An examination of the media and how it operates in Australia. The history of human communication is outlined and an exploration of contemporary media ownership and media criticism is presented. The author, a communications lecturer at Charles Sturt University, has worked for various media organisations including the ABC, SBS TV,'The Australian' and 60 Minutes.

This book provides a timely political insight to show how mythology plays an affective role in our lives. Brexit, bankers, institutional scandals, the far right, and Russell Brand’s “revolution” are just some of the issues tackled through this innovative and interdisciplinary discourse analysis. Through multimedia case studies, Kelsey explores the psychological dimensions of archetypes and mythologies and how they function ideologically in contemporary politics. By synergising approaches to critical discourse studies with the work of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and other mythologists, Kelsey’s psychodiscursive approach explores the depths of the human psyche to analyse the affective qualities of storytelling. Kelsey makes a compelling case for our need to understand more about the power of mythology in modern society. Whilst mythology might be part of who we are, societies are responsible for its ideological substance and implications. Media and Affective Mythologies shows how we can begin to engage with this principle.

Media narratives are the “reflection” of current beliefs and ideas. The case studies in this volume represent an exceptional field of research on dominant mythologies; examples from several countries reveal that media narratives express a dominant consumer storytelling.

A collection of essays on where computer and communications technology is taking us. He explores the underlying social and political implications of the Internet and its associated technologies, based on his contention that the cyberspace experience is far more complex than it is commonly assumed.

A collection of essays on television which focuses on the previewers, the TV magazines, quiz shows, commercial breaks, Top of the Pops, One Man and His Dog, personalities, politicians and continuity announcers.

This anthology examines a number of issues related to violence within the media landscape. Violence has been a topic of continued concern within American culture and society. Although there have been numerous sociological and historical studies of violence and its origins, there is relatively little systematic analysis of violence within media representation, even as this issue becomes preeminent within public discourse. This anthology examines a number of issues related to violence within the media landscape, using various methodologies to suggest the implications of the increasing obsession with violence for postmodern civilization.

This is Barthes’ seminal text reimagined in a contemporary context by contemporary academics. Through a revisiting of Mythologies, a key text in cultural and media studies, this volume explores the value these disciplines can add to an understanding of contemporary society and culture. Leading academics in media, English, education, and cultural studies here are tasked with identifying the "new mythologies" some fifty or so years on from Barthes’ original interventions. The contributions in this volume, then, are readings of contemporary culture, each engaging with a cultural event, practice, or text as mythological. These readings are then contextualized by an introduction which reflects on the ‘how’ of these engaging responses and an "essay at the back of the book" which replaces Myth Today with a reflection on the contemporary provenance of both Barthes and his most famous book. Thus the book is at least two things at once whichever way you look: a ‘new’ Mythologies and a book about Barthes’ legacy, an exploration of the place of theory in critical writing, and a book about contemporary culture.

In a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of "pure sound." Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of "pure sound" was always an expression of western ethnocentrism. Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie's dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse's experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez's endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would "absorb" the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work—both published and unpublished—that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. In Part I, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable, and that nature itself might be considered queer. In Part II, See proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities. With essays by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat.