For this week’s reading, we were asked to read blog posts by UK academic, David Gauntlett, where he introduces the key topics of his new book Making Media Studies: The Creativity Turn in Media and Cultural Studies and the knowledge about media that is currently essential.

In his Introduction, Gauntlett explains how media studies can be discussed in terms of four categories, which are ‘institutions’, ‘production’, ‘audience’ and ‘text’. He explains how institutions remain relevant in spite of now having different companies fall under this category, with technology developers acting as media companies when in reality they mostly gather user information to present relevant information to them. Whereas ‘production’, ‘audience’ and ‘texts’ are no longer as interesting as it was historically. Gauntlett emphasises the idea that media is not something you should just learn about, but rather learn with. He provides the example ‘research through design’ which is a statement that, in relation to design, means to explore design through practicality in order to learn more about it. This can also be applied to media and communications in order to generate ideas as to how it can be used and applied in society.

I think that the most important statement that Gauntlett makes in terms of developing media studies is that ‘media and communications studies need to keep ahead to avoid becoming redundant’. In this constant changing world of ours where we are surrounded by so much technology that allows us to consume media in more ways than thought possible back then, I think that the statement highlights the issue as to how media studies has become somewhat less interesting than it used to be. Media has become more than just about what’s reflected onto a screen, but nowadays it includes just about everything that the internet has to offer. And there’s a lot. From social media to news online, it’s pretty much anything. The definition of media itself has evolved and there are things that are now considered as media but never were before. So I think to retain interest and relevance in current society, media studies need to be able to adapt to such changes.

In his other blog post, Gauntlett describes the four kinds of knowledge to be known about media studies — how things work (technical and economic knowledge); how things feel and fit (emotional and embodied knowledge); and how to make a difference (creative and political knowledge). In a brief sense, how things work means to understand the function of things and know it’s potential and limitations in terms of it uses; how things feel and fit is to have knowledge about the connections between physicality, digital content and human experiences; and how to make a difference is to have the ability to formulate creative ideas and effectively implement them in reality.