Today's students have a world of knowledge at their fingertips, and no longer need textbooks filled with names and dates crammed into a single volume. The Mediated World takes as its starting point the understanding that readers want a compelling story, a good read, an intelligent analysis, and a new way of looking at the media revolutions around us. It is designed as a life line to help students understand and interpret the sea of media washing over us all. In this text, David Mindich writes for students who want to understand how we communicate to one another, how we process our world, and how the media shapes us. His engaging and narrative style focuses on concepts and real-world contexts--he avoids a dry recitation of facts--that helps students understand their own personal relationship with media and gives them the tools to push back against the media forces. One of the primary goals of The Mediated World is to empower readers by giving them a thorough understanding of the media; and by teaching them how to counter the force of the media and at the same time use this force for their own ends. Readers of this book come to recognize that they have the potential to be not only active consumers of media but producers of it on a scale never seen before.