Thinking About Media in Cultural Studies

This paper reviews the ways in which media technologies have been addressed in the field of cultural studies. Cultural studies has considered media technologies to be crucial to understanding popular culture and its scholars have thoroughly examined their cultural production, audience reception, textual representation, and social relations. However it has given little direct attention to ‘media as media’ or human-technology interplay. By criticizing the media ecology tradition as technological determinism, they have failed to have a productive interdisciplinary dialogue about media theory. This paper discusses what insights the media ecology perspective can provide for thinking about media technologies in cultural studies.