Introduction

Maybe you have picked up this book because you’re starting a course in Media Studies (given the title, it’s a fair guess). Perhaps you are an English teacher and you are going to ‘pick up’ some media teaching and need to be one step ahead of the students. Or you could be a parent, wondering what Media Studies is really all about and whether your child should spend their time engaging with it. Or you could be such a polymath that you have no vocational reason or vested interest whatsoever. It would be nice to think that some of you are in that last category. If you are a media student, the assumption will be that you’ve

never studied it before (although it might be a useful ‘refresher’ even if you have). All the way through, the emphasis will be on distinguishing between everyday media engagement and critical media literacy. Just by being alive in the contemporary ‘mediated’ world, we all respond actively to media – we never just ‘take it in’ without any thought or interpretation. Equally, the distinction between our ‘real world’ experiences and media experiences are not always clear-cut. Media are, for most people, part of our ‘lifeworld’. We refer to media in our conversations, use media as reference points in all kinds of ways and increasingly respond to, adapt or even create media for public reception through YouTube and other ‘Web 2.0’ affordances. But the critical media student brings to this

everyday engagement a range of academic theories and approaches. Textual analysis is the practice of deconstructing media products to understand how they are constructed and how people receive them in different ways. Theories of media and power look at ownership, control, regulation and politics in historical and economic contexts. Put simply, who controls media and does controlling media equate to controlling us? In a democracy, what should media be for? Academic approaches to media globalization go beyond ‘the global village’ to explore the role media play in blending local, national and international identities. Theories of change are all about technology – the idea of ‘Media 2.0’ and claims and counterclaims about the impact on new social media on how we communicate, engage with the public world and, ultimately, how we think. There are plentiful ‘brave new world’ theories and plentiful counterarguments – words of caution. There are optimistic and dystopian theories about the future and the next generation of media students will doubtless look back at all this with amusement. But, as they say, we are where we are. If all these theoretical areas aren’t enough to deal with, media students need to create their own media as well and present this in a ‘theorizing’ context, reflecting on the creative process and taking a step back from their own products to do textual analysis on them. Hopefully, we are done with the ‘soft option’ idea already.