Recommended Reading
We consume media everyday of our lives - it has become such a part of society that we have come to take it for granted. Adorno and Horkheimer from the Frankfurt School (the centre of contemporary Marxism) were heavily sceptical when they arrived on the shores of America (as German emigres fleeing the Nazis) and saw how mass communication was manipulating the people. The Frankfurt School are often consider the founders of modern cultural studies, which includes under its umbrella term subjects like communication studies, media studies and film studies.
During the 1960s as sub-cultures of society began to rise up and seek identification and equality in a world dominated by white, middle class, heterosexual men some individuals from these societies began to develop their own form of history. They wrote about the present - today's culture - in order to offer alternative voices to the hegemonic history they had always learnt. Thus, cultural studies which dealt with issues of Gender, Sexuality and Ethnicity particularily, in the first instance, was born. This academic field did not spring from the abyss however; it took inspiration from a number of existing scholarly fields of thought - philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, economics, history and literature studies to name but a few.
Of course as Film and Media studies branched off to become significant fields in their own rights there became a divide between the vocational knowledge of the practiontioners developing scientific and information technology skills alongside management, team work and other life skills; and the academic knowledge of the scholars, who continued to take a more cultural analysis approach to their work. When Film and Media Studies first became available as A Level subjects they combine both of these skill sets. Students who leave college with A Levels in Film and/or Media or graduate from University with a degree in either of these respected fields are often shunned socially for having taken a 'soft option' (to use the tag of the popular press) despite having developed a knowledge of a number of different academic and practical fields.
Such students have learnt to develop stories through screenwriting; the use complex animation or editing software; to run a TV or sound studio set up; to work in a team; to manage others and to look after budgets and the legal requirements of permission for filming; to use graphic software and yet have also developed an understanding of contemporary cultural thinkers; philosophers from Aristotle to Kant; politics such as Marxism and the rise of 20th Century Fascism; the history and cultural of a number of different countries across the world; the economic structure of the film industry and how this affects the types of films produced; marketing; and have developed the ability to analyse the very texts which often are taken for granted by the rest of society. It is these students who will question what they read on the internet, search out alternative views and develop their own independent thinking, it is these students who will challenge society and begin to create their own.
Is society really so scared of such free-thinking, well-cultured and intellectual beings? It seems nonsense to think so. Perhaps a second look should be taken toward how people think about Film and Media Studies. They are not the "watching films" and "reading magazines" subjects that people take them to be.
