Why Study Media?

In this section, we explore the question "Why Study Media?" and offer one perspective below. We also provide the following resources to help you answer this question for yourself:

• What Is Media Studies?
• Information on Career Opportunities and Labour Market Analysis
• Industry Backgrounder: The Olympics Factor
• Media Studies and Communications Programs in Canada and Australia (more to come)
• Recently Recommended Reading

Good Question!

We study media because we are so immersed in media messages, it takes a special act of awareness to recognize their impact on us. Anthropologist / media theorist Ted Carpenter used an analogy to explain this condition of immersion: we don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish. Studying the media gives us a vantage point from which to observe our movement through culture. Culture is our medium.

There is no question that media shape our perceptions, beliefs, and actions. If the effect of media is relatively unconscious, we are being moved to think, feel, and act by forces without our express consent. We study the media to help us act in conscious--and responsible--ways.

If we want to live with intention, we study media to learn how to communicate effectively, what tools are available to us to communicate our messages, and how to use collaboration and networking to achieve our goals.

In our study of media we acquire communication and interpersonal skills, critical thinking techniques, insight into cultures around the globe, understanding of technology, and a range of technical skills. We become knowledge workers whose skills are required in all sectors of society from starting a small business to managing a large corporation, from creating new artworks to changing governments.

Empire and Communications

In their ground-breaking analysis of emerging global sovereignty--Empire, 2000--Daniel Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest why media and communication studies are so significant:

"[T]he role of industrial factory labour has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labour. In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another" (vii).

As labour opportunities become increasingly related to activities involving communication, collaboration, and networking, what we need to know and the skills we need to develop will shift as well. The products of “affective labour” inform, entertain, influence, and otherwise affect behaviour. When these products and messages influence our bodies, emotions, and minds in ever deepening ways, they take on a biopolitical force: our biologies—our lives--are intimately engaged in politics, commerce, and culture in general.

A good example of biopolitics is the extent to which our national government plays a role in our personal healthcare, our most intimate site of engagement with life: telling us what is healthy for us, or not; what treatment we must take; how we must give birth to a child.

As a multi-disciplinary field of studies, Communications (and its subset Media Studies) investigates the affective labour of persuasion, promotion and propaganda in all its forms. We study the history of media and communication to gain insights into the tools of the trade: from the rhetorical strategies of orality and storytelling to the interactivity of new digital media.

Media acts like a mirror if we know how to see ourselves looking into that mirror. We study media to learn about ourselves, what we value, and what we need to do in the world. To accomplish this self-reflection, we require the best insights of anthropology, sociology, psychology, literature, art, marketing, and human resource management.

In our studies of the media and communication in general, we consider what it means to be a consumer in a material culture and a citizen in a mediated geo-political context. We attempt to balance theory with praxis—thinking about media and doing things with it.

Through media studies, we learn how to send a message with impact; what difference we want to make; where we want to see change; when to take action; and why we are motivated to act.

What do you think?

M. Soules, May 2006