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Print books for Film Studies are located in the Art collection in the UCL Main Library and cover the philosophy of film, film in society, the industry and its economics, technical aspects, film genres, and film history, shelved according to the following sequence:
ART Q: Film and television: general
ART QB: Philosophy and psychology
ART QC: Society and cinema
ART QE: The industry and its economics
ART QH: Production
ART QJ: Technical aspects
ART QK: Genres
ART QM: History (including film in specific countries)
ART QN: People in film and television
Print books for Media Studies can be found in the IOE Library and the Science Library. The following guides have more information about the collections which are most relevant to Media Studies.
School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) library: includes major holdings of the history and literature of East Germany and other German-speaking areas, Finland and the Baltic region. Also includes the Bain Graffy Film Collection, a collection of films from and about Russia and Central and Eastern Europe that includes features films, animation, documentaries and other material.
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This resource uses evidence-based documentation to examine the veracity of claims and beliefs about the state, nature, and extent of media bias in American news media, including social media, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets. The book provides students and other readers with a clear and accurate understanding of claims of media bias (both conservative and liberal) in the United States by refuting falsehoods, misunderstandings, and exaggerations surrounding this topic - and confirming the validity of other assertions. In addition, this sourcebook examines claims and assertions about media bias in other realms of American life, from popular entertainment to social media platforms.
Social media are an integral part of contemporary society. From news, warfare, politics, advertising, consumption, entertainment, friendships, labour, and economy to friendships, leisure, language, and everyday life, they have changed the way we communicate, use information and understand the world. Social media shape and are shaped by contemporary society. In order to understand contemporary society we have to ask critical questions about social media. This book is the ultimate guide for digging deeper into issues of ownership, power, class, and (in)justice.
Offering a comprehensive and research-oriented survey of the emergence of virtual reality (VR) into the gaming mainstream, Virtual Reality Gaming delves into the complexities of VR gaming, emphasising immersion, embodiment, and player presence. As the first study to critically assess and systematically investigate the phenomenon of VR Gaming through the tripartite lens of embodiment, presence, and immersion, established and emerging voices in the field discuss the unique aspects of VR games and the challenges they present to researchers and designers with regards to re-conceptualising the relationship between system, player and game play - in essence, a reconsideration of the human-computer interface (HCI) of gaming.
Beginning with the definition and history of media studies, this book delves into exciting subjects like the political economy of mass media, digitalization, AI, filter bubbles, misinformation and much more. Reading this text, you will encounter: - Real case studies, from a day in the life of a journalist, to global media conglomerates - An exploration of key themes like race and gender in the critical issues section - Accessible content, with key material boxes, a glossary and further reading - A lively style that won't leave you bored.
Growing sales numbers for cassette tapes in the Global North since the early 2010s have led mass media outlets to repeatedly proclaim a tape revival. Yet, the grassroots projects of devotees in niche punk, noise and hip-hop DIY music scenes have continuously upheld the unique material benefits of cassettes while wider society considered them a relic of bygone times. Contrasting the popular notion of current cassette use being a mere side effect of the blazing interest in the vinyl record, this book argues that the lasting embrace of tapes is based on complex cultural, economic and material factors that shape cassettes as hybrid artefacts of music in the new media age.
With significant evolutions in digital technologies and media distribution in the past two decades, the business of storytelling through screens has shifted dramatically. In the past, blockbuster movies and TV shows like Friends aimed first for domestic mass audiences, although the biggest hits circulated globally. Now, transnational distribution plays a primary role and imagined audiences are global. At the same time, the once-mass audience has significantly fragmented to enable an expansion in the range of commercially viable stories, as evident in series as varied as Atlanta, Better Things, and dozens of others that are not widely known, but deeply loved by their microaudiences. Delving into the changing landscape of commercial screen storytelling, After Mass Media explores how industrial shifts and technological advancements have remade the narrative landscape over the past two decades.
What does it mean to build a world Worldbuilding is traditionally understood as an expression of storytelling across media forms. Yet, as video games show us, worldbuilding does not necessarily need to center narrative elements. Instead, new worlds can allow us to reimagine existing structures, conventions, and constants. Video games challenge us to address how worlds are built through underlying systems rather than surface-level representation. They also offer opportunities to envision alternate and queer ways of living, loving, desiring, and being.
Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the "four C's": class, clout, canon, and comfort. Through 75 in-depth interviews with Black fans, Fandom for Us, by Us argues not only for the importance of studying Black fandoms, but also demonstrates their complexities by both coupling and decoupling Black reception practices from the politics of representation.
