Media studies
discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history and effects of various media
Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but it mostly draws from its core disciplines of mass communication, communication, communication sciences, and communication studies.
Researchers may also develop and employ theories and methods from disciplines. There are many different areas of disciplines that are involved in the study of media coming from culture, psychology, politics, and the economy. These include cultural studies, rhetoric (including digital rhetoric), philosophy, literary theory, psychology, political science, political economy, economics, sociology, anthropology, social theory, art history and criticism, film theory, and information theory.
Origin
Former priest and American educator John Culkin was one of the earliest advocates for implementing a media studies curriculum in schools. He believed students should be capable of scrutinizing mass media, and valued the application of modern communication techniques within the education system. Culkin wanted to study the effect of media on young students, highlighting how much more time they spent watching various television programs than studying. He shared how there was a significant cultural gap between those who had grown up in the “electronic age”, which included television. Older generations were more used to analog style media.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Media studies” as discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history and effects of various media. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q165650. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Media studies” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.