New Books in Communications

Humans have coped with tragedy using ritual and memorials since the Neolithic era. Doka called a memorial a space invested with meaning, “set aside to commemorate an event such as a tragedy.” Memorialization is a ritual of bereavement, the creation of a place, permanent or not, that facilitates the persistence of memory. This space allows for the restructuring of the social network between the living, those who create the memorial, and the dead, those for which the memorial is created. Memorialization happens in both the analog and digital contexts. In fact, some now decline to recognize a distinction between the on- and offline worlds. In his new book, Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Peter J. Gloviczki, an assistant professor at Coker College, conceptualizes online memorials as networked remembrance spaces. These social media posts and groups are “immediate, interactive and public and they function across a great distance.” Online memorials are both user-driven – the users drive the conversations and are responsible for keeping up the sites – and story-driven – the sites are places where users tell stories related to the subject(s) of the memorial. Thorough, fact-based journalism plays an important role in the maintenance of online memorials. According to Gloviczki, news reports provide the foundation for the discussion of events, as well as being central to making sense of those events. So significant is journalism for online memorials that, in some cases, a memorial will cease once coverage of that event ends. But many online memorials continue long after media interests concludes. The persistence of these sites demonstrates how online memorials “disrupt the notion of a finite end.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can be extrapolated from a close look at the associated graphic art?” Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W. W. Norton, 2015) treats the commercial and advertising art of the mid-twentieth century as an archive to explore the social and cultural engagement with electronics technologies during a particularly vibrant moment for the American graphic commercial arts. Incorporating text and image as sources to be read, Prelinger’s book moves from the beginnings of FM technology and vacuum tubes, to televisions and quartz crystals, to transistors and circuit boards, to digital computing and into space. Of special interest is the attention Prelinger pays to to the importance of graphic designers and staff artists at major labs and research centers. The book models an innovative and inspiring way to read graphic images as historical documents, and the story is a pleasure to read for specialists and non-experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Jerome de Bourdon‘s Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle (Presses des Mines, 2014) is a revised version of a book that first appeared in 1990. This edition has been revamped, and includes a new introduction in which Bourdon explores the historiography of the medium in the years since the book’s original publication. A history of television that is also a history of the De Gaulle presidency and the early years of the Fifth Republic, Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle examines a range of issues, from government legislation to programming and content, to the variety of personnel (directors, producers, technicians, administrators) who made television happen during this “era of professionalization.” Exploring the medium as both information and entertainment, the book considers the relationship between television and the cinema, situating television within the broader cultural and political history of France during this critical period. Covering key events and turning points, including the introduction of a second channel in 1964 and a key directors’ strike in 1965, the book also charts the years leading up to 1968 in France, exploring the impact that TV and les eventements had upon one another. This new edition considers the history of TV in light of the technological and cultural developments of the last twenty-five years (reality TV, the Internet) and the new (especially audiovisual) archival material available to researchers of television’s past in France. Bringing together the analysis of government policy, culture, and labour, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of the French media and/or the Fifth Republic’s crucial first decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

John Durham Peters‘ wonderful new book is a brilliant and beautifully-written consideration of natural environments as subjects for media studies. Accessible and informative for a broad readership. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is structured as a series of meditations on and explorations of water, fire, air, earth, and ether media. After a chapter that sets out some of the foundational ideas shaping the book and charts an intellectual landscape for rethinking media, each of the following chapters offers a carefully curated series of studies of particulars – dolphin jaws, candles, towers, watches, clouds, feet, bells, weathermen, Google, and more – as a means of examining the significance of infrastructure, forgetting, technicity, and other modes of understanding media. Peters asks us to come with a fresh perspective to notions that we otherwise take for granted, and the result is a thoughtful and inspiring account that brings together media studies, theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences in thoroughly compelling ways. Among other things, the book is a call for a “greener media studies” that “appreciates our long natural history of shaping and being shaped by our habitats as a process of mediation.” What if, Peters asks, we took nature instead of the mind as the “epitome of meaning”? What are the stakes of doing so? The result is among the most exciting and enjoyable books that I’ve read in some time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed individuals to access masses of information faster than ever before. What, then, has been the effect of digital tools on research practices? In their new book Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press, 2015), Eric T. Meyer, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Ralph Schroeder, Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, explore how digital tools have transformed research. To do this, Meyer and Schroeder use case studies to examine how new technology has, and continues to, change research in various fields, and what this means for the future of e-research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as case studies. The book is both compelling and readable, and argues that the fantasy and depiction of torture play a role as an ideology in national politics and policy, and that it’s all more complicated than it seems–once you stop averting your eyes. Hilary Neroni teaches in the Film and Television Studies Program at the University of Vermont and is also the author of The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Her areas of interest include representations of gender and race in contemporary American film, violence in film, women directors, documentary film/video, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. She has published essays on women directors (in particular Jane Campion and Claire Denis) and on issues surrounding gender and violence in the cinema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the empire? How were books