In Anglophone and international media studies, “media” mostly stands for contemporary mass media, with traditional media studies covering news media, radio and TV and “new media” researching computing and Internet. | In the last decade, German humanities have developed a broad, general and transhistorical notion of media as “mediality” (“Medialität”) in which any material or imaginary carrier of information qualifies as a medium, from CPUs to angels. The notion of “medium” has thus replaced and superseded the older semiotic-structuralist term of the “sign”. | “Kulturwissenschaft” thus should not be mixed up with Anglo-American “cultural studies”. In the German context, it means cross-disciplinary humanities study of the arts and history of knowledge. | “cultural studies” of the Birmingham School were a straightforward adaption of the 1970s post-Frankfurt School German “Kultursoziologie”. | books of Anthony Grafton are Kulturwissenschaft while those of the Birmingham School are not
http://medienumbrueche.uni-siegen.de/groups/medienwissenschaften/weblog/38962/Antworten_von_Florian_Cramer.html