Media Praxis: Introducing Media Theory, Application and Context

Media theory is a valuable resource for media producers and with the increased pervasion of digital media technology into everyday life, it has become necessary for understanding developments in culture. Media Praxis, introduces the reader to media theory and its application to art and design, animation and filmmaking. The book interweaves diverse areas of thinking to synthesize and reconsider their relative merits for understanding media practice in context. This includes theories of semiotics and “the linguistic turn,” phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, modernism and post-modernism, deconstruction, and critical theory, as well as the new aesthetic and new media theory.

A wide range of media thinkers and theories from the 1930s to contemporary exponents are covered, including technological and media determinism, mythologies, ideology, censorship and free speech. The application of these ideas to multiple case studies and examples are intended to help readers understand how theory and practice intersect. Areas of media considered include advertising, consumerism and propaganda, as well as alternative media practices in critical contexts. There is also a historical overview of media developments from analog to digital forms of re-mediation, from pre-internet to online cultures, cyber-theories, simulacra and debates concerning realism and virtualities.

Media Praxis covers many methodologies and approaches to media theory from critical theory, close reading, contextual studies, and more recent developments in digital and new media. Whether abstract theory, its concrete application, historical contexts of production and speculative theory, the book aims to introduce the reader to a set of tools for thinking and re-thinking this rapidly developing area of social communication.