Media Environments

Media Environments uses mainstream films as a way into serious critical reading about contemporary media and society. Each film is paired with essays and excerpts by well-known writers, including Stephen Hawking, Al Gore, Naomi Klein, Carl Sagan, Naomi Wolf, Susan Jacoby, Neil Postman, Henry Jenkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ray Kurzweil, and others. Titles such as The Social Network, Contact, Network, American Beauty, Fight Club, The Truman Show, Slumdog Millionaire, Waking Life, WALL*E, and Good Night, and Good Luck introduce the readings, which are meant to be studied seriously rather than enjoyed as light viewing.

The book aims to build creative and critical thinking grounded in a wide cultural literacy that spans media and society, theory and technology, and the arts and sciences. Its central idea is to map the environments of media, which it divides into mental, material, and cultural dimensions. Instead of treating media as a set of separate industries or devices, it considers media as a whole and offers ways to examine themes that recur across media and global culture.

The anthology opens with four foundational models: the Meme, the Network, the Spectacle, and the Hyperreal. Each later chapter applies these models to a particular theme and includes its own set of readings and a film. Written for Mass Media and Society courses, it is intended as a course text for students of the twenty-first century.