Media, Culture & Society

Media, Culture & Society
Name	Media, Culture & Society
Discipline	Cultural studies; Communication studies; Sociology
Established	1979
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Country	United Kingdom

Contents

Media, Culture & Society

Media, Culture & Society is an interdisciplinary field examining relationships among Marshall McLuhan, Stuart Hall, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and institutions like BBC and New York Times as they intersect with cultural phenomena associated with Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, Sony Corporation, and Walt Disney Company. It analyzes artifacts from Aristotle-era rhetorical practices through Gutenberg Press revolutions to contemporary platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix. Scholarship engages with events like the Watergate scandal, Arab Spring, and Brexit referendum to explore how media shapes public life in contexts including United Nations, European Union, United States, China, and India.

Overview and Definitions

The field draws on traditions associated with Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Judith Butler, and Pierre Bourdieu to define terms such as "media", "culture", "society", and "representation" through examples like Citizen Kane, War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama), Rolling Stone (magazine), and Time (magazine). Scholars reference institutions such as Columbia University, London School of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, and University of Oxford in order to situate debates alongside journals like Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Communication, and New Media & Society. Canonical texts include works tied to Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Frantz Fanon.

Frameworks incorporate approaches from structuralism, post-structuralism, and scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Homi K. Bhabha, and bell hooks to analyze ideology, hegemony, discourse, and representation in texts ranging from The Godfather to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Concepts like "encoding/decoding" link to Stuart Hall while political economy perspectives trace power through corporations like News Corporation, Viacom, AT&T, Comcast, and Google. Audience theories engage names such as Seymour Papert, Henry Jenkins, Jürgen Habermas, and James Carey to examine publics evident in phenomena like the Occupy Wall Street movement, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo movement.

Historical work maps continuities from Johannes Gutenberg to Samuel Morse, Guglielmo Marconi, Thomas Edison, and institutions like RCA and Bell Labs that catalyzed radio, cinema, and television industries exemplified by RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures, CBS, and ITV. Twentieth-century milestones include the Spanish Civil War's news coverage, the World War II propaganda systems of Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom, and Cold War media campaigns linked to United States Information Agency. The digital turn foregrounds actors including Apple Inc., Microsoft, Amazon, Tencent, and Baidu alongside events like the Dot-com bubble and legislative moments such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Analysis of production explores labor, institutions, and creative practices within companies such as Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Tencent Music Entertainment Group, Spotify, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone as they produce content across formats from magazine features to blockbuster films like Titanic and series such as Game of Thrones. Studies interrogate distribution and exhibition through platforms like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Instagram, Snapchat, and exhibition spaces including Cannes Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, and Academy Awards. Intellectual property regimes reference treaties such as the Berne Convention and organizations like the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Research addresses how identities associated with race, gender, class, sexuality, and nations like Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico are negotiated in media texts and fandoms exemplified by communities around K-pop, Star Wars, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Doctor Who. Reception studies draw on empirical methods used by scholars at institutions like Pew Research Center, Ofcom, Nielsen Holdings, and Gallup to map consumption patterns, participatory cultures tied to Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr, and political mobilization scripted by references to Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Narendra Modi.

Critical analysis traces media ownership concentration in conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, Sony, Vivendi, Tencent, and Disney and regulatory frameworks administered by bodies like Federal Communications Commission, Ofcom, European Commission, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (China), and legal cases including New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. Studies examine censorship in contexts like People's Republic of China, Russia, and Turkey alongside freedom-of-information debates linked to WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange.

Contemporary scholarship considers transnational flows exemplified by Netflix's global expansion, the spread of Hallyu via BTS and Parasite, algorithmic governance by YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, and emergent technologies from blockchain experiments to artificial intelligence products by OpenAI and DeepMind. Ongoing concerns tie to misinformation events like the 2016 United States presidential election, platform liability debates in the European Union Digital Services Act, and cultural resilience movements such as Indigenous peoples' media initiatives and regional festivals like AfriFest and Cairo International Film Festival.