Dysfunctionalities. Annual Conference of the German Society for Media Science (GfM), Potsdam, Germany, 5-8 October 2011

During the 1970s the intense use of audiovisual media in Germany encouraged a vigorous debate among philologists. The outcome of this discussion was the establishment of Media Studies as an independent discipline in the German high education system in the second half of the 1980s (“Fachgeschichte”). The German Society for Media Studies was founded in November 1985 as a forum for academic exchange and dialogue, as well as an initiator of public debate around media-related issues. Aesthetic, historical, sociological, psychological and communicational perspectives were equally considered within the GfM, and this multilayered critique of media production and consumption continues today (“Der Gesellschaft”).