Media Culture Analyses

This unique textbook provides a fresh interpretation of media analysis and cultural studies. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of American popular culture - including Hollywood cinema, presidential elections and the Super Bowl - to demystify complex concepts such as ritual, postmodernism and political economy. This use of popular culture texts, narratives and interpretations will enable readers to understand more about this important yet esoteric debate. Exploring Media Culture synthesizes a wealth of information and research and presents this in an engaging and accessible format.

Providing a student guide to the process of research and writing for media and cultural studies, the author covers both quantitative and qualitative methods and includes a list of useful library resources and essential Web sites.

The study of media, texts and culture(s) and especially the analysis of interdependent relationships between them has become a major concern in various academic fields, such as intercultural communication, contrastive textology, comparative cultural studies, historical and intercultural pragmatics. Starting from the observation that in contrastive studies of mass media communication not only the theoretical status of “culture” often remains unclear but also the interdependent relation between the theoretical conceptualization of “culture” and the methodological approach of text analysis, this volume brings together linguistic mass media studies with intercultural, diachronic, intermedia and interlingual perspectives. Apart from offering new empirical insights into the field, this volume’s aim is to advance and to broaden the methodological and theoretical discussions involved. Comparing such diverse formats and genres like newspapers, TV news shows, TV commercials, radio phone-ins, obituaries, fanzines and film subtitles, the contributions of this volume illustrate the complexity of the growing field of contrastive media analysis.

′Jim McGuigan has done it again. The complex cultural machinery hiding behind the apparently simple ′facts of life′ still fresh in our collective memory, has been pulled out from its hiding, exposed, disassembled and put together again, and showed in action of shaping up its products; all that done to the benefit of us all - simultaneously producers and product of the life we share. Another great contribution to cultural studies; and to our understanding of the world notorious for defying/escaping understanding. This is exactly what we need ′cultural analysis′ for′ - Professor Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Leeds ′Jim McGuigan is one of cultural studies′ leading practitioners. This volume is a generous and wide-reaching exploration of how to use cultural theory to explore a wide variety of topics, brought together under the sign of the struggle for a vigorous, participatory public sphere′ - Toby Miller, University of California This book represents a distinctive approach to cultural analysis, using multi-dimensional methods for addressing issues of public interest. Stressing the impact of both neoliberalism and the formation of a ′cool capitalist culture′ that has colonised everyday life around much of the globe, Jim McGuigan deploys his original concept of the ′cultural public sphere′ within several carefully analysed case studies, including: • celebrity death • festivals and urban regeneration • ′race′ and multicultural controversy • popular television • social significance of the all purpose mobile communication device in a privatised and individualised way of life • riskiness and uncertainty in the creative and media industries This is a radical intervention in the research agendas and conceptual development of cultural policy studies, cultural sociology and, more generally, in the broad field known as ′cultural studies′. It offers challenging theoretical arguments that are substantiated with concrete evidence of cultural and social processes.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book presents a clear, concise and critical introduction to contemporary media and cultural studies. The book will be of interest to all students about to embark on courses in which knowledge of the mass media, cultural identities, popular culture, film, or television, forms a part of their programme. But the book is also aimed at those who are interested in how media and cultural identities can be studied in relation to audiences and industries in the context of local and global media. And finally, the book is of interest to all those who are studying aspects of the media, culture, and communications industries and who want to consolidate their knowledge and critical skills in more comprehensive ways. Get Set for Media and Cultural Studies will provide a concise learning aid.

Many very intelligent people don't like dealing with numbers. Similarly, many gifted scientists are not especially interested in studying people and their cultural behavior. In this book, we argue that being interested in people and their cultures, and helping students and others to use numbers to pursue these interests, are not mutually exclusive. Research methods are becoming an increasingly important requirement for students of all kinds. But many students, particularly those in the humanities, struggle with concepts drawn from the social sciences and find quantitative and statistical information inaccessible and daunting. Nonetheless, such concepts are found in nearly all areas of society, from market research to opinion polls to psychological studies of human behavior. This book provides a simple guide to the process of conducting research in the humanities, with special reference to media and culture, from the planning stage, through the data gathering, to the analysis and interpretation of results: planning it, doing it, and understanding it. The book shows how students' own choice of research topic can be refined into a manageable research question and how the most appropriate methodologies can be applied. Each section draws on actual examples from research that the authors and their students have conducted. Topics covered include: choosing a research question and method; instrument design and pilot data; practical procedures; research with children; looking at statistics; and interpretation of results.

Written in a clear and engaging style, Super Media introduces and examines the newly emerging cultural studies approach to understanding media. Michael Real begins by providing a critical review of previous traditions of media research and theory -- illustrated with tables and comparative charts -- and re-integrates media study around cultural studies. He argues that issues of personal identity and consciousness, of conflict and bias, of politics and policy, are more effectively articulated and understood through cultural studies. Drawing from both humanities and the social sciences, he centers his analyses in text, meaning, representation, interpretation, conflict, ideology, hegemony and culture. Extensive case stud