ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on various approaches to the media, which play such a large role in contemporary cultural life. The media system plays such an important role in society, linking the audience to all its various institutions, it is necessarily the case that the media will play important social and personal roles in individual and collective life. The chapter represents many different theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Susan Sontag, and Michel de Certeau, discussing everything from photography to video games. Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on the image maker. On the most obvious level television is a dramatic medium simply because a large proportion of the material it transmits is in the form of traditional drama, consisting of fictional material mimetically represented by actors and employing plot, dialogue, character, gesture, costume.
