Page 18 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

introduCtion

Few institutions are as powerful or as thoroughly suffused into every aspect of
our daily lives as are the media. From computers to television, film to music,
cell phones to newspapers, most of us spend much of our waking hours using,
consuming, or creating media. From entertainment fare to nonfiction program-
ming and from videogames to theme parks, media corporations are highly con-
glomerated, profit-seeking entities, and also the couriers, purveyors, creators,
and editors of the messages, texts, and images that comprise the information
age. It is, therefore, no surprise that the media have become a hub of contro-
versy and a battleground for issues as disparate as election campaigns and the
critical satire of Comedy Central, to depictions of race, gender, and sexuality.
With its power to regulate such a powerful industry, government has become
a battleground site as independent media producers and public interest groups
struggle over the policies that shape the landscape of media—from current pub-
lic access television to the future of the Internet. Many of these controversies
extend well into cultural and social realms because they focus debate around the
values expressed in media messages and the effects they have on children, teens,
our knowledge of the world, members of other religions or groups, and even
of our own bodies and social identities. As entries on the Digital Divide and
Representations of Class illustrate, media issues also provide a lens into social
and economic inequities. The ways in which we define ourselves and our com-
munities are reflected and shaped by such formats as the so-called reality shows
and by citizens themselves as they create media content and find their voices as
bloggers on the Internet.
In this ever evolving geography of symbolic techniques, media and marketing
strategies, new and traditional genres, and new media technology, the task of

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