Long description:

In this expansive historical synthesis, Richard Butsch integrates social, economic, and political history to offer a comprehensive and cohesive examination of screen media and screen culture globally - from film and television to computers and smart phones - as they have evolved through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Drawing on an enormous trove of research on the USA, Britain, France, Egypt, West Africa, India, China, and other nations, Butsch tells the stories of how media have developed in these nations and what global forces linked them. He assesses the global ebb and flow of media hegemony and the cultural differences in audiences' use of media. Comparisons across time and space reveal two linked developments: the rise and fall of American cultural hegemony, and the consistency among audiences from different countries in the way they incorporate screen entertainments into their own cultures.

Screen Culture offers a masterful, integrated global history that invites media scholars to see this landscape in a new light. Deeply engaging, the book is also suitable for students and interested general readers.

"Screen culture is culture - lived culture yet industrialized, ubiquitous yet iniquitous, pleasurable yet problematic for audiences around the world. Few scholars have the ambition to encompass both a historical and a global/local perspective, but Richard Butsch takes it all on with aplomb, expertly steering us through a wealth of fascinating archival research to reveal the emerging character of globalized media in this still-new millennium."
Sonia Livingstone, author of The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age

"Richard Butsch's highly original and very readable overview of the development of screen cultures is particularly striking in the breadth of its chronological and geographical coverage. His knowledge and scholarship, based on an extensive career, ring out from the text."
Richard Maltby, Flinders University

"Screen Culture is a meticulously researched work and a welcome response to the demand for a comprehensive textbook on the history of screen culture... students and scholars of film studies will find this book particularly useful."
Rahul Kumar, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television