Societies are organised by the media. That is not just true of the industrial age or the post-industrial age of information. The kingdoms and empires of antiquity were based on media technological simplification and optimisation of the civil, religious and military infrastructures. But it has only been since the Renaissance and the sustained establishment of printing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that a clear identification between media technological advances and political and cultural shifts has taken place. From that point Europe has developed in the light of media technological innovation and Europe increasingly became a media space in the consciousness of artistic and administrative elites. The pamphlet war of the Reformation, the Encyclopaedia project of the Enlightenment and the monumental memorial projects of nation states are only the most prominent examples of this. Therefore religious, aesthetic, technical, political, military or philosophical controversies and innovations have had a media technological index, under the surface at first, but increasingly clear over time.

Modern Europe has developed more and more in this direction. It has long since gained a place and an identity within the minds of its citizens. Politics, work, art and technology are key concepts whose interaction with the conditions and possibilities in the media are now taken for granted. Skills in these apparently separate areas are also media skills nowadays. This is where the BA and MA programmes in European Media Studies come in. The advanced degree of digitalisation of the media and all communication processes has affected almost all areas of work, giving them new structures and contours. Education, management, art, politics and administration are increasingly being reorganised on international lines using the newest media technology. Now it is not just the so-called media producers (in traditional fields such as the press, TV, radio or advertising) who create the world of the media, but almost all jobs in the post-industrial era.

With new explorations and reconstructions of media environments, modern forms of art show how the worlds of experience and media technology are related. From this perspective, artistic projects, provocations and experiences are increasingly readable as representative documentations and analyses of new spaces and extreme experiences, which foreshadow future spaces for play and work. The concept of the media that is used in the Media Studies programme fits with this perspective of a European cultural space as a media space. It therefore includes all kinds of media technology, practices and strategies, the basic media forms of text, image, sound and number, as well as technological image media such as photography and film, modern communication technology such as telephones, mobile phones, internet, interactive media and complex media environment. Particular attention is paid to conceptual designs with digital media, analysis of genres and narrative systems, as well as media-aesthetic project work involving the analysis and use of specific artistic techniques. The seminars aim to bridge the gap between production and analysis, theory and practice, art and academia. On top of this, experimental research and practical projects with a high degree of independent research and a focus on the theory and history of the media and its concepts will be carried out. These things allow innovative possibilities for a new kind of course in both the BA and MA programmes.

The idea of Europe as a media space creates a comprehensive change of perspective for the cultural and technological history of the continent. At the same time, there are differences within Europe, and an understanding of these is necessary in the expanding world of the media. For this reason, and despite the many critical predictions of the supposed (according to some, already completed) Americanisation of the market, political and cultural differences between national markets is the basis for production plans in each country. Consciousness of the historicity and cultural diversity of Europe is therefore of fundamental importance for all productive activity in the media. Media formats and their acceptance or reception and their influence cannot be revealed by any ahistorical economic calculation. Only with an understanding of Europe as a cultural, legal and media space with key modern skills in digital communication makes qualified work in the various parts of the media possible.