About the Author

Daniel Chandler teaches media and communication studies in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University, where he established a degree in the subject in 2001, having run a major website on the same topic since 1995. He is the author of Semiotics: The Basics (Routledge, 2nd edition 2007) and a consultant in marketing semiotics with a particular interest in the visual semiotics of gender. Rod Munday has worked in
television post-production since the 1980s, including jobs at advertising agencies and Greenpeace. In 2002 he became interested in studying the media and is currently working on a PhD examining communication practices
in virtual worlds. He teaches on media production courses as well as lecturing on new media topics at Aberystwyth University.

Reviews

"Chandler and Munday have produced a wonderful volume that is much more than a simple dictionary. The book concisely summarizes over 2,000 terms and concepts from multiple subfields of media and communication and related disciplines. It also provides extensive cross-references, which encourage readers to understand relationships among concepts and to make connections across different discourses. As result, the volume offers a fine introduction to the field to students and other newcomers while also enabling specialists in each subfield of communication to better understand and communicate with each other." - Joshua Meyrowitz, author of No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford University Press)"As one reads through the entries one becomes more and more aware of the need for a dictionary of this kind. Media Studies is a notoriously diffuse and ill-defined subject area but the ingenuity and scholarship of the compilers has ensured that its principal concepts and ideas are now available in a coherent and comprehensible form. But perhaps the greatest value of the work lies in its assiduous cross-referencing. As the authors point out, students who have previously been forced to rely upon the web for conceptual definitions in this area are often denied knowledge of the context from which the terms emerged. This dictionary not only remedies that defect but also provides a rich array of web sources which can be used by those who wish to pursue more detailed study of concepts, theories, and theorists. It is a fine achievement which left me with only one question. How on earth have I managed for so long without having such a volume close at hand?" - Professor Laurie Taylor, BBC Radio