Media Studies examines the new and rapidly developing field of media studies to discover what insights it has to offer students and general readers as they negotiate their way through the new - and thoroughly saturated - media environment.

• Explores how recent changes in our media affect the way we watch older media like television, movies, and radio, and offer up rich new interactive media, like video games and the internet
• The perfect introduction to the field of media studies
• Chronicles the recent dramatic changes in communication technologies, arguing that most of life itself is now experienced as 'mediated'
• Discusses the development of cable and satellite television, VCRs, DVDs, the internet and personal computers
• Emphasizes the broader political, social, and economic context within which these important new technologies have developed

Andrea L. Press is Chair of Media Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Women Watching Television and the co-author (with Elizabeth Cole) of Speaking of Abortion, and has published widely in the area of media reception and feminist theory.

Bruce A. Williams is a Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, and the author of After the News: Media Regimes and the New Information Environment (with Michael X. Delli Carpini) and Democracy, Dialogue, and Environmental Disputes: The Contested Languages of Social Regulation (with Albert Matheny). His current research interests focus on the role of a changing media environment in shaping citizenship in the United States.