INTRODUCTION

The Media Studies Site is aimed at bringing together wide-ranging materials and studies dealing with contemporary and historical media, communication and cultural issues. Media culture is treated here in relation to political communication and democracy as well as the shaping of the media and political consciousness with regard to the public relations industries uses. The various approaches to the media, including the Internet, allow to extend and modify the scope of sociological, cultural and political research and provide theoretically developed contributions to the field of communication studies.

The Site is also aimed at understanding the media coverage processes. A major task of the Site is to provide material for the continuing discussion of how access to the media is conditioned by the use of media relations and how the media themselves respond to the highly competitive global communication and information environment. 

The Site is supposed to respond to the needs of navigating the sea of symbolically orchestrated messages flooding into everyone's  life daily through TV, movies, radio, music, video games, newspaper, magazines as well as interpersonal communication networks. With this in mind, media ecology and media literacy issues form part of The Media Studies Site agenda. 

The Site responds to the need to apply the power of information and communication technologies to worldwide educational goals. The information age conflicts - as they manifest themselves in media wars and information warfare issues in particular - are relevant to the Media Studies Site too. 

The Site is aimed at bringing together media studies experts and educators as well as media professionals. An important new guideline of the Site development is the new economy issues including all problems characterizing its dynamics. The interrelationships characterizing the global and Russian media context are of particular importance here.