Media Environments: Using Movies and Texts to Critique Media and Society

Media Environments: Using Movies and Texts to Critique Media and Society uses popular film as a gateway to critical readings, encouraging students to think creatively and critically about media, society, technology, and popular culture.

The text explores media in their totality and provides models and theories for interrogating many universal themes that span media, technology, and planetary civilization. Using popular films about media as lead-ins, students are introduced to the works of well-known thinkers and writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Charlton D. McIlwain, Shoshanna Zuboff, Julia Hildebrand, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Devon Powers, Antonio Lopez, and many others. Chapters span interconnected topics, including:

Memes

Capitalism and Consumerism

Science and Our Place in the Universe

Networks

Freedom and Protest

Pseudoscience and Conspiracy

Spectacle

Ecology and the Anthropocene

Celebrity and Superheroes

Hyperreality

Social-Mobile Media

New Concepts of Hot and Cool Media

The fourth edition features 19 new readings that explore Afrofuturism in Black Panther, Avatar and global media ecosystems, Hollywood and climate change, Blade Runner 2049 and future earth scenarios, Avengers and environmental advocacy, #BlackLivesMatter and Black movements in digital culture, and the International Dark Sky movement as a radical media-tech philosophy. Intellectually rigorous and thematically diverse, Media Environments is ideal for courses and programs in media and/or communication studies.

Barry Vacker teaches media and cultural studies at Temple University, where he is an associate professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication. He has authored many articles and books on art, media, culture, and technology. His latest books include: Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory (2018), an anthology co-edited with Angela Cirucci, and Specter of the Monolith (2017), a critique of space exploration inspired by the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Also a mixed-media artist, Vacker is a two-time international award winner for Space Times Square (2007) and Media(S)cene (2019), an ongoing art and theory project co-developed with Julia Hildebrand. He is writing and directing the film Probes into a Dark Sky (2022) and developing an art installation about dark skies and future civilization. Vacker earned his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin.