The centrality of the media, all media, to human experience - from the conduct of everyday life, to the exercise of power, to the creation of culture - is inescapable. We live in an intensely mediated world.
Yet the academic study of the media has rarely made its own insights accessible and relevant to those outside its own limited sphere. Indeed it is constantly under attack for its lack of rigor, apparent failure to address the needs of industry and its inability to tell us anything substantive about the world in which we live.
Written as a manifesto and in order to set a new intellectual agenda, Why Study the Media? argues for the importance of the media in our culture and society and the consequent necessity of taking the media seriously as an object of enlightened but rigorous investigation.
At once human and humane, Why Study the Media? will be welcomed by all those in search of new ways of thinking about our mediated world.
