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Text - any and all media products (tv shows, radio programmes, newspapers & magazines, websites, music & music videos, films, adverts, etc). We use this term 'text' because, first, in the ways in which we approach the study of these media products they are all the same &, second, because the critical analysis we practice is called 'reading'. Now some media products are 'texts' that we read [such as a news article] but we can also 'read' a TV show, a comic strip or graphic novel, the web, video & audio products, and so forth. We 'read' all of these thngs with the same 'tool-kit' of concepts and theories; just as we would a literary text. So we read texts in media studies just as students of literature do but our texts may be or may contain photography, video, audio, hypertext, etc.
Textual - we treat all of the media as though it were text. That which is textual is that which can be read.
Textuality - the textual condition. It is the textuality of all these different media products that allows us to get to grips with them through the concepts and theories we are going to learn and work with.
Media - any and all means of facilitating, allowing or communicating discourse (Discourse is a difficult term but for the moment think of it as language and power combined). [such as news papers].
Media are all pervasive in our world and have become more and more present and accessible especially with the development of the Internet over the past 50 or so year and the web over the last 20 (it was 'born' at CERN in 1990).
Mediation - The media have a strange double effect in and on society in that they simultaneously separate us from that which is mediated (that which we see on the screen, hear from the audio player, 'read' in the 'text') and 'reconcile' us with it (i.e. allow us to understand and explore our world but also to try and constrain that understanding and exploration). This separating and uniting effect is one of the major problem of media studies especially when we come to consider the Audience.
"the medium is the message" - This famous saying by Marshal McLuhan means that “the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology”. McLuhan was trying to get us to think about the ways in which the media in our society shape and form our society and culture. McLuhan most crucial point is that changes in media in a society change the modes of mediation in that society and thus the ways people understand the world, interact with each other and the values they hold.