Super Media: A Cultural Studies Approach

Selected as One of Media & Values′ Best Books Using varying approaches, researchers have tried to capture the actual dynamics and role of media in culture and society, but do we really understand this relationship? Super Media introduces and illustrates the newly emerging cultural studies approach to understanding the media in society. Drawing from both humanities and the social sciences, cultural studies centers its analysis in text, meaning, representation, interpretation, conflict, ideology, hegemony, and culture. In his analysis, Michael Real first provides a critical review of previous traditions of media research and theory--illustrated with tables and comparative charts--and then reintegrates media study around cultural studies. He then presents extensive case studies that illustrate the concepts and theories of the cultural studies approach. Included are the most widely available expressions of culture in history: the Olympics, superpower politics, Oscar-winning films, prime time television, and other transnational cases. Original in perspective, Super Media examines top research in media communication and provides a synthesis between research and the media experiences that affect people′s everyday lives. The result is a provocative volume that will provide useful insights to professionals and advanced students in all areas of communication and popular culture. "In many overviews of the field, the canon provides the student and mere tourist alike a standard guide to familiar sights assumed to embody enduring lessons about our mass-mediated world. Contemporary media studies, however, comprise a sprawling network of alternative routes that offer access to more intriguing, dynamic sites of cultural production. In Super Media, Michael Real charts some of these alternative perspectives, broadly related as critical culture studies, in terms that can be understood by the initiate. Further, he attempts to synthesize `the best′ of behavioral and critical media research toward a new reference guide." --Communication Quarterly "Super Media is the smartest and most accessible volume available that introduces the fundamental theoretical and methodological positions and practices in cultural studies. It challenges the reader to think through the very issues that cultural studies research and theorizing promotes. Real′s touch as an author has produced a very readable text. Super Media helps signal the relevance of cultural studies for communication studies in America." --Journal of International and Intercultural Relations "The book aims to simplify several aspects of critical theory into easily accessible concepts which can be applied to cultural phenomena by the general media consumer. The book succeeds in its goal of raising the reader′s awareness of the ways the media pervade our daily existence." --Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media "This is a serious attempt to make cultural studies′ insights accessible to U.S. students. Many teachers should find it helpful and stimulating. It will challenge students and teachers to grasp the tools of cultural studies and apply them to super media." --Journal of Communication "Has much to recommend it. . . . Super Media is the most comprehensive of all popular culture volumes with textbook potential. It generously embraces both the American and European cultural studies traditions. . . . Besides comprehensive range, Super Media has textbook potential because it also provides and illustrates methodological approaches. . . . In many ways, and perhaps most importantly though, the book makes a tacit statement about the nature of a cultural studies approach. . . . It integrates explication of theory, methodology, and topic discussion throughout. . . . The thoughtful organization of this book thus says much about the organization of meaning, society, culture and, of course, cultural study itself." --Popular Communication Newsletter and Review "Real provides a clear and compelling introduction to the cultural studies approach and provides a series of innovative and insightful studies that illustrate the cogency of this approach. . . . A valuable source of critical analyses and methods. His presentations are equally lucid and illuminating and this book should find a large audience among students studying media criticism and those who want to develop tools and strategies for analyzing and criticizing our media culture." --Journalism Quarterly "Michael R. Real′s Super Media is an important book at an important time... Many who know of Real′s work realize that he has been perhaps the key player in the emergence of the cultural studies tradition in American media research. . . .perceptive and engaging. . . .a telling analysis. . . .Michael Real′s Super Media offers complex and important understandings of the working of media on us. His arguments are convincing. . . .McLuhan placed us in a new media world. Michael Real has taken us a step farther. He has provided us with some tools to understand super media and to dissect what parts of its mirror are distinctly clouded and harm our view of what we want to become..." --Lawrence Wenner, Television Quarterly "Selected among the "16 best books on television, mass media and communications." --Media and Values magazine "Real′s Super Media has much to recommend it as the new text anchor, especially for those wanting to deal in their courses with the central, theoretical contribution offered by popular communication and culture scholars: how the construing and maintenance of meaningful reality occur in everyday experience in a culture (rather than as a result of a simple message or media system). Super Media is the most comprehensive of all popular culture volumes with textbook potential. It generously embraces both the American and European cultural studies traditions, ranging from American studies of icons, genres, myths, and ritual to European concerns with discourse systems and ideology. Diverse schools and concepts are tellingly introduced by Real, and then interwoven to advance the field′s common inquiry: into the organization and reorganization of meaning. . . . Besides comprehensive range, Super Media has textbook potential because it also provides and illustrates methodological approaches: empirical, structuralist, critical, and ritual analysis. . . .In many ways, and perhaps most importantly though, the book makes a tacit statement about the nature of a cultural studies approach. . . .it integrates explication of theory, methodology, and topic discussion throughout. . . .the thoughtful organization of this book thus says much about the organization of meaning, society, culture, and, of course, cultural study itself." --Dennis Corrigan, Popcom Newsletter

Michael Real is a professor at Royal Roads University in Canada. Previously, he was Director of the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and prior to that Director of the innovative School of Communication at San Diego State University, where he taught for twenty years.

His books include Exploring Media Culture, Super Media, The Olympics as Global Ritual, and Mass-Mediated Culture. He is the editor for UNESCO. His writings on journalism, media events, sports, popular culture, and communication theory have appeared in dozens of scholarly and general publications (Studies in Mass Communication, American Quarterly, Journal of Communications, Media Development, Journalism Quarterly, Journal of Popular culture, TV Quarterly, Quest). He holds a Ph. D. from the University of Illinois and served for nine years on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego. He has directed a variety of local, national, and international research and journalism projects, as well as hosted television and radio programs and teleconferences. The focus of his work is media, culture, and social responsibility.

He is a member of the ICA, the IAMCR, and other professional organizations.