Research On Douglas Kellner' Thought In Media Culture

Douglas Kellner is one of the most influential "public knowledge activists " in the United States, and a scholar in the field of American local culture. This paper employs the text studies, attempting to make some values on his thought, based on the introduction and arrangement of Douglas Kellner 's thought in media culture.Douglas Kellner has covered the most extensive field of different disciplines, following the criticism awareness - the tradition of European Criticism, and integrating the multi-culture of American society to make an elucidation and explanation towards media culture of local American. Most research in media culture by Kellner is an elucidation of British culture, and based on some stances or multicultural understanding of Frankfurt School, post-modernism; an elucidation with some amending, updating, or reconstructing sense; the key note of the reconstruction is demonstrated not only in his academic stances, but lies in his attempts to integrate schools of all kinds and their different thoughts for the purpose of complementation, taking the integration of modern and post modern, Frankfurt school and British Culturalism for instances.Methodologically, Kellner adopted Nietzsche's Worldview of Perspectivism and Marx's dialectics, combined with the American multiculturalism, putting forward the multi-perspective and multi-dimension research methods, also, advocating to conduct interdisciplinary culture studies. He combined the culture studies with diagnostic criticism in the specific research, with close reading and context analysis to profoundly illustrate the modern social culture, and to explain contradictions and problems extant in social system, to analyze the essence of disputes among political, social and commercial powers. Kellner also employed the conceptual frame-"Mega media" to elucidate phenomenon in media culture of all kinds, highlighted the media's influence upon politics, economics, society and culture.Douglas Kellner's theories in media culture have some drawbacks as well, finding in amending and reconstructing theories of all kinds, overemphasizing in integration of these theories, which greatly weakened the persuasive power in critics.Kellner's theories in media culture offer some values to the Chinese Communication Studies on the way of development. At the academic level, the research from multiple perspectives and from pluralism is worthwhile being referred and studied by Chinese scholars. At a practical level, the social movement with cultural involvement Kellner advocated has implications to the social development of China in the course of transition.