Mass Communication: Living in a Media World

Mass Communication delivers an engaging and compact introduction to the field of mass comm without the glitz that does little to improve students’ ability to be smarter consumers of media or think critically about the media’s role in today’s society. Ralph E. Hanson combines solid content, incisive analysis, fun and conversational writing in a highly readable and informative text that will save your students as much as $50.

Employing an effective media literacy perspective, Hanson shows students that media are not something to be feared or demonized, but rather are an essential part of our lives that should be thoughtfully consumed. Updated to reflect changes in the media landscape, Mass Communication offers expanded discussion of:

the role of social media in breaking domestic and international news stories;
video games as a form of interactive media;
the newspaper industry’s continuing financial woes;
further consolidation of the media industry with the NBC/Comcast merger and the News Corporation’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal;
public relations as a way of creating, developing, and nurturing relationships between an organization and its key publics; and
integrated marketing communication in the advertising chapter.

UNIQUE FEATURES HELP REINFORCE THE BOOK’S APPROACH:
Chapter-opening vignettes feature media professionals from Jon Stewart and Annie Leibovitz to Steve Jobs and Twitter founders Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone.
Timelines place important media events in a broader historical context.
Test Your Media Literacy boxes showcase current research, interviews, or noteworthy events with questions that model critical thinking, helping to cultivate critical media consumption.
A marginal glossary helps reinforce learning of key concepts as students read.

THE SEVEN TRUTHS “THEY” DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE MEDIA:
1. The media are essential components of our lives.
2. There are no mainstream media (MSM).
3. Everything from the margin moves to the center.
4. Nothing’s new—everything that happened in the past will happen again.
5. New media are always scary.
6. Activism and analysis are not the same thing.
7. There is no “they.”