Media Studies
It is amazing to see the transformation in the area of media studies in the last couple of decades. The study of media, after all, used to be a pretty fringe fields. Sure, there was some study of classical music and high art cinema, to say nothing of literature, but popular culture was always considered a lesser area of study. Studying the media was something that was either viewed as avant-garde or useless – sometimes both.
If you want proof that our society is an information society, you need look no further than in the area of media studies. Nowadays, this is one of the fastest growing sectors. Everything from advertising to pop culture, music production to film studies is exploding. While the manufacturing industry continues to decline, media production just gets bigger and bigger. Decades after we are no longer making anything in this country, we will still make the best movies in the world.Nowadays, you almost have an embarrassment of riches in media studies courses. There is history of media, media economics, art criticism, and of course psychological and anthropological studies. There really is too much to read in the field of media studies, so you need to narrow it down a little bit. The important thing isn’t really which books you want to read – you can read anything on your own – but what area you want to get into. If you want to be a producer or promoter, you might want to study popular culture or advertising. If you want to be an engineer, you could study production. And then if you want to make media yourself, you can go to film school or enroll in a creative writing program.
Then again, some people get into media study simply as a matter of cultural fluency. Just as back in the day we used to have to read all of the great classics to feel like fully informed members of society, nowadays we have to read the correct blogs and understand the history of electronic media. Things have changed massively, but in some ways they haven’t changed at all. It is ultimately still a matter of understanding the cultural phenomena that make our world what it is today. That has always been, and will always be the most important part of studying art and media in my opinion. The rest of media studies is interesting – sometimes fascinating – but optional.