Collected writings, artworks and manifestos outlining the developments in Indigenous cinema and its most adventurous practitioners Founded in 2018, COUSIN Collective is dedicated to promoting Indigenous artists working with the moving image. Temporal Territories is the collective's critical anthology on Indigenous experimental cinema, bringing together new works, reprints of key writings, theoretical interventions, artist portfolios, intergenerational dialogues and manifestos. With topics ranging from science fiction to found-footage filmmaking to the strange case of the DeMille Indians, the volume surveys a varied and vital body of work, and suggests new forms still to come. As COUSIN writes in their introduction, "We hope this collection can be something like a celebration, a point along your path that fosters conversations and connections. ...There are no rules to this thing, and you are not alone."
Disability and Fandom discusses the accessibility and welcome of fan spaces, and it explores how disability functions in fan practices. Katherine Anderson Howell shows the overlaps between disability studies and fan studies, analyzing how fandom operates in physical and digital fan spaces. She argues that it is time for fan studies to let go of the idea of fans in general as marginalized or as powerless groups. Anderson Howell examines how key fandom platforms--including cons, Tumblr, Archive of Our Own, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok--set up user interfaces that may mask their true values, potentially decreasing access and creating a system by which disability remains stigmatized. Readers will find case studies of fan fiction, disability influencers, anti-fans, trolls, and celebrities. The argument is made for incorporating disability into the analytical tools of fandom so that we may begin with better tools and better questions.
Feminist Manifestos for Media and Communication brings together evidence-based manifestos for media and communication that take a feminist perspective and add up to a provocative vision of feminist media practices and of feminist communication. The book discusses critical problems and complaints in ways that identify and make the case for actionable, concrete solutions to media problems and deficiencies; it shows how feminist thinking can be usefully and effectively applied to a wide range of journalism, media, and communication practices. The manifestos are not "only" about women but rather offer specific, feasible blueprints for restructuring media in ways that make them fairer and more equitable along many vectors of identity, so that media can better serve democracy. These manifestos give concrete solutions to specific problems that can and should be implemented by journalists, media practitioners, students, faculty, and scholars.
This companion brings together an internationally and interdisciplinarily diverse group of emerging and established fan studies scholars to reflect on the state of the field and to chart new directions for research. Engaging an impressive array of media texts and formats, and incorporating a variety of methodologies, this collection is designed to survey, complicate, and expand core concerns. This collection remains an essential volume for students and scholars interested in fandom and fan studies, popular culture, media studies, and film and television studies.
Podcasting's stratospheric rise has inspired a new breed of audio reporting. Offering immersive storytelling for a binge-listening audience as well as reaching previously underserved communities, podcasts have become journalism's most rapidly growing digital genre, buoying a beleaguered news industry. Yet many concerns have been raised about this new medium, such as the potential for disinformation, the influence of sponsors on content, the dominance of a few publishers and platforms, and at-times questionable adherence to journalistic principles. David O. Dowling critically examines how podcasting and its evolving conventions are transforming reporting-and even reshaping journalism's core functions and identity. He considers podcast reporting's most influential achievements as well as its most consequential ethical and journalistic shortcomings, emphasizing the reciprocal influences between podcasting and traditional and digital journalism.
A small but growing number of people in many countries consistently avoid the news. They feel they do not have time for it, believe it is not worth the effort, find it irrelevant or emotionally draining, or do not trust the media. Why and how do people circumvent news? Which groups are more and less reluctant to follow the news? In what ways is news avoidance a problem--for individuals, for the news industry, for society--and how can it be addressed? This groundbreaking book explains why and how so many people consume little or no news despite unprecedented abundance and ease of access. Avoiding the News examines how people who tune out traditional media get information and explores their "folk theories" about how news organizations work. The authors argue that news avoidance is about not only content but also identity, ideologies, and infrastructures: who people are, what they believe, and how news does or does not fit into their everyday lives. Because news avoidance is most common among disadvantaged groups, it threatens to exacerbate existing inequalities by tilting mainstream journalism even further toward privileged audiences.
This book examines the nexus of East Asian media, culture, and digital technologies in the early 21st century from a Global South perspective. Providing an empirically rich analysis of the emergence of Asian culture, histories, texts, and state policies as they relate to both Asian media and global media, the author discusses relevant theoretical frameworks as East Asian popular culture and media have shifted the contours of globalization. The book explores the ways in which East Asia-focused analytical frameworks are able to shift people's understanding of globalization and media, drawing upon examples from different East Asian countries to illustrate how current cultural flows have influenced and have been influenced by a handful of dimensions.
