Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context

This thoroughly revised and updated third edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the various approaches to the field, explaining why media messages matter, how media businesses prosper and why media is integral to defining contemporary life.

The text is divided into three parts – Media texts and meanings; Producing media; and Media and social contexts – exploring the ways in which various media forms make meaning; are produced and regulated; and how society, culture and history are defined by such forms. Encouraging students to actively engage in media research and analysis, each chapter seeks to guide readers through key questions and ideas in order to empower them to develop their own scholarship, expertise and investigations of the media worlds in which we live. Fully updated to reflect the contemporary media environment, the third edition includes new case studies covering topics such as Brexit, podcasts, Love Island, Captain Marvel, Black Lives Matter, Netflix, data politics, the Kardashians, President Trump, ‘fake news’, the post-Covid world and perspectives on global media forms.

This is an essential introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media and popular culture.

Paul Long is Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries in the School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Australia.

Beth Johnson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Leeds, UK.

Shana MacDonald is Associate Professor in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, Canada and is the current President of the Film Studies Association of Canada.

Schem Rogerson Bader completed a PhD in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University, Toronto after studying photography at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Tim Wall is the Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media, Birmingham City University, UK.