Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context

Product Description
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.
Review
'In our deeply mediatised societies, Media Studies has never been more vital or more complex. The authors provide us with an updated, detailed, and decolonised, road-map to lead us through the fast-paced terrain of media change whilst also giving us the tools to respond with finely tuned critical analyses. Read this text to really get a grip of Media Studies as an evolving and exciting field of inquiry and practice.'
Helen Wood, Lancaster University, UK
'This is a great textbook. The breadth and range of chapters is incredibly impressive, proceeding accessibly and logically through the debates, with helpful and interesting contextual and biographical information about the key thinkers which bring their lives into relief for students. The book continues to serve as an extremely valuable teaching resource.'
Lisa Taylor, Leeds Beckett University, UK
'This new, expanded, and enhanced edition of Media Studies is designed to give its readers the conceptual tools and encouragement to create their own vibrant practice of media analysis. Through its focus on the complex ways in which media makes meaning, its detailed attention to theoretical approaches to media studies, and its exploration of a wonderfully wide range of themes and topics, it is a volume from which instructors will learn as much as their students. Highly recommended.'
Imre Szeman, University of Waterloo, Canada
'Media Studies is a comprehensive and up-to-date textbook on media studies for Anglophone readers. With intriguing examples and cases as well as clear explanations of key terms and theories, the authors expertly guide readers through getting involved in media text, production, consumption, and media in context. The best virtue of this book is how it makes the study of media ‘come alive’ by encouraging readers to try out research strategies for themselves, e.g., thinking aloud, posing questions, conducting your own analyses and even developing your own theories.'
Younghan Cho, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea
'With a fine critical eye, this new edition of Media Studies by Paul Long, Beth Johnson, Schem Rogerson Bader, Shana MacDonald and Tim Wall produces the sharpest analysis, and clearest explanations of this growing field of study. Their book will inspire and enable many researchers and practitioners to determine a more subtle understanding of how our interactions with media forms and industries are shaping the world. This new edition is as rich and dynamic as the media the authors invoke.'
Toija Cinque, Deakin University, Australia
'Media Studies is aimed at inspiring students to become curious