On the terrain of popular communication are cultural artifacts with a potential to entertain, inform, or persuade. Accordingly, dramatic media content has been investigated by way of five interdependent perspectives: (1) genre, (2) medium, (3) narrative, (4) ideology, and (5) meaning. Especially with regard to film and television, this generic designation has been fluid, with
Media ecology is a multidisciplinary field that studies the evolution, effects, and forms of environments. Media ecology is most often defined as both the study of media as environments and the study of environments – such as situations or contexts – as media. Scholars work within expansive definitions of media, ecology, and technology. Although “medium”
To take part in the democratic process, citizens should be well informed about politics, which implies they should keep up with current affairs through the news media. Given this essential role of the media for democracy, it seems important to know to what extent and why citizens actually use political media content. While comparatively few
Election polls have a long history of a symbiotic relationship with the media, dating back to the nineteenth century (Converse 1987; Frankovic 2008). However, it was not until the 1920s that polls insinuated themselves into the news operations of election coverage on a regular basis. Before the advent of the modern polling period, the major
Media economics is the application and study of economic theories and concepts to the media industries. Media economics encompasses all forms of media, including traditional media such as print, broadcasting, music, and film, and new media forms such as the Internet. Media economics scholarship is broad and diverse and includes such topics as policy and
The concept “mass media” is a collective term that stands for a broad variety of print media like newspapers, magazines, books and electronic media like radio, television, and the Internet. The concept “newspaper,” in turn, comprises daily and weekly newspapers, and “magazines” publications like news magazines, fashion magazines, sports magazines, etc. All mass media offer
Media history as a concept in its own right possesses a relatively recent lineage. In the early decades of the twentieth century, when references to “the media” – newspapers, magazines, cinema, radio, and the like – were entering popular parlance, university academics tended to be rather skeptical about whether these institutions were important enough to
Research in the sub-field of media production and content seeks to describe and explain the symbolic world of the media with reference to a variety of contributing societal, institutional, organizational, and normative factors. It draws boundaries around a large and diverse body of research efforts, predominantly social science, but also including more interpretive cultural analysis.
Typologies of media systems date to the publication of Four Theories of the Press, which proposed a typology of authoritarian, libertarian, social responsibility and Soviet Communist media systems. Hallin and Mancini’s typology of media systems in Western Europe and North America has influenced most recent work in comparative analysis of media systems. Hallin and Mancini proposed
Discussions of media in sociology are generally concerned with mass media and, more recently, new media. Mass media are defined as communication systems by which centralized providers use industrialized technologies to reach large and geographically scattered audiences, distributing content broadly classified as information and entertainment. Media reaching mass populations emerged in the late nineteenth century