simple concept: combine movies with texts to critique media and society in the 21st century.

That's right, movies and texts. But this is not edutainment! This anthology uses popular film as a gateway to critical readings, culled from the works of a variety of well-known thinkers, scholars, and writers. Authors include Stephen Hawking, Al Gore, Naomi Klein, Carl Sagan, Naomi Wolf, Susan Jacoby, Neil Postman, Henry Jenkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ray Kurzweil, and many others. Their writings are introduced to students through films like The Social Network, Contact, Network, American Beauty, Fight Club, The Truman Show, Slumdog Millionaire, Waking Life, WALL*E, Good Night, and Good Luck, and many others.

The goal of Media Environments is to inspire students to think creatively and critically based on a broad cultural literacy that includes media and society, theory and technology, and the arts and sciences. To achieve this goal, this anthology critically maps the "environments" of the media -- the mental, material, and cultural environments.

A text for the 21st century, this innovative anthology breaks the mold for books used in "Mass Media and Society" courses. Rather than examine the media as separate industries or technologies, Media Environments explores the media in their totality and provides models for interrogating many universal themes that span media and global culture. The anthology begins with four basic media models -- The Meme, The Network, The Spectacle, and The Hyperreal. These models can then be applied across numerous themes, each with its own chapter, readings, and film.

Barry Vacker teaches media and cultural theory at Temple University (Philadelphia) where he is the Faculty Teaching Mentor in the School of Communication and Theater. Vacker has taught media courses for fifteen years and authored many articles on art, media, culture, and technology. His recent publications include the text for Peter Granser's photography book, Signs (Hatje Cantz and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2008), which has been featured in exhibitions around the world. Not satisfied solely with traditional academic publishing, Vacker has also authored three experimental books, Zero Conditions (2008), Crashing Into the Vanishing Points (2009), Starry Skies Moving Away (2009), all available at Amazon.com. He also directed the experimental documentary, Space Times Square (2007), which has screened in festivals around the world.