Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture, and Technology

Figures: Updated with the latest data, vibrant visuals integrated throughout capture key trends and statistics in an accessible and graphically appealing style common to the new media.

Media Literacy: Included within each media chapter, Media Literacy sections focus on key issues regarding the impact of media on culture and society, encouraging students to think critically and analyze issues related to their own consumption of media. This edition emphasizes privacy issues and changes in media ownership patterns that affect consumers.

Featured Boxes: Four types of boxes appear in the text, each designed to target specific issues and pique students' interest: Media and Culture highlights cultural issues in the media; Technology Demystified clearly explains technological information; Your Media Career guides readers to "hot spots" in media industries; and World View encourages a more global perspective.

Hands-On Application: Helping students maximize their study time and course success, Stop & Review questions in each chapter enable students to assess their understanding of key material as they progress through the text, while Summary & Review sections conclude each chapter with questions and brief narrative answers.

MindTap® for Communication Arts: With its highly personalized, online digital learning platform, MindTap® provides students with an immersive learning experience that builds critical thinking skills. Through a carefully designed chapter-based learning path, MindTap® enables students to easily identify the chapter's learning objectives, read the chapter, test their content knowledge, and reflect on what they've learned. The course is as flexible as you want it to be: you can add your own activities, PowerPoint slides, videos, and Google docs -- or simply select from the available content and rearrange the parts to suit the needs of your course. Analytics and reports provide a snapshot of class progress, time in course, engagement, and completion rates.

Thoroughly updated to reflect the latest developments, trends, and issues from the field, MEDIA NOW: UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, CULTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY, 10th Edition, begins its cutting-edge coverage with "Media and the Information Age". Chapter 1, The Changing Media, examines how smartphone and tablet apps expand conventional typologies of communication. It also charts the end game in the conversion of conventional media to digital forms. Chapter 2, Media and Society, considers the new business models that are emerging in social media and tracks recent trends in the adoption of media forms old and new.

Chapter 3 traces the evolution of technology, content, audiences, and multiple delivery methods (print, audio, and digital) for books, along with the effects of those changes on the industry and consumers.

Highlighting the positive impact of journalism on the growth of democracy, Chapter 4, Print to Digital Newspapers, analyzes the industry as it evolves with the digital landscape toward immersive journalism and experiments with changes in its business model.

A full chapter is now devoted to Magazines and examines the good influence of (muckraking) content on society, the expansion of genres, and the shifts that technology, audiences, and owners have caused in the industry.

Chapter 6, Recorded Music, tracks how the music industry copes with declining sales by exploring new outlets for music on the Internet, such as streaming music services. In the Radio chapter, students examine the Internet "cloud music" trend, evolving Internet radio, and their impact on conventional broadcasting.

Chapter 8, Film and Video, analyzes how the industry prospers through premium ticket sales in 3-D and IMAX venues and tries to take advantage of streaming services like Netflix -- all while changing global distribution to fight piracy and maximize growing international revenues.

Chapter 9 explores how the basic nature of television and its conventional business models are evolving in response to the challenge of streaming media with new business models even as a new golden age of television drama fills the home screen.

The Internet chapter scrutinizes trends that are leading to a decline in Internet use in American homes as social media apps challenge the conventional PC-oriented model.

Chapter 11, The Third Screen: Smartphones and Tablets, monitors the latest trends in mobile apps and the evolution of smartphones into an entertainment and advertising medium, while Chapter 12, Video Games, profiles a rapidly changing industry and anticipates the impact of virtual reality and augmented reality.

The Public Relations chapter gives students an up-close of view of how social media present new opportunities, tools, and ways to communicate to various publics across the country and to other cultures throughout the world, while the chapter on Advertising thoroughly examines mobile advertising trends and the growing threats to consumer privacy.

Offering expanded coverage of new media, Chapter 15, Media Uses and Impacts, takes a closer look at the relationship between media consumption and well-being. Chapter 16, Media Policy and Law, considers the implications of new FCC rulings on network neutrality and universal access.

Equipping students for real-world practice, an entire chapter is devoted to Media Ethics. Chapter 17 expounds on professional responsibility to society, the processes of ethical decision-making, and the importance of ethical behavior that has magnified with the new challenges brought about by social media.

Incorporating the latest trends and issues, Chapter 18, Global Communications Media, investigates the impact of social media and smartphones on a wide variety of global media use and accelerating global film, television, and music flows.