Ideas for reading a mediated world.
Media &
Communication Theory
What helps us explain communication?
Compare models, trace influence and examine how media organise meaning, culture and public life. Start with a question, then put the explanations alongside one another.
Dr. Uma Shankar Pandey profusp.com
Suggested learning routes
A useful place to begin.
These are starting points.
Follow your own question.
Find your bearings
Start with traditions, meaning and a model of communication.
Follow influence
Compare interpersonal influence, persuasion and audience choice.
Question the media environment
Connect technologies with platforms and the resources behind them.
Find the chapter you need
Explore all 46 chapters.
Browse by topic.
Chapters run A–Z within each group.
01 / 8 chapters
Foundations & models
Compare ways of explaining communication, language and shared meaning.
- Foundations & models
Functional Theory of Media
Examine the roles media perform in society, alongside dysfunctions and questions about whose needs they serve.
Open chapter - Foundations & models
Gerbner’s Model
Follow an event through perception and representation, asking how each step shapes the message.
Open chapter - Foundations & models
Jakobson’s Model
Use six language functions to examine what an utterance does within a communication situation.
Open chapter - Foundations & models
Rhetorical Theory
Investigate how speakers and texts address audiences, build arguments and seek a response.
Open chapter - Foundations & models
Ritual Model of Communication
Explore how communication sustains shared worlds through participation, symbols and recurring practices.
Open chapter - Foundations & models
Semiotics
Read signs, codes and systems of meaning in words, images and everyday media.
Open chapter - Foundations & models
Seven Traditions of Communication Theory
Find your bearings across seven approaches to explaining communication and its place in human life.
Open chapter - Foundations & models
Westley–MacLean Model
Connect events, communicators, audiences and feedback in a model built around selection and mediation.
Open chapter
02 / 11 chapters
Audiences, learning & influence
Examine what audiences do with media and how influence takes shape.
- Audiences, learning & influence
Affect and Emotion in Media
Explore how feelings, bodily responses and emotional expression move through media encounters and public life.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Cultivation Theory
Investigate how sustained patterns of media exposure relate to people’s perceptions of social reality.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Diffusion of Innovations
Follow how an innovation spreads through communication, social relationships and decisions over time.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Elaboration Likelihood Model
Compare routes to persuasion and ask how motivation and ability affect the processing of messages.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Individual Differences Theory
Consider how differences in experience, needs and dispositions shape responses to the same media message.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Media Audience Theory
Compare ways of understanding audiences, from measured groups to active interpreters and participants.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Media Dependency Theory
Explore how relationships among audiences, media and society shape dependence on information resources.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Social Cognitive Theory
Connect observational learning, self-efficacy and agency with the environments in which people act.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Third-Person Effect
Examine why people may judge others as more influenced by media than themselves.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Two-Step Flow Theory
Trace how opinion leaders and interpersonal relationships help carry media influence through social networks.
Open chapter - Audiences, learning & influence
Uses and Gratifications Theory
Ask what people seek from media and how those purposes guide their choices and use.
Open chapter
03 / 6 chapters
News, opinion & representation
Follow how issues enter the news, acquire a frame and circulate in public life.
- News, opinion & representation
Agenda Setting
Examine how patterns of media attention relate to the issues people consider important.
Open chapter - News, opinion & representation
Gatekeeping Theory
Follow the choices that determine which events, voices and accounts become visible as news.
Open chapter - News, opinion & representation
News Framing
Examine how selection, emphasis and interpretation give an issue a particular shape in news.
Open chapter - News, opinion & representation
Public Opinion
Examine how opinions form, become visible and enter the conduct of collective life.
Open chapter - News, opinion & representation
Spiral of Silence
Examine how perceived opinion climates and fear of isolation can shape willingness to speak.
Open chapter - News, opinion & representation
Stereotyping in Media
Question how recurring representations simplify social groups and shape the ways people recognise them.
Open chapter
04 / 7 chapters
Media, technology & networks
Investigate how media environments, platforms and networks organise communication.
- Media, technology & networks
Actor–Network Theory
Trace the associations through which people, technologies and other entities participate in social action.
Open chapter - Media, technology & networks
Assemblage Theory
Explore how heterogeneous elements come together, hold relations and change within media arrangements.
Open chapter - Media, technology & networks
Digital Media Theory
Investigate how digital forms, participation and data reshape media practices and the questions we ask.
Open chapter - Media, technology & networks
Media Ecology Theory
Explore how media environments shape the conditions of perception, expression and social organisation.
Open chapter - Media, technology & networks
Network Society
Connect networks, flows and communication power with changes in social and economic organisation.
Open chapter - Media, technology & networks
Platform Society
Examine how platforms organise visibility, participation and the institutions of everyday life.
Open chapter - Media, technology & networks
Technological Determinism
Assess claims that technologies drive social change and examine the choices those claims can obscure.
Open chapter
05 / 7 chapters
Power, institutions & public life
Connect media ownership, institutions and communication with wider social arrangements.
- Power, institutions & public life
Bourdieu’s Field Theory
Connect field, habitus and capital to examine positions and struggles within media and cultural life.
Open chapter - Power, institutions & public life
Media Sociology
Connect media work and communication with institutions, professional routines and the organisation of society.
Open chapter - Power, institutions & public life
Media Systems
Compare how media institutions relate to political structures, professional practices and wider social conditions.
Open chapter - Power, institutions & public life
NWICO
Examine debates about unequal information flows and the New World Information and Communication Order.
Open chapter - Power, institutions & public life
Political Economy of Media
Follow ownership, labour and revenue to examine how resources and power shape media production.
Open chapter - Power, institutions & public life
Propaganda Model
Examine how structural pressures and institutional filters shape patterns of news production.
Open chapter - Power, institutions & public life
Public Sphere
Investigate the spaces and conditions through which people debate matters of shared concern.
Open chapter
06 / 7 chapters
Critical & cultural perspectives
Read culture, identity and everyday interaction through contrasting theoretical traditions.
- Critical & cultural perspectives
Birmingham School
Explore cultural studies, audience interpretation and the relationship between representation, identity and power.
Open chapter - Critical & cultural perspectives
Chicago School
Connect communication with city life, social interaction, public inquiry and the making of communities.
Open chapter - Critical & cultural perspectives
Feminist Theory
Investigate how gender, representation and power shape media institutions, texts and everyday experience.
Open chapter - Critical & cultural perspectives
Frankfurt School
Examine critical accounts of the culture industry, mass communication and the organisation of modern life.
Open chapter - Critical & cultural perspectives
Postmodernism
Examine debates about representation, knowledge and cultural life in a world of circulating images.
Open chapter - Critical & cultural perspectives
Structuralism
Look beyond individual signs to the relationships and underlying systems that organise meaning.
Open chapter - Critical & cultural perspectives
Symbolic Interactionism
Follow how people interpret symbols, define situations and build meanings through interaction.
Open chapter
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