Component 4. Section B. Contemporary Media Issues

Students have to choose to study in depth one of the topics below:


Contemporary media regulation:

• What is the nature of contemporary media regulation compared with previous practices?

• What are the arguments for and against specific forms of contemporary media regulation?

• How effective are regulatory practices?

• What are the wider social issues relating to media regulation?


Global media:

• What kinds of media are increasingly global in terms of production and distribution?

• How have global media developed, in historical terms, and how inclusive is this trend in reality?

• What kinds of audience behaviour and consumption are increasingly global?

• What are the arguments for and against global media, in relation to content, access, representation and identity?


Media and collective identity:

• How do the contemporary media represent nations, regions and ethnic/social/collective groups of people in different ways?

• How does contemporary representation compare to previous time periods?

• What are the social implications of different media representations of groups of people?

• To what extent is human identity increasingly ‘mediated’?


Media in the online age:

• How have online media developed?

• What has been the impact of the internet on media production?

• How far has the worldwide web had a democratising effect for audiences?

• To what extent has convergence transformed the media?


Post-modern media:

• What are the different versions of post-modernism (historical period, style, theoretical approach)?

• What are the arguments for and against understanding some forms of media as post-modern?

• How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation?

• In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world?

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