After the Media: Culture and Identity in the 21st Century

This provocative text considers the state of media and cultural studies today, after the demolition of the traditional media paradigm and engages with the new, active consumer culture.Using the central media concepts of representation, power, genre, identity, politics, history, narrative, audience and technology, the authors discuss media 2.0 and how the big theories of the twentieth and early twenty-first century need to change in the light of modern technology and audience interactivity.This book discusses the previously imagined passive consumption of ideologies as presented by the elite media professionals and addresses how this has changed. After the Media debates how meaning is negotiated between producer and consumer, how technology has crumbled the producer/consumer barrier, and asks how applicable critical theory is to today's study of the media.