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This article outlines the growth and character of media and communication studies in the UK. It sets out the history and development of the field, and explains its twin origins in both humanities and social sciences contexts. The article also presents some descriptive data about the scale and nature of teaching and research in the field in UK higher education, and explains the evolution of relevant subject associations. The public, political and professional reception of and response to the field are described, and the continuing debates about its value and salience examined.

Citizenship is an active role, requiring information to enable people to deliberate and arrive at decisions that they can then effectively voice. This article argues that the cumulative evidence of research is that mainstream media fail to provide such information and the essential analysis to buttress it. The result is information detriment, a significant element within a broader citizen detriment. This problem is only minimally addressed by the proliferation of information accessible through the widening availability of online and digital resources. Deepening inequality is translated into citizen detriment because of the growing cost of information resources. Evidence is provided of the significant advantages of the better off in an increasingly commercial and costly information environment, both as consumers of information and through lobbying, as sources of ideas and information in the political and public arena. The fundamental problem at the heart of this issue, therefore, is that of growing material inequality more than media and communication practice and policy.

This article explores the social impact of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). It argues that they are best understood, not as heralding a substantially new `information society', but as significant technologies emerging in but inherently part of late modernity. This argument is developed by examining themes from post-materialism, globalisation and information society theories. It is suggested there are two types of technology, those changing and extending existing processes and those facilitating wholly new activities, and that recent innovations in information and communication technology are rather better construed as the former. By examining empirically questions of identity, inequality, power and change the recent and future impact of ICTs is explored, and it is argued that current trends suggest increasing convergence (economic and organisational as much as technological), differentiation and deregulation.

This paper argues that the media have failed to provide for informed citizenship. Despite claims in media occupational ideologies to service the information needs of the public, the accumulated verdict of research is that the media provide an inadequate basis for citizens to fulfil their role. The popular press has become integrated into the entertainment industry, and public service broadcasting is being dismantled in form and purpose. New technologies, far from creating an `information society', are fostering a media society, in which the gaps between rich and poor are enlarging. These failings place a larger obligation on critical social research to act as witness to history, but this mission can only be fulfilled if we escape from the threats to independent inquiry both within and without academia. Research into the media must reconnect with wider questions of social inequality, power and process.