Since the release of Jordan Peele's Academy Award-winning horror hit Get Out (2017), interest in Black horror films has erupted. This renewed intrigue in stories about Black life, history, culture, or "Blackness" has taken two forms. First, the history and politics of race have been centered in the horror genre. Second, Black horror has become an increasingly visible topic in mainstream discourses with scholars, critics, and fans contending that Black horror is seeing its so-called renaissance. However, critical attention to Blackness in horror has primarily focused on the U.S. and western world, despite Black stories having featured prominently in the genre-as actors, screenwriters, directors, producers-globally and across cultures. The essays in this handbook explore global Black horror cinema by interrogating Blackness and the ways in which it manifests in films across the diaspora and around the world.
Steven Brill has observed the rise of fake news from a front-row seat. In The Death of Truth, with startling, often terrifying clarity, he explains how we got here-and how we can get back to a world where truth matters. None of this-conspiracy theories embraced, expertise ridiculed, empirical evidence ignored-has happened by accident. Brill takes us inside the decisions made by executives in Silicon Valley to code the algorithms embedded in their social media platforms to maximize profits by pushing divisive content. He unravels the ingenious creation of automated advertising buying systems that reward that click-baiting content and penalize reliable news publishers, and describes how the use of these ad-financed, misinformation platforms by politicians, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists deceives ordinary citizens. He documents how the most powerful adversaries of America have used American-made social media and advertising tools against us with massive disinformation campaigns-and how, with the development of generative artificial intelligence, everything could get exponentially worse unless we act. The stakes are high for all of us, including Brill himself, whose company's role in exposing Russian disinformation operations resulted in a Russian agent targeting him and his family.
Media Travels: Toward An Atlas of Global Media fills a significant gap in global media scholarship by offering short, readable articles covering different types of media from around the world. Through careful and informed analysis, these eleven accessibly written chapters illustrate the particularities of different media practices and situate them within social, historical, and geographical contexts. Media studies courses, particularly introductory courses, are often narrowly focused on US and Western European canons. Instructors for introductory media studies courses wishing to expand the offerings in their curricula will find in these essays new ways of approaching foundational concepts and issues in the field, including globalization, social difference, and diverse media cultures. By including a variety of media and several geographical areas, the collection introduces readers to the formal, technological, and cultural diversity of global media studies.
This edited volume focuses on slow media, an approach that fosters intentional and thoughtful engagement with media of all forms. Contributors explore our individual and community relations with analog and digital media by critiquing current power structures underpinning contemporary media sensibilities, processes, and technologies. Through these critiques, the authors pose crucial questions surrounding how to slow down and be intentional within the landscape of accelerated media technology innovation and ubiquity. Building on existing media studies theory, the essays in this volume explore case studies of the intersections between analog and digital media, share insights from personal slow media projects, and propose useful methods for ethical and thoughtful media practices for both producers and audiences. Ultimately, this volume prompts readers to contemplate and reconsider the role of media technologies in contemporary life.
Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory critically examines the emergent field of podcasting in academia, revealing its significant impact on scholarly communication and approaches to research and knowledge creation. This collection presents in-depth analyses from scholars who have integrated podcasting into their academic pursuits. The book systematically explores the medium's implications for teaching, its effectiveness in reaching broader audiences, and its role in reshaping the dissemination of academic work. Covering a spectrum of disciplines, the contributors detail their engagement with podcasting, providing insight into its use as both a research tool and an object of analysis, thereby illuminating the multifaceted ways in which podcasting intersects with and influences academic life.
Over the past thirty years, humanity has made a huge mistake. We handed over to big tech decisions that have allowed them to build what has become our "space of the world" - the highly artificial space of social media platforms where much of our social life now unfolds. This has proved reckless and has huge social consequences. The toxic effects on social life, young people's mental health, and political solidarity are well known, but the key factor underlying all this has been missed: the fact that humanity allowed business to construct our space of the world and then exploit it for profit. In the process, we ignored two millennia of political thought about the conditions under which a healthy or even a non-violent politics is possible. We endangered the one resource that is in desperately short supply in the face of catastrophic climate change: solidarity. Is human solidarity possible in a world of continuous digital connection and commercially managed platforms, and what if it isn't?
Lillian Ross was a staff writer at The New Yorker for seven decades, starting there in 1945. During this time she frequently wrote on cinema, and many of these extraordinary pieces are collected here together for the first time.
