essential reading for media students from Professor Flanagan:

Essays:
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. "The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas." Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. Ed. Durham, Meennakshi Gigi and Kellner, Douglas M. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, p 39 - 42.

Debord, Guy. "The Commodity as Spectacle." Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works. Ed. Durham, Meennakshi Gigi and Kellner, Douglas M. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, p 139 - 144.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18 ; http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/staff_research/visual1.html
 
Benjamin, Walter. “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).” Illuninations:Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 
 
McLuhan, Marshall.”The Medium is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signer Press, 1964.
 
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think (July 1945).” Atlantic Monthly. Accessed 2 March 2004. http://www.theatlantic.com/ unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm
 
Dibbel, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace (1993).” Village Voice. Accessed 2 March 2004. http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html
 
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, 149-181.

Books:
Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York: Harvest Books, 1969.
Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. NY: Doubleday, 1990.