Dictionary of Media and Communications

Аннотация

As McLuhan anticipated, the media and mass communications devices are at the center of our world, shaping lifestyle and worldview. relatively young by academic standards, media and communication studies started growing in the late 1950s, after McLuhan’s influential writings started receiving international attention. The field has since produced a vast repertory of notions, ideas, techniques, theories, and methods of analysis. Many of these were originally borrowed and adapted from cognate disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology; but many others have been self-generated, and are thus new, interesting, and often controversial. Newcomers to this area may thus experience unease or consternation with the vast repertory of terms that populate the field. This dictionary is an attempt to provide a comprehensible map through that field.