Media Society: Industries, Images and Audiences

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 432 pages
• Published by: Pine Forge Press
• Edition: 3rd Edition July 15, 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0761987738
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0761987734
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Product Description


Praise for the Second Edition

"Croteau and Hoynes have written the clearest, most comprehensive, and useful textbook I’ve seen on the media, American Society, and their interconnections. As sage as it is thoroughgoinga, it serves as an encyclopedic reference book as well as a cogent summation of what scholars know. My congratulations to the authors."

-- Todd Gitlin, Columbia University

"The most comprehensive and insightful book on the role of media in life and society. If students, scholars, and all those concerned about our culture had to pick one book to enlighten and inform them, this would be the book."

-- George Gerbner, Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunication, Temple University

In a society saturated by mass media, from newspapers and magazines, television and radio, to digital video projects and the worldwide web, most students possess a great deal of media knowledge and experience before they ever enter the classroom. What they often lack, however, is a broader framework for understanding the relationship between media and society. Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences provides that context and helps students develop skills for critically evaluating both conventional wisdom and one’s own assumptions about the social role of the media.

The first two editions of Media/Society introduced thousands of students to a sociologically informed analysis of the media process. The Third Edition builds on this success with revised Internet resources, the latest data on the media industry, new examples from the independent media sector, and updated discussions of media policy, online media, and independent media. Media/Society is unique among media texts in that it offers:

• A sociological approach that looks at overarching relationships between the various components of the media process-the industry, its products, audiences, technology, and the broader social world
• An integrated study of mass media that looks at media technologies, collective influences, and connections between mass media issues that are often treated as separate
• An examination of how economic and political constraints affect the media and how audiences actively construct their own interpretations of media messages

Media/Society: Industries, Images and Audiences, Third Edition engages the reader with accessible analyses that are historically grounded but draw upon current media debates such as regulation of the Internet, concentration of media ownership, portrayals of gays in the media, and the growth of global media. Media/Society an outstanding text for courses in mass media and sociology.

About The Author


David Croteau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he teaches courses on the sociology of media. He is the author of Politics and the Class Divide: Working People and the Middle-Class Left.



William Hoynes is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he teaches courses on media, culture, and social theory. He is the author of Public Television for Sale: Media, the Market, and the Public Sphere.

Croteau and Hoynes are the co-authors of By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate (1994) and The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest (2001).

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences (Paperback) Media-disseminated messages flood our every waking second, affecting us in ways we often do not readily discern. Croteau and Hoynes take the reader on an exploration of these media forces in a sociological journey that walks then leaps from the birth of printed words for the masses to cyberspace for the individual. In the process, we learn a lot along the way. Not only about media, but, about ourselves. Unlike most college course texts in Media and Society (in sociology or journalism), "Media Society" is written in understandable English and is not ruefully Marxian in ideological slant. The work plays it straight down the middle. The authors' goal, to which they succeed, is to provide information that shows the complexity of social relationships in, around and through which information from all sources is sought and internalized by "receivers" then, through feedback, subtly affects the "senders" and subsequent messages as well. Surprisingly up-to-date in information, especially concerning the so-called New Media (a synthesis of current technologies, traditional entertainment programs-turned-political,and old news media). Croteau and Hoynes not only introduce the reader to the media mileau in society, they show how economics drive news coverage. At the same time they explain that media consolidations have not shrunk the markets as first feared, but have actually led--perhaps inadvertently--to an explosion of different, often smaller and more intimate media. The media pie, they attest, is growing bigger as the number of slices inexplicably increase. In later chapters, the authors do a commendable job acquainting the reader with communications theory, especially explaining how opinions are formed. My favorite chapter, given my predilections, are the chapters dealing with media and the political world (and the rest of the chapters in Part 4). The authors also enter the globalization fray by demonstrating not only how American pop culture is transforming traditional cultures (see Barber's McWorld v. Jihad for greater detail), but also how traditional cultures are influencing American pop culture in ways greater than we had intuited. Anyone interested in gaining a sense of how media is impacting his or her daily life and how we, as social beings, react to that impact, should certainly read this wonderful book.