It has never been more important to study the media. As Lord Leveson lifts the Fleet Street flagstones to glimpse the tangle of power, influence, secrecy, disdain and corruption writhing beneath them, as social media are accused of rewiring children’s brains, of destroying the very sociality they proclaim but also celebrated for toppling autocratic regimes, as popular magazines proliferate new forms of disgust for their readers’ bodies, and as photography, video, animation and the written word fuse, split and evolve in the new primal soup of the Web, the work on display in this exhibition offers a magnifying glass for the study of this rapidly mutating media ecosystem.
