Because it’s such a capaciously plural discipline—if “discipline” is even the right term—Media Studies keeps presenting me with pedagogical challenges, particularly with its incoherence and methodological overabundance: how do I teach, or even simply convey to students, a critical (and even creative) toolkit that enables the astute and rigorous study of media, something of a workable practice that’s accessible and available to them, to us? I’ve currently taken up, in my classes, what I feel is a viable articulation between Cultural Studies and Media Studies, beginning with techniques of “reading” media culture, a semiotics of media focused to start with on unpacking forms of representation. Mediation and signification, at least initially, are collapsed into each other, and media objects and artifacts are treated, to begin with, as texts. We try to intervene—as readers, interpreters, consumers or users—in the complex dissemination, or really in the decidedly asymmetrical circulation, of media and media flows at various points along the encoding/decoding curve that Stuart Hall describes; we’re ostensibly learning to decode, with as much reflexive and situated self-awareness as we can muster, the conflicted “meanings” that manifest and entangle themselves in (and as) signs, and then—and this can be very difficult—to recognize our own re-inscription in those signs and sign-systems. Sets of critical practices—which also incline toward forms of creative engagement and “making,” a media poetics—tend not to have enough room to be carefully and thoroughly described, let alone enacted, in the classroom, so I have parked for the most part considerations of media as technology, of media as historical materiality (realized, for example, in communities of users) and even of media as corporeal interface (the phenomenology, for example, of users’ and performers’’ embodied reception and refiguration of meaning) in favour of developing a media aesthetics, a practice of essentially formal semiotic analysis keyed to the cultural and performative work that media object undertake, as if they were texts. At each point, a consideration of the aesthetic is not meant to depoliticize or to dis-engage what it is that we choose to study; instead, this trajectory through Media Studies presents students (myself included) with an emergent cultural politics, what Walter Benjamin might refer to as a politicizing of the aesthetic; by attending to the processes, filters, rhythms and resonances of various moments of mediation, we can start to think through the consequences, convergences and impacts of media on our lives and the lives of others, on what Cultural Studies scholars tend to call the everyday.