This text encourages students to be active 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, and remains the only, university-level text to make media literacy central to its approach, and given recent national and global turmoil, its emphasis on media use and democracy could not be more timely.

Building on this tested emphasis, the sixth edition features a complete updating of industry statistics throughout, numerous new examples from the ongoing Iraq war, the Presidential election, and the emergence of wildly popular Internet applications such as massive multiplayer online worlds like Second Life and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.