Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture, 4th Edition

by Stanley J. Baran

While encouraging students to take more active roles as media consumers, this text gives them a deeper understanding of the role that the media play in both shaping and reflecting culture. Through this cultural perspective, students learn that audience members are as much a part of the mass communication process as are the media producers, technologies, and industries. This was the first university-level text to make media literacy central to its approach. The sixth edition includes a completely reorganized Chapter 13 (Theories and Effects of Mass Communication) that reflects recent historical and theoretical analyses, coverage of new models in music recording and distribution with special attention to Radiohead's "pay what you want" experiment, extended discussion of massive multiplayer online games (MMOs), and much more.

"On the whole this is a great text that I plan to use in the foreseeable future for my Mass Media & Society course and that I would strongly recommend to anyone teaching an introductory course on mass communication." Biswarup Sen, University of Oregon

"It is an excellent undergraduate text. I like how culture is contextualized up front and then is consistently referenced throughout the text with text call-outs highlighting contemporary issues." Lisa A. Stephens, University at Buffalo

"I really appreciate that Baran includes a chapter on video games, which is a big industry, very present in students' lives, and treated too cursorily by comparable texts." Cynthia Chris, College of Staten Island

Includes Media Literacy worksheets, PowerPoint® slides, a Web tutorial, chapter self-quizzes with feedback, key terms flash cards, hot links to media resources for the student, and more.

Provides an inside look at the daily operations of a television station, a radio station, a newspaper, a public relations company, and Vibe magazine. Archived NBC News and The Today Show video clips also help bring to life the concepts discussed in the text.

Genres: Textbooks, School, Nonfiction

523 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[W. M.]

Read this one for a class but was wonderfully surprised by how good this was. Most textbooks aren't riveting. Enjoyed learning all about how communications are all around us and affect everyday life.

[Chloe Bright]

Some parts of this book were excruciatingly boring. I can't quite blame the book for that because it had to talk about the history of the inventions like the radio, television, computer, etc. but those parts were so boring, but they could've at least tried to make it a little more interesting than just info-dumping random dates and names, blah blah blah.

I read an ebook version online through my University, and I did appreciate how it highlighted only the most important sections to really focus on instead of all the other filler information that was not necessary. The quizzes that were made in correspondence to the textbook software that I had to take weekly were also awful. You had to memorize every little statistic, date, and person's name the book mentioned and they gave you like 30 of them each chapter, so that was really annoying.

Overall, it helped me know what I needed to for the course, but it wasn't enjoyable. If it hadn't been absolutely necessary to read for my course, I would have preferred to not touch it.

[Steph]

My major is print communications so this book was a mandatory rfead for our clasa. This text book was actaully interesting. I found many of the chapters very interesting.

[Sin Tien Tan]

Best academic book I've read. The heights of sarcasm just make everything so much more interesting. Entertaining yet informative at the same time.

[Britta Paye]

This book gives a bigger picture of the media sector. It's so entertaining and adventurous.

[Lilake]

I needed this for my thesis but it's kind of outdated already. Used it for basics.

[Lola He]

A tool to know the basic about Communication Studies.

[Kara Rochester Garcia]

I read the newest 2023 version. It had some political bias, but overall was one of the least boring textbooks!

[madeline]

This was my textbook for my COMM 290: Elements of Media course this semester. We skipped maybe one or two chapters but I read the bulk of it. As a textbook, it was very insightful and it read almost conversationally at times which made it easier to follow than a textbook with strictly technical speech. The chapter topics ranges from the history of TV & radio to the video game industry to the mass communication process in general, and I feel it taught me a lot. Each chapter also started with a real-world example, which helped illustrate the issues we would be discussing in a more relatable manner. This obviously wasn't my preferred genre, though, hence the four stars.

[Sonam Puri]

It's a good book for mass communications, media management,media industry students.
Since it's a foreign author book examples are to be found out by the reader.
Thus first year students ma not be able to relate.

[Uwaysulkarni]

nice

[03218839126]

want to collect definition

[Emily Colby]

Shoutout to this textbook for being my comfort and inspiration my first semester at college. Definitely not selling this one.