Media Studies - Key Themes

Key Themes

In addition to the interdisciplinary nature of the academic field, popular understandings of media studies encompass:

• Online communication
• electronic media
• journalism
• mass communication
• media influence
• creative industries
• political economy
• cultural studies
• media production (Television production, Filmmaking)
• media psychology

Foundational Media theories include: Media effects theory; Agenda Setting, Priming, Framing, political economy, discourse analysis,content analysis,Hyperpersonal theory,representation theory, imagined community,public sphere, theories of persuasion, attention, and control, etc.

Most production and journalism courses incorporate media studies content, but academic institutions often establish separate departments. Media studies students may see themselves as observers of media, not creators or practitioners. These distinctions vary across national boundaries. The essential definition of media studies involves the study of media effects. Specific programs in media studies that focus on the study of media effects have emerged at Fielding Graduate University, Penn State UCLA, and Touro University Worldwide.

Separate strands exist within media studies, such as television studies. Film studies is often considered a separate discipline, though television and video games studies grew out of it, as made evident by the application of basic critical theories such as psychoanalysis, feminism and Marxism.

Critical media theory looks at how the corporate ownership of media production and distribution affects society, and provides a common ground to social conservatives (concerned by the effects of media on the traditional family) and liberals and socialists (concerned by the corporatization of social discourse). The study of the effects and techniques of advertising forms a cornerstone of media studies.

Contemporary media studies includes the analysis of new media with emphasis on the internet, video games, mobile devices, interactive television, and other forms of mass media which developed from the 1990s. Because these new technologies allow instant communication across the world (chat rooms and instant messaging, online video games, video conferencing), interpersonal communication is an important element in new media studies.

It has been argued that media studies has not fully acknowledged the changes which the internet and digital interactive media have brought about, seeing these as an 'add-on'. David Gauntlett has argued for a 'Media Studies 2.0' which fully recognises the ways in which media has changed, and that traditional boundaries between 'audiences' and 'producers' has collapsed.