This text encourages students to take more active roles as media consumers and gives them a deeper understanding of the role that the media play in both shaping and reflecting culture. Through this cultural perspective, students learn that audience members are as much a part of the mass communication process as are the media producers, technologies, and industries. This was the first university-level text to make media literacy central to its approach; building on this tested emphasis, the new edition features a new chapter on the convergence of videogames with other media technologies, up-to-date coverage of media's role in the War in Iraq, and coverage of new technologies such as WiFi, VoIP, and blogs.