Defining Media Studies: Reflections on the Future of the Field

The last two issues of the 1993 Journal of Communication featured a discipline-wide self-analysis, collecting over fifty essays by giants in the field as well as many up-and-coming scholars. Now available in a single volume for courses in communications theory and practice, this collective reconnaissance of scholarship and research in the field makes a fundamental contribution to understanding the very essence of media studies. Representing a wide range of intellectual perspectives, Defining Media Studies incorporates the growing presence and significance of such technological media as the computer Net, virtual reality, and fiber optic telecommunication. Maintaining that such leaps in communication now help to define the parameters of media reality, the editors argue that these phenomena must draw the scholarly attention of media studies. The resulting volume of essays emphasizes this shift in the field, presenting insight into interfaces, telecommunications, the Information Society, media economics, "imagined communities", and many other issues, both old and new, familiar and not so familiar.