Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences

This is a great introduction to media studies. It generally covers a lot of theories and their originators. It does not go into a great deal of depth on any one of them, however, this book is great to get ideas for a theory that one might wish to expand on in detail. I have used this many times for short papers in which I want to incorporate an idea, but do not want the hassle of a lot of in depth research on topic.

I have this book for a class. It discusses some very interesting topics. I highly recommend it!

Unquestionably, the strength and courage shown by the modern day media has been the sole driving force in bringing forward the various viewpoints that would eventually change the world for better. It is like the words - "It sometimes takes a stranger for us to be able to look into justices' beautiful eyes". That is true at so many levels, both at an individual and personal level but also in terms of the relationship between the citizens of this world and the media. And therein lies the genesis of everlasting love as well, no matter how much doubt is cast by slander. However human nature is strange in that one often ends up hurting the most those that they actually love dearly. Words, in that context, are also strange since they can be sometimes be so vitriolic, if not being utterly cruel. There once was an ordinary man who sat in his home looking at his television screen, as if looking through it and asked for forgiveness and hoped that one day he would be forgiven by everyone he hurt. It was at times like this that he wished he could get himself to walk away from the television and return to his ordinary world of man and machines or even to his essence, not out of fear of retaliation but out of the pain he kept causing others. After all he was just a human being! He was such a person who could see the truth in every perspective and ideology and at the same time felt that the modern world would be writing its epitaph if it did not bravely face the reality of the every changing world. It was something as simple and pure as seeing the truth in the different ways of life chosen by different human beings who lived on this land even if he did not agree with all viewpoints. It is like being able to walk in every stranger's shoes and realizing that in essence some face of the ultimate truth shows itself no matter how different this truth looks at face value. It is analogous to the different faces of a diamond and that it would take a miracle to be able to see these myriad, if not infinite, faces of the same diamond in one glimpse. In this regard, the narrower the tunnel vision, the more mistrust there is against other viewpoints. That is the essence of life. Well, what can you say other than - "shine on you crazy diamond..."

Complete moral degredation of society, eh? Dimwit zealots interspersed with egotistical invaders of privacy and the silly immature masses of disgusting protoplasm seeking fun at others' expense, all trapped in the tragic duplicity and hypocrisy of their own self-glorified beliefs...the self-proclaimed intellectual class, the so-called saviors of modern society? Has the rabid journalistic and entertainment and advertising (aka the modern day devils) media gone berserk with no one around to save them from their mental illness except maybe their own slow but inevitable slide down into oblivion?

Media-disseminated messages flood our every waking second, affecting us in ways we often do not readily discern. Croteau and Hoynes take the reader on an exploration of these media forces in a sociological journey that walks then leaps from the birth of printed words for the masses to cyberspace for the individual. In the process, we learn a lot along the way. Not only about media, but, about ourselves. Unlike most college course texts in Media and Society (in sociology or journalism), "Media Society" is written in understandable English and is not ruefully Marxian in ideological slant. The work plays it straight down the middle. The authors' goal, to which they succeed, is to provide information that shows the complexity of social relationships in, around and through which information from all sources is sought and internalized by "receivers" then, through feedback, subtly affects the "senders" and subsequent messages as well. Surprisingly up-to-date in information, especially concerning the so-called New Media (a synthesis of current technologies, traditional entertainment programs-turned-political,and old news media). Croteau and Hoynes not only introduce the reader to the media mileau in society, they show how economics drive news coverage. At the same time they explain that media consolidations have not shrunk the markets as first feared, but have actually led--perhaps inadvertently--to an explosion of different, often smaller and more intimate media. The media pie, they attest, is growing bigger as the number of slices inexplicably increase. In later chapters, the authors do a commendable job acquainting the reader with communications theory, especially explaining how opinions are formed. My favorite chapter, given my predilections, are the chapters dealing with media and the political world (and the rest of the chapters in Part 4). The authors also enter the globalization fray by demonstrating not only how American pop culture is transforming traditional cultures (see Barber's McWorld v. Jihad for greater detail), but also how traditional cultures are influencing American pop culture in ways greater than we had intuited. Anyone interested in gaining a sense of how media is impacting his or her daily life and how we, as social beings, react to that impact, should certainly read this wonderful book.