Media studies

Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass communication, communication, communication sciences, and communication studies. Researchers may also develop and employ theories and methods from disciplines including cultural studies, rhetoric (including digital rhetoric), philosophy, literary theory, psychology, political science, political economy, economics, sociology, anthropology, social theory, art history and criticism, film theory, feminist theory, and information theory.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan has suggested that "the medium is the message", and that all human artefacts and technologies are media. A medium is anything that mediates our interaction with the world or other humans. Given this perspective, media study is not restricted to just media of communications but all forms of technology. Media and their users form an ecosystem and the study of this ecosystem is known as media ecology.

Multimedia Studies

Multimedia Studies is an interdisciplinary field of academic discourse focused on the understanding of technologies and cultural dimensions of linking traditional media sources with ones based on new media to support social systems.

History

Multimedia Studies as a discipline came out of the need for media studies to be made relevant to the new world of CD-ROMs and hypertext in the 1990s. Revolutionary books like Jakob Nielsen's 'Hypertext and Hypermedia' book lay the foundations for understanding multimedia alongside traditional cognitive science and interface design issues. Software like Authorware Attain, now owned by Adobe, made the design of multimedia systems accessible to those unskilled in programming and became major applications by the end of the 1990s

Recent Challenges

The Internet age that has been growing since the launch of Windows 98 has brought new challenges for the discipline including developing new models and rules for the World Wide Web. Areas such as usability have had to develop specific guidelines for Website design and traditional concepts like genre, narrative theory, and stereotypes have had to be updated to take account of Cyberculture. Cultural aspects of Multimedia Studies have been conceptualised by authors such as Lev Manovich,Arturo Escobar and Fred Forest.