Defining the media -- Media studies -- What do the media do to us? Media and society -- What's in a name? Language and the social construction of reality -- Mediation and representation -- Texts, meanings, and audiences -- New media and technological development -- Semiology -- Reading images and advertisements -- Model essay: semiotic analysis of an advertisement -- Defining discourse and ideology -- Where are discourses and ideologies found? -- Dominant ideology and hegemony -- Culture jamming and counter-hegemony -- Genres, codes, and conventions -- The language of film: American beauty -- Narrative structure and binary oppositions -- Documentary and reality TV -- Why stories? -- Feminism, postfeminism, and ideologies of femininity -- Ideologies and discourses of masculinity -- Ethnicity, ideology, and the media -- Stars and celebrities -- Postmodernism -- Globalisation.