Book Description

In this book we ask students to do three things: (l)To keep a media journal in which they reflect on the uses they make of the voices and images of popular culture; (2) to read and respond to the work of other media critics, to test their own views and experiences against those of the writers included in these pages, and (3) to try their hands at writing media criticism themselves. All three kinds of work ask students to find and write about texts from the media culture around them, to think critically about what they see and hear on their television sets and radios, in magazines and newspapers, on city streets and shopping malls, at the movies, and at concerts and clubs. To put it another way, we believe that a book such as this can provide only some of the materials for a course on writing about popular culture, that the remaining materials must always come from the media themselves and the experiences students have with them. Our aim is not to inculcate students with a certain set of critical methods or terms or to introduce them to the academic study of popular culture, but to offer them opportunities to rethink and write about their own experiences with the media, to come to their own understandings of our common culture.