Ebook: Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides)

Communication, Cultural and Media Studies does not address me. I wondered not finding the key concept as its subtitle says. After reading I understood it as a philosophical dictionary. It contains a lot of links to other philosophical articles and books. It can be taken as a library of links. If you want to understand what an image is, first you should concern with Annette Kuhns feminist article "The Power of the Image" and then John Hartley teaches you Platos arguments. At the end, an image is understood as "the objectification of self-knowledge for communicative purposes". In my opinion an image is an image - a non text object fixed on a material like paper or in a file and not the imagination. The most popular example of an image is a photograph. And everybody knows, photos play an important role in communication processes. Even amateur photos. In seconds they go round the world and tell us stories....

In some items I do not agree with the author:
1. Effects are described as results of manipulated reception. I'm coming now from a conference about "Digital Content Creation" - a failed description, too. 2007 the producers and the audience understand effects as special effects. By technical means, hard- and software images are produced which can not be photographed but have the look of a photograph.

2. Describing MP3 John Hartley seems not to use a MP3 player. He forgot that there are also other compression codecs, but MP3 is the best with respect to the relation of quality to file size. It was a great discovery of the German "Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen" and not the discovery of Hacker, publishing "MP3: The Definitive Guide" in 2000.

3. Even the item on violence I would renew completely. If a human is killed - this is violence - and not a point of view depending on culture. Celebrating the new Bond film "Casino Royal" we have seen nearly 100 shots including violence. But we like it. Maybe we do not like it, but it gives excitement to the story. We relate to the hero and wish that he solves his problems directly. We give him the licence to kill. And then we wonder that our kids like to play games murdering virtual humans every minute. Confused sometimes about games and life. Becoming addictive for such games.

I missed in the index: movies, film, cinema, video, Jewry, Islam, Photography, Painting, News, MPEG2, MPEG4, ICQ, Server, Composition, Layout, Screenplay, Drama, Soup, Documentary, HD, Windows, Macintosh, 11-9-2001, Production, Direction, search engine, Wikipedia.