Jon Krakauer. (1997). Into thin air: A personal account of the Mount Everest disaster. New York: Villard. A thoughtful and disturbing look at what happens when the media, nature, people, disaster meet up together.
Marshall McLuhan. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill. The original work on how the media shape how we perceive the world.
Joshua Meyrowitz. (1985). No sense of place. New York: Oxford University Press. An examination of how television through its very existence changes the world we live in.
Neil Postman. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death; Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Penguin Books. Postman is highly critical of television, arguing that it turns everything it touches into entertainment. It's an interesting counterpoint to Meyrowitz.
Arthur Asa Berger. (1982). Media Analysis Techniques, ed. F. Gerald Kline, The Sage CommText Series. Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications. An excellent and readable summary of different approaches to studying the mass media.