produced and read, and by whom? In his new book, Joseph R. Dennis helps answer these questions and more by studying the genre of local gazetteers. Focusing on the Ming period, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100-1700 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) argues that gazetteers were “important points of intersection between the central government and local societies and one of the main vehicles for transmitting local information to central government officials.” In seven chapters that collectively move readers through the life cycle of a gazetteer, Dennis’s story informs the histories of the frontier, the state, kinship, the law, material culture, and the book industry. It will be a must-read for all scholars and students of late imperial Chinese history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen the person I was speaking to. Rather, I kept my ear turned acutely towards the authors, hanging on their every word while privately perusing my list of questions. I have joked with many interviewees that for all I know they are in their pajamas or naked. Truth be told, I have had no interest in seeing the authors during the interview. There was and is something about having the experience that the listener has on hearing, rather than seeing, the interview that may play a role in creating a certain kind of intensity and intimacy. So it was not lost on me that for this particular interview with Gillian Isaacs Russell about a book that looks straightforwardly at the impact of technology on the therapeutic relationship, that we would not be making eye contact. Though we could, I requested that we not do so. And anyway, of course, if you have used it, eye contact is actually impossible on Skype. We can see each other but we cannot lock orbs. Our interview, as you will hear, is full of the same kinds of problems that one might have when working with a patient over the ether. At one point there is a bizarre reverb and everything Isaacs Russell says comes out in triplicate. We did not lose the connection though this has happened to me on several occasions while playing my interlocutory part. And of course we both had our anxieties about the capacity of the technology to connect us and to keep us connected but do bear in mind that we are not analyst and patient. Our relationship is layered with much less meaning or significance than that of the analytic couple. If the technology disconnected us, we would not wonder if it was something that one of us said. No one would have hurt feelings. We could keep it impersonal. In Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2015), Isaacs Russell asks a key question of psychoanalysts: what might be lost in working this way? The interview explores reasons why analysts have jumped in to use Skype and explores what the implications might be of the loss of two bodies in a room together. Her thinking is clear and the ideas she pits forth I found haunting. The age old question of what makes a treatment psychoanalysis came to mind when reading this book as I wondered if you can’t smell the patient, if there is not the risk of touch that is not acted upon, if there is not the walk out the door when the session is over, is essential grist for the mill irreparably lost? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Literary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the varieties of literary practice in Rotherham, England. The book engages with the locally particular to draw out a variety of general findings, relevant to methodological reflection and material culture debates. The book draws on a wealth of projects from the AHRC funded Connected Communities programme, including Fishing as Wisdom, The Imagine Project, and Language as Talisman. The book represents an important intervention into how we understand community, literacy and identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In the first legal history course I took as an undergraduate, I read Lawrence M. Friedman‘s A History of American Law and American Law in the 20th Century and have been fascinated with the subject ever since. His most recent work, The Big Trial: Law as Public Spectacle (University Press of Kansas, 2015) combines the scintillating narrative style that he employs as the author of several mystery novels with the keen insights about law and society that he has revealed time and again in his numerous cornerstone works of legal scholarship. Per the book jacket, “The trial of O. J. Simpson was a sensation, avidly followed by millions of people, but it was also, in a sense, nothing new. One hundred years earlier the Lizzie Borden trial had held the nation in thrall. The names (and the crimes) may change, but the appeal is enduring–and why this is, how it works, and what it means are what Lawrence Friedman investigates in The Big Trial. What is it about these cases that captures the public imagination? Are the “headline trials” of our period different from those of a century or two ago? And what do we learn from them, about the nature of our society, past and present? To get a clearer picture, Friedman first identifies what certain headline trials have in common, then considers particular cases within each grouping. The political trial, for instance, embraces treason and spying, dissenters and radicals, and, to varying degrees, corruption and fraud. Celebrity trials involve the famous–whether victims, as in the case of Charles Manson, or defendants as disparate as Fatty Arbuckle and William Kennedy Smith–but certain high-profile cases, such as those Friedman categorizes as tabloid trials, can also create celebrities. The fascination of whodunit trials can be found in the mystery surrounding the case: Are we sure about O. J. Simpson? What about Claus von Bulow–tried, in another sensational case, for sending his wife into a coma? An especially interesting type of case Friedman groups under the rubric worm in the bud. These are cases, such as that of Lizzie Borden, that seem to put society itself on trial; they raise fundamental social questions and often suggest hidden and secret pathologies. And finally, a small but important group of cases proceed from moral panic, the Salem witchcraft trials being the classic instance, though Friedman also considers recent examples. Though they might differ in significant ways, these types of trials also have important similarities. Most notably, they invariably raise questions about identity (Who is this defendant? A villain? An innocent unfairly accused?). And in this respect, The Big Trial shows us, the headline trial reflects a critical aspect of modern society. Reaching across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the latest outrage, from congressional hearings to lynching and vigilante justice to public punishment, from Dr. Sam Sheppard (the “fugitive”) to Jeffrey Dahmer (the “cannibal”), The Rosenbergs to Timothy McVeigh, the book presents a complex picture of headline trials as displays of power–moments of “didactic theater”” that demonstrate in one way or another whether a society is fair, whom it protects, and whose interest it serves.” Some of the topics we cover are: (1) Classifications of the different types of headline trials; (2) How telling the story of headline trials also tells the story of the rise of mass media; (3) Why big trials are considered didactic theater. (4) The effect the familiarity we now have with celebrities has upon the trials that involve them. Lawrence Friedman is Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications