Super Media

Selected as One of Media & Values' Best Books Using varying approaches, researchers have tried to capture the actual dynamics and role of media in culture and society, but do we really understand this relationship? Super Media introduces and illustrates the newly emerging cultural studies approach to understanding the media in society. Drawing from both humanities and the social sciences, cultural studies centers its analysis in text, meaning, representation, interpretation, conflict, ideology, hegemony, and culture. In his analysis, Michael Real first provides a critical review of previous traditions of media research and theory--illustrated with tables and comparative charts--and then reintegrates media study around cultural studies. He then presents extensive case studies that illustrate the concepts and theories of the cultural studies approach. Included are the most widely available expressions of culture in history: the Olympics, superpower politics, Oscar-winning films, prime time television, and other transnational cases. Original in perspective, Super Media examines top research in media communication and provides a synthesis between research and the media experiences that affect people's everyday lives. The result is a provocative volume that will provide useful insights to professionals and advanced students in all areas of communication and popular culture. "In many overviews of the field, the canon provides the student and mere tourist alike a standard guide to familiar sights assumed to embody enduring lessons about our mass-mediated world. Contemporary media studies, however, comprise a sprawling network of alternative routes that offer access to more intriguing, dynamic sites of cultural production. In Super Media, Michael Real charts some of these alternative perspectives, broadly related as critical culture studies, in terms that can be understood by the initiate. Further, he attempts to synthesize `the best' of behavioral and critical media research toward a new reference guide." --Communication Quarterly "Super Media is the smartest and most accessible volume available that introduces the fundamental theoretical and methodological positions and practices in cultural studies. It challenges the reader to think through the very issues that cultural studies research and theorizing promotes. Real's touch as an author has produced a very readable text. Super Media helps signal the relevance of cultural studies for communication studies in America." --Journal of International and Intercultural Relations "The book aims to simplify several aspects of critical theory into easily accessible concepts which can be applied to cultural phenomena by the general media consumer. The book succeeds in its goal of raising the reader's awareness of the ways the media pervade our daily existence." --Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media "This is a serious attempt to make cultural studies' insights accessible to U.S. students. Many t...