Our students are the last generation of people who will have lived before the internet. For the next generation, there will be no concept of ‘going online’. Being always connected will be (in the developed world) everyday life. Equally, social media is increasingly competing with – or even replacing – ‘command and control’ media. This is impacting on public life, politics, democracy and commerce. The idea of ‘the media’ as a stable object of study, along with ‘the audience’ and ‘representation’, is challenged by these changes to the ways we communicate, and what we expect of culture.

The first edition of this book was described in reviews as ‘provocative’, ‘controversial’ and helpful to Media teachers in ‘thinking through their own positions in a period of profound and rapid technological change and much theoretical uncertainty’ (Masterman, 2006: 37). That edition had a primary objective, which was to offer an update to and also a shift in approach from Masterman’s Teaching the Media (1985). Masterman’s book remains a comprehensive presentation of strategies for the Media teacher and indeed a compelling raison d’être for the subject. However it was already clear in 2006 that the Media learner twenty years on was operating within a different set of cultural and technological discourses, and equally the Media teacher has been residing in a very different educational paradigm. Five years on again, in producing a revised edition, the overwhelming feeling is that the change has accelerated, outdating a fair amount of what I wrote in the first edition. This is staggering. The first edition made a few passing references to YouTube, social networking was largely absent and Google was discussed in a case study as ‘sort of a media institution’. This second edition is accompanied by a set of online materials dominated by links to web content. In 2010, a book of this nature is an extended discourse but it must lead, as always, to the internet – where the useful ‘stuff’ lives.