A text is a unit of meaning for interpretation and understanding. As such, most things are (or could be treated as) texts. Within media studies, a text could be a TV program, film, video game, website, book, song, podcast, newspaper article, tweet, or app. Texts matter because they are bearers of communication and movers of meaning. Texts can inspire and delight, or disgust and disappoint, but more importantly they intervene in the world and into culture, introducing new ideas, or variously attacking or reinforcing old ones. Textual analysis has long been a primary mode of “doing” media studies, as scholars seek to ascertain what a text means, _how_ it means (what techniques are used to convey meaning), and what its themes, messages, and explicit and implicit assumptions aim to accomplish. All of this is simple and reasonably unobjectionable. Where texts and textual analysis become tricky is in their connections to the outside world. While they are _treated as_ a discrete unit of meaning, texts are never truly discrete, because meaning is always contextual, relative, and situated in a particular place and time. The challenge of working with media texts lies in tracking how context works, and hence in how they...

_Keywords for Media Studies_ introduces and aims to advance the field of critical media studies by tracing, defining, and problematizing its established and emergent terminology. The book historicizes thinking about media and society, whether that means noting a long history of “new media,” or tracing how understandings of media “power” vary across time periods and knowledge formations. The print publication includes sixty-five essays from an impressive group of established scholars from television studies, film studies, sound studies, games studies, and more. Each of the essays in the volume focuses on a critical concept, from “[**fan**](/media-studies/essay/fan/)” to “[**industry**](/media-studies/essay/industry/),” and “[**celebrity**](/media-studies/essay/celebrity/)” to “[**surveillance**](/media-studies/essay/surveillance/).” This site includes the volume’s **“[Introduction](/media-studies/introduction/),”** 7 web essays from the volume, the list of **[works cited](/media-studies/works_cited/)** for all the essays, information about the [**contributors**](/media-studies/contributors/), a **[note on classroom](/media-studies/note-on-classroom-use/)** use. Any page in the site can be printed or saved as a PDF, and a single click provides a citation to that page that can be pasted into a bibliography. ### **EXPLORE THE SITE** Readers may browse the full list of essays by clicking **Essays** at the upper left **to bring up a menu**. Clicking **Search** at upper right allows you to discover both the print and web essays:...

_Keywords for Media Studies_ introduces and advances the field of critical media studies by tracing, defining, and problematizing its established and emergent terminology. Like the authors of other books in the New York University Press Keywords series, we take our bearings from the Welsh scholar Raymond Williams. In _Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society_ (1976/1983), Williams presented a “shared body of words and meanings” for understanding “general discussions of... the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society” (15). Less a dictionary or an encyclopedia than a holistic conceptual map organized around words, his book charted the history and usage of “key” words as a means of “recording, investigating and presenting” problems of culture and society to which they were bound (15). Williams did not set out to define a definitive canon of important terms, or to fix their significance for all time. Rather, he charted the dynamic relationship between language, knowledge, and subjects. By tracing the origins and meaning of words across changing social, economic, and political contexts, he opened up space to interrogate and disrupt commonsense assumptions about culture and society in the present. _Keywords for Media Studies_ adapts this approach to the vocabulary of...