Media Studies: Perspectives and Challenges

The academic field of "media studies" is one of the modern interdisciplinary-orientated fields of social scientific research and university lecturing. It is a settled and well-developed discipline, although its stability is continuously attacked by a variety of trends, with the rapidly changing subject of its interest as one of the most important examples. The main traditions of studying the media are cognitive-empirical tradition, critical-speculative one and "cultural" tradition. Apart from that, a strong tradition of historical study of media can be traced back. The last decade and the turn of the century have opened a new topic of media studies – the ICT. With dissemination of "new" technologies and their integration into social communication, new questions have been raised: how do the ITC-based media influence the scope and shape of public communication? What are the political, commercial and cultural consequences of implementing these communications? What kinds of changes are caused by ICT regarding users’ habits? Last but not least, how to incorporate ITC development into a more traditional narrative of media development? The article aims to explain the cotemporary status of media studies with some comments on the "Czech" and "Slovak" media studies tradition and, transforming some of these questions into a possible programme for future development of the whole field.