The popularity of American television programs and feature films in the international marketplace is widely recognized but scarcely understood. Existing studies have not sufficiently explained the global power of the American media nor its actual effects. In this volume, Scott Robert Olson tackles the issue head on, establishing his thesis that the United States' competitive advantage in the creation and global distribution of popular taste is due to a unique mix of cultural conditions tha...

Accessible, entertaining, anecdotal. A good introduction to issues in contemporary civics as well as a measured and thoughtful response to major themes and figures in cultural studies.Civility in politics is a subject throughout, and analyses of both Obama's rhetoric and the use of lowest-common-denominator insults in public debate will be well-timed going into the 2012 election campaignNot just formal essays: some are dialogues, some personal meditations, some direct addre...

Brings together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumersHenry Jenkins's pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and socially connected consumers of popular culture and that they represent the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though marginal and largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, med...

Introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and their histories, and offers a sense of the new frontiers and questions emerging in the field of media studiesKeywords for Media Studies introduces and aims to advance the field of critical media studies by tracing, defining, and problematizing its established and emergent terminology. The book historicizes thinking about media and society, whether that means noting a long history of “new media,” or tracing how...

This book explores the weird and mean and in-between that characterize everyday expression online, from absurdist photoshops to antagonistic Twitter hashtags to deceptive identity play.Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner focus especially on the ambivalence of this expression: the fact that it is too unwieldy, too variable across cases, to be essentialized as old or new, vernacular or institutional, generative or destructive. Online expression is, instead, all of the above. This amb...

You've got TV, internet, phone, radio, movies, music, magazines and newspapers - and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Unless we live on a desert island, there is no escape from media communications of one sort or another. So how do we begin to understand today's all-embracing media culture?In this book, all the key issues and debates in media studies are covered in a lively and accessible style. You will learn about the main features of global media corporations, and approaches ...

The twentieth anniversary edition of Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers brings this now-canonical text to a new generation of students interested in the intersections of fandom, participatory culture, popular consumption and media theory.Supplementing the original, classic text is an interview between Henry Jenkins and Suzanne Scott in which Jenkins reflects upon changes in the field since the original release of Textual Poachers. A study guide by Louisa Stein helps...

Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. Celebrity and Power questions the impulse to become embroiled with the construction and collapse of the famous, exploring the concept of the new public intimacy: a product of social media in which celebrities from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama are expected to continuously campaign for audiences in new ways. In a new Introductio...

This book is an essential resource for media educators working to promote critical thinking, creativity, and civic engagement through their teaching. Connecting theory and research with creative projects and analyses of pop culture, it models an integrated and practical approach to media education.In order to prepare learners to successfully navigate rapid shifts in digital technology and popular culture, media educators in both secondary and university settings need to develop fre...

This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters’ for today’s students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Ron Becker, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steve Classen, Elana Levine, Jason Mittell, Greg Smith and Pam Wilson on ‘John Fiske and Television Culture’. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of contemporary media and popular culture.Television i...

Winner of the Popular Culture Association's 2018 John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook / PrimerWhat is popular culture? Why study popular culture in an academic context? An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US: People, Politics, and Power introduces and explores the history and contemporary analysis of popular culture in the United States. In situating popular culture as lived experience through the activities, objects, and distractions of every...

Television entertainment rules supreme, one of the world’s most important disseminators of information, ideas, and amusement. More than a parade of little figures in a box, it is deeply embedded in everyday life, in how we think, what we think and care about, and who we think and care about it with.But is television entertainment art? Why do so many love it and so many hate or fear it? Does it offer a window to the world, or images of a fake world? How is it political and how does ...