In Social Media Cultures, Dhiraj Murthy provides a theoretically-grounded, historical exploration of the social media landscape. Uniquely tracing the evolution of social media - from traditional media like letters, postcards, and the telephone to new media and platforms - Murthy argues that these contemporary phenomena are not divorced from their analog antecedents. The historical and theoretical frameworks employed in this book allow readers to better understand the intricacies of nuanced modern dynamics like cancel culture, self-expression, and celebrity influence. Focusing on mobility, political discourse, and the power of witnessing from global perspectives, Murthy uses empirical case studies from both the Global South and North to demonstrate the profound impact of social media on culture, politics, and everyday life.
Erving Goffman's much-loved works are widely cited in media and communication studies. His books have stimulated research on news framing, mass media and social media, inviting new insights about how communication, self, audiences and public life are mediated by, but also transcend, particular technological forms. What explains the continuing relevance of this highly original theorist? In this book, Peter Lunt critically examines how and why the concepts developed by Goffman - face-work and the mediated self, frontstage and backstage, impression management, media frames and logics, footing and interaction rituals - still resonate across the field. Ultimately, Goffman's sociology emerges not only as an enduring influence, but as a source of new inspiration in our ever more interactive world.
Media and Society: An Introduction, offers an interdisciplinary approach to media as means of social connection in everyday life and beyond. Integrating theory and concrete analysis in case studies, exercises, and illustrative examples from around the world, Media and Society: An Introduction delivers a go-to reference work for learning about one of the essential social infrastructures of the twenty-first century. Standing on the shoulders of classic communication models, and covering legacies of research about media institutions, media texts, and media users, the chapters include both how-to sections on methods addressing current digital media forms and reflective segments that place TikTok, ChatGPT, and the emerging Internet of Things in the longer history of human communication.
David T. Z. Mindich's The Mediated World charts the story of media as it has shaped human life and as it infuses every aspect of our modern existence. Mindich's engaging narrative style focuses on concepts and real-world contexts to promote the media literacy students need to understand their personal relationships with media. Empowered as media consumers, creators, and curators, students realize their responsibility to work within the vast world of media to create more positive and productive futures. With a strong emphasis on media literacy that treats students as media stakeholders who have a vested interest in understanding its workings and effects, Mindich's text is the perfect book for a generation of students looking to take charge of their futures in this mediated world.
This book is about the role that social media plays in the lives of individuals, societies, economies and polities. It therefore takes in a wide view of the emergent and changing impacts of social media platforms, and social media practices. As a consequence, it examines social media use through various intellectual and scholarly traditions --psychology, sociology, cultural studies, economics, and (national and global) politics - but it is primarily situated in the field of media and communications studies. As such, it frames its analysis of social media impacts using media studies concepts and terminology, and places media texts, forms, industries and agents (producers, audiences and other users) at the centre of each thematic chapter.
This book will sketch the dynamics of infrastructure in video games, focusing on the relationship between game rules, fictional world, and player interaction. It will discuss a variety of commercial video games, both mainstream and somewhat niche, that use infrastructure in different ways: Control, Wolfenstein, Fallout, This War of Mine, Exocolonist, Cyberpunk, and Frostpunk. Video games offer a particularly rich field for thinking about the relationship between narrative and infrastructure. The infrastructures that exist in the fictional worlds of these games define the experience of play in a very direct way: how players are instantiated in the game, how they move around the play space, the resources that are available, and so on.
How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an "able" body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society's shared notions of heteronormative masculinity? In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability, demonstrating that an increased concern with disability in the postwar period would ultimately lead to greater incoherence in the definitions and cultural meanings of disability in America. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in twentieth-century postwar contexts, beginning with the first World War and continuing through America's war in Vietnam.
This book is a study of the psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of creativity, originality, and inspiration viewed from the lens of a seasoned game developer. It introduces the concept of creative sobriety—a practice that advocates better understanding our own sources of inspiration so that we can intellectually drive our creative voice closer to originality. The creative process is an improvised dance between the conscious and the subconscious mind, where knowledge, experience, intuition, observation, imagination, and projection meet in ways that are completely unique to each person. Presenting practical and theoretical approaches to originality and game concept generation, this book explores the notion of creative sobriety before moving to chapters that blend theory and practice, covering topics such as innovation, the creative process, auteurship, collaboration, and creative vision.
This book addresses how opinion change and political persuasion unfold in three main domains of media effects: private media (i.e., news organizations), public service media (state-own media services), and social media platforms. The volume discusses and further advances the most recent theoretical assumptions and empirical findings that underpin our current understanding on how media influence public opinion and shape liberal democracies. The book also explores how media literacy and critical thinking can mitigate the effects of misinformation and propaganda, emphasizing the importance of educating the public to discern credible information from deceptive content. Furthermore, it discusses the ethical implications of media practices and the responsibilities of media producers in maintaining the integrity of democratic discourse.
