Discuss the role of media studies in making sense of the political, economic and cultural meaning of everyday life

Authors Avatar

Discuss the role of media studies in making sense of the political, economic and cultural meaning of everyday life.

 

Communications media ranging from televisions, radios, newspapers and so forth play a major role in the way we live. To understand how contemporary society and communications media have taken on the shapes and roles that they have as well as how audiences interpret meanings out of television programs, it is important for us to know and appreciate the role of media studies.

Media studies arose from a pressing need to account for the rapid developments in mass communication, especially during the twentieth century. Bazalgette (2000:6) mentioned that media studies is not simply an academic subject where one receives and repeats heaps of information. Instead, it engages people to analyse media messages such as television programs and newspaper content, to understand how people are informed or misinformed and how all these create an impact on one's society. While there is "no single, correct interpretation of reality, it becomes important to understand how media texts might be used in order to make sense of the world we live in" (McKee 2001:144). For this reason, media studies is regarded as an important field to recognize how media affect our lives. wI8p6bN Visit coursework ce in ce fo ce for ce more hypothesis ce Do ce not ce redistribute wI8p6bN

In the essay, I will be discussing the role of media studies in making sense of the political, economic and cultural meanings along with various adverse effects media studies might have on both people and society.

One important approach to media studies focuses on the political perspective of media, which is genuinely linked to issues associated with politics, government and power relations where media play an influential role. Media industries are controlled by the government and regulated by censorship whereby dictatorial governments control the flow of information to the people and make rules of what can be accessed and publicised (James and Michael 1977:45). By studying how media institutions interact with the government, it can point down to how politics work.

 

The other issue underlying political perspective is the power relations between media industries and the government. Within a broadly neo-Marxist view of society, media studies is concerned with the constitution and exercise of power (Sinclair 2002:25). This range from the way news is structured between press editors or journalists and their sources to the way television viewing is affected by the organisation and power relations within the family (Golding and Murdock 1991:18). Besides, the study of media serves to define what is of political concern as it leads to questions about power in society such as who owns the newspaper and who financed the film production. These media politics not only affect our lives as active audiences of media but also ultimately determine the economic standing of a society.

Join now!

In relation to an economic perspective, we might ask questions such as: How do people make money through the media? How effective is advertising-does it persuade us to buy things we otherwise would not? Such issues are typical concerns of individuals to examine how media function in society. From an economic approach, media studies identifies what is of economic importance by studying the ownership and control of the media and how these may influence the audiences and economy.

How then do people make money through the media? To answer this, one has to understand that the advertising ...

This is a preview of the whole essay