The lineage of traditions that lead to the study of media makes defining a single coherent discipline difficult. But these studies involve more than just what we see on the screen. They focus on one of the inescapable aspects of human experience – mediation and technics. Phenomena are never the subject of direct encounters. Our experiences are always mediated through something which stands between us and the world. Communication and media studies researches both content and form, with an exceptional focus on the relationships between ourselves, the messages we receive via the medium, and the artifacts and systems through which we experience the world. Geordi La Forge’s VISOR is a prime example. It is both “the medium and the message,” in McLuhan’s (1994) terms. Despite his obvious prosthetic, La Forge is just one of the many humans in Starfleet who depend on complex socio-technical systems to mediate their experiences. The purpose of communication and media studies is to reveal the way these systems contribute to our lives and help to constitute our social world, by drawing from many different disciplines to investigate the means of communication we otherwise take for granted.