This book offers a timely and engaging account of how technologies of communication media impact nationalist challenges to global order, shedding new light on how they matter, how they have changed, and how their evolution transforms the conditions of possibility for nationalist order challengers. In the 21st century, we have become accustomed to close entanglements between resurgent nationalism and digital media. In Mediatizing the Nation, Ordering the World, Andrew Dougall shows that the relationship between media and nationalist order contestation is far older. Comparing Trump's breakthrough in the 21st century United States with a similar - but unsuccessful - movement in 19th century Britain, the book argues that communication media shaped these episodes by differently patterning the constitution and distribution of meaning on which they relied.
Through interviews, news analysis, and personal observation, Meredith D. Clark presents the first book about how Black Twitter users carved out a vital space for fast-paced, incisive commentary on Black life in America not found in the mainstream press. Since 1827, when Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper to be published by free Black men in the United States, Black folks have been making use of the media technologies available to them to tell their own stories in their own ways. In We Tried to Tell Y'all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives, Meredith D. Clark explains how Black social media users subvert the digital divide narrative while confronting centuries of erasure, omission, and mischaracterization of Black life in 'mainstream' media.
The image of the child is often a site of conflict, one that has been captured, preserved, and recollected on screen; but what do these representations tell us about the animated child and how do they compare to their real counterparts? Is childhood simply a metaphor for innocence, or something far more complex that encompasses agency, performance, and othering? Childhood in Animation focuses on key screen characters, such as DJ, Norman, Lilo, the Lost Boys, Marji, Parvana, Bluey, Kirikou, Robyn, Mebh, Cartman and Bart, amongst others, to see how they are represented within worlds of fantasy, separation, horror, politics, and satire, as well as viewing childhood itself through a philosophical, sociological, and global lens.
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable? To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.
The images of men, women, and individuals across the gender spectrum on African social media platforms are socially, culturally, and politically embedded with ideologies that continue to shape our understandings of gender. Social Media and Gender in Africa: Discourses on Power and Politics of Everyday Life explores gender debates expressed through social media and the political, social, and cultural discourses surrounding them. The book addresses issues of gender-based violence, gender in political and economic spaces, gender activism, challenges faced in the LGBTQIA+ community, and gender harassment. It is through these platforms that sexual and gender identities are being freely expressed, political expressions are made without fear or favor, and political participation is achieved.
Mother Trouble traces white maternal angst in popular culture across a span of more than fifty years, from the iconic Rosemary’s Baby to anti-vaxx mom memes and HGTV shows. The book narrows in on popular media to think about white maternal angst as a manifestation of feminism’s unrealized possibilities and continued omissions since the second wave. It interrogates intersecting systems of power which make mothers and their children the most impoverished people in the world and urges a greater appreciation in academic and popular thinking of the work that mothers do. The book calls for an analytical expansion beyond gender to better address the erasure of reproductive labour, and especially that performed by migrants and people of colour. It illustrates the continued marginalization of racialized mothers and the disproportionate amount of labour performed by all mothers in a society where their work is devalued.
Against the backdrop of a hyper-competitive AAA industry and the perception that it is a world reserved for top programmers and hard-core 'gamers', Story Mode offers an accessible entry-point for all into writing and designing complex and emotionally affecting narrative video games. The first textbook to combine game design with creative writing techniques, this much-needed resource makes the skills necessary to consume and create digital and multi-modal stories attainable and fun. Appealing to the growing calls for greater inclusivity and access to this important contemporary apparatus of expression, this book offers low-cost, accessible tools and instruction that bridge the knowledge gap for creative writers, showing them how they can merge their skill-set with the fundamentals of game creation and empowering them to produce their own games which push stories beyond the page and the written word.
The serious study of entertainment seems paradoxical, as we presume entertainment to be the "lighter side" of our daily lives. Yet as revealed in this volume, entertainment media serve as cultural artifacts that shape our understandings of various peoples and publics in ways that invite deeper, immersive, and increasingly interactive engagement. On this backdrop, Entertainment Media and Communication serves as a reference guide for canonical and foundational research into media entertainment and a collection of emerging and updated theories and models core to the study of media entertainment in the 21st century. The contributors explore its foundations, define and extend key concepts and theories through myriad lenses, discuss unique considerations of digital media, and divine future paths for scholarly inquiry.
ReadingLists @UCL is an online service that gives students easy access to materials on their reading lists wherever they are, and allows academic staff to create and update their own reading lists.
