There is a range of concerns common to both media and cultural studies and critical discourse analysis, relating to shifts and reconfigurations that can be said to characterise the modern world. These concerns are the subject of this chapter.

I begin with issues relating to time, place and their compression in the modern media. I then go on to outline two tensions or dichotomies that will be familiar to anyone working in the field of media discourse. These are public and private, information and entertainment. Fairclough relates themto two tendencies, which he identifies (in characteristically abstract nominalisations) as the conventionalisation of public affairs media and marketisation in the shift towards entertainment (Fairclough 1995a: 10). The chapter concludes with attention to other hybrid media genres, including pastiche and parody.

Time and place

Discursive events always involve some form of addresser and addressee. If we take the example of a live theatre performance, both the actors (the addressers) and the audience (the addressees) are physically co-present, so that production (at least, its end result in a rehearsed performance) and consumption are taking place at the same time. Discourse in the media tends to be rather different; there is typically a considerable distance, in space and often in time, between the production of a media text and its consumption. In itself, of course, this disjunction between production and consumption is by no means a modern phenomenon. In fact, it is as old as writing itself.