Rethinking Media Studies

The growing connections between media, culture and religion are increasingly evident in contemporary society, but until now have rarely been theoretically linked. The contributors to this volume effectively combine these areas into a coherent whole. The issues they examine include: the decline of religious institutions during the late twentieth century; the increasing autonomy and individualized practice of religion; and the surge of media and media-based icons that are often imbued with religious qualities, and the ensuing effect on cultural practices.

"This book reconsiders media studies from different philosophical and theoretical perspectives from around the world. It brings together diverse views and visions from thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas, Ramachandra Gandhi, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer, Pope Francis, and Satyajit Ray, among others. The authors focus on the issues of ethics, aesthetics, meditation, and communication in relation to media studies, and explore the links between media and mindfulness. The volume includes case studies from India, United States, Switzerland, and Denmark, and presents empirical works on new horizons of critical media studies in different fields such as American news media and creative media lab. A unique contribution, this book will be indispensable for students and researchers of journalism, communication studies, social media, behavioral sciences, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and development studies"--

Leading scholars of media and public life grapple with how to make sense of major transformations rocking media and politics.

This book links the growing connections between media, culture and religion into a coherent theoretical whole. It examines, amongst others, the effect on cultural practices and the increasing autonomy and individualized practice of religion.

The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors' introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and "the virtual window." The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.

Re-Inventing the Media provides a highly original re-thinking of media studies for the contemporary post-broadcast, post-analogue, and post-mass media era. While media and cultural studies has made much of the changes to the media landscape that have come from digital technologies, these constitute only part of the transformations that have taken place in what amounts of a reinvention of the media over the last two decades. Graeme Turner takes on the task of re-thinking how media studies approaches the whole of the contemporary media-scape by focusing on three large, cross-platform, and transnational themes: the decline of the mass media paradigm, the ongoing restructuring of the relations between the media and the state, and the structural and social consequences of celebrity culture. By addressing the fact that the reinvention of the media is not simply a matter of globalising markets or the take-up of technological change, Turner is able to explore the more fundamental movements and widespread trends that have significantly influenced the character of what the contemporary media have become, how it is structured, and how it is used. Re-Inventing the Media is a must-read for both students and scholars of media, culture and communication studies.

The growing connections between media, culture and religion are increasingly evident in contemporary society, but until now have rarely been theoretically linked. The contributors to this volume effectively combine these areas into a coherent whole. The issues they examine include: the decline of religious institutions during the late twentieth century; the increasing autonomy and individualized practice of religion; and the surge of media and media-based icons that are often imbued with religious qualities, and the ensuing effect on cultural practices.

This book offers an important reconsideration of teaching, learning and research in media studies, and provides an overview of some of the key issues, controversies and debates in the field. It argues that, in spite of critical interventions from scholars working both within and outside of media studies, many academics have been slow to respond to the ongoing shifts and transformations in digital media in terms of curriculum design and course content. The book critically engages with and reassesses issues and debates in teaching and learning in the field of media studies in light of wide-scale shifts incurred by digital media, and asks is media studies still relevant as a subject in its current form? This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, media education, cultural studies and popular culture.