Why Study the Media?

by Roger Silverstone

"It′s easy to be snobbish about media culture; the great merit of Roger Silverstone′s book is to make the reader understand just how important that culture is." --Richard Sennett, New York University

"A remarkable book which argues for a new paradigm for the study of the media." --Daniel Dayan, Centre National de la Recherche

"A persuasive and sophisticated discussion of the role of the media in modern life at the threshold of the twenty-first century." --Ellen Seiter, University of California

"A very important book, one that moves media theory and argument on at long last. This is an attempt to get people to think differently about the media - not just when they are writing essays, but also when they are arguing about media in everyday life." --Simon Frith, University of Stirling


The centrality of the media, all media, to human experience - from the conduct of everyday life, to the exercise of power, to the creation of culture - is inescapable. We live in an intensely mediated world.

Yet the academic study of the media has rarely made its own insights accessible and relevant to those outside its own limited sphere. Indeed it is constantly under attack for its lack of rigour, aparent failure to address the needs of industry and its inability to tell us anything substantive about the world in which we live.

Written as a manifesto and in order to set a new intellectual agenda, "Why Study the Media?" argues for the importance of the media in our culture and society, and the consequent necessity of taking the media seriously as an object of enlightened but rigorous investigation.

At once human and humane, "Why Study the Media?" will be welcomed by all those in search of new ways of thinking about our mediated world.

165 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[David Meme]

This book presents an excellent argument as to why studying the media requires more than the often simplistic treatment it receives in the social sciences (see for instance Moss' work). Media cannot just be ignored or treated as being carried over a neutral transmission medium, nor can we take for granted the form of the medium. New media has obviously raised these issues in startling new ways (in terms of remediation in particular) but the difficulty of placing the media within a methodological framework of analysis without lapsing into sociologism or technologism (to use Latour's terms) show the importance of developing methodology in relation to media/medium scholarship. A great place to start to get up to speed on contemporary debates about media studies.

[Adam Ripon]

Outdated for 2017-2018 bud good for media theories.