New Books in Communications

There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. But the changes that we are seeing are far from novel. In fact, most are a continuation of changes to society and societal structure with roots in the past. So argues Hugh F. Cline, adjunct professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, in his new book, Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation: A Social and Historical Perspective (Routledge, 2014). According to Cline, the technopanics, or strong objections to new technology have happened since the days of Aristotle. In spite of the objections, technological innovations can positively advance societal interests. Mixing history, sociology, anthropology, and technological studies, Cline provides context for the examination of how ICTs are impacting society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Brooke Erin Duffy's Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013) traces the upheaval in the women's magazine industry in an era of media convergence and audience media-making. Duffy, assistant professor at Temple University's School of Media and Communication, is especially interested in the experience of writers, editors, and others who produce women's magazines: How are they coping with new competition, more intense work routines, and the imperative to produce (and engage) across a range of non-print media platforms? Questions of identity thread through the book: What does it mean to be a magazine writer in the iPad era? What are the stakes for gender identity as this female-focused genre adapts to digital workflows? To get at these questions, Duffy conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of editors, publishers, interns, and business-side workers, most of them at the big three magazine publishers, Hearst, Conde Nast, and Time, Inc. Remake, Remodel traces the history of women's magazines, as well the history of scholarship on these magazines, but the bulk of the book explores different facets of workers' coming-to-terms with the digital tsunami, including changes to the gendered makeup of the workforce, shifts in the industry's attitude toward its audience, the complicated rivalry, dismissal, and embrace of fashion bloggers, and the tension between medium-specific traditions and the push to spread the magazine--now reimagined as a brand--across a range of platforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Julia Azari has written Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Cornell University Press, 2014). Azari is assistant professor of political science at Marquette University. What was President Obama’s mandate when he was elected in 2008? Did that mandate extend to 2012? We commonly think that mandates attach to wide electoral margins. Azari cuts through this convention to analyze the variety of ways presidents have used the language of mandates to advocate for their policy agenda. Azari’s book fits with a book featured on the podcast in May by John Hudak. Both books link together the political and policy dimensions of the presidency. Azari discovers that presidents refer to mandates when political polarization increases and as the White House loses legitimacy. By the time President Obama was elected, these factors came together, thereby increasing the use of mandate language and the unrealistic expectations that often come with lofty promises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Social media is a phenomenon that continues to grow and attract much attention in the form of consternation, commentary, criticism and scholarly research. Any attempt at truly understanding social media communication practices and tools requires interdisciplinary analysis, the examination of the technology from the varying perspectives of the groups of users, developers and experts with respect to the issues surrounding it.  It also should include a look at the changes social media has and continues to bring to various fields, particularly with respect to professional communication. Jeremy Lipschultz, Isaacson Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, discusses the impact of social media on various mass communications professions in his new book Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law, and Ethics (Routledge 2014). In his book, Lipschultz examines the various theories and practices connected to social media communication, and how this emerging form of communication differs from the traditional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The social and cultural historian Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK is interested in the everyday moments between great events. In his books Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime, On Roads: A Hidden History and now Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (Profile Books, 2013) he documents the mundane activities that make up our lives. In Armchair Nation Moran surveys the history of television watching in Britain from the technology’s first demonstration in a department store in 1925 and up to today. Moran’s engaging narrative progresses through major milestones in the medium’s history. To document how watching television had become a daily habit for a multitude of individuals, Moran uses an assortment of sources such as newspaper reviews, listings and interviews, diaries, and Mass Observation entries. While Moran hesitates to treat the consumption of television as an act of community building, he does frame it as a communal and meaningful act that binds millions together.  Therefore, for Moran, the analysis of television consumption is also a meditation about the characteristics and challenges of collective memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The conversation about the Web and social media skews toward a discussion of the potential for connections, and how both individuals and organizations are using the media to communicate, to form communities, and to conduct business. Lacking, for the most part, is an investigation of the design of these spaces and how design, both good and bad, encourages or provokes certain kinds of interactions. In her new book, The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press, 2014), Judith Donath, Faculty Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, explores the theory and practice of interface design, and analyzes how design influences online interaction. With a view toward inspiring designers, and others, “to be more radical and thoughtful in their creations,” Donath provides a detailed examination of topics to be considered for beneficial design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…” From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelman‘s new book, the reader is introduced to a way of thinking about documents as tools for creating bodily experience, and as material objects situated within hierarchies and relationships of labor. Working beautifully at the intersection of media studies and history, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a thoughtful and inspiring collection of moments from the expansion of a modern “scriptural economy.” The case studies explore fill-in-the-blank forms in the context of late nineteenth century job printing, typescript books and scholarly communication in the 1930s, photocopies and photocopying in the 1960s and 1970s, and PDF files in the 1990s and beyond. The final chapter is a fascinating exploration of what it might look like to write a situated history of amateurdom and the figure of the “amateur,” a theme that recurs throughout the preceding chapters. Though all of these cases are carefully rooted within a US context, the insights gleaned from them potentially apply to a much wider and trans-local conversation about the documentary media of writers and readers. It is a history of documenting as an epistemic practice and documents as instruments, and that history is consistently and productively entangled with concerns about reproduction, access, labor, and the emergence of a bureaucratic self. Along the way, Paper Knowledge helpfully opens up some persistent historiographical notions that benefit from such opening, such as “print culture,” “digital humanities,” “authorship,” and other categories that have defined the history of and with communication, and that animate contemporary debates within academia and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Scholars and commentators have used metaphor in an attempt to describe the Web since public access began. Think of ideas like the information highway, cyberspace, the digital library, etc. In her new book, The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2014), Payal Arora, an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, takes a novel approach to the use of metaphor by examining the parallels between public common spaces and Web 2.0. In the book, Arora uses an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the historical, geographical, political and social issues related to public parks. In so doing, Arora, provides a foundation for how policymakers, organizations and individuals may conceptualizes the debates surrounding common spaces, particularly Web 2.0. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the Executive Committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. Lopez investigates the often hidden side of racism. He traces the political history of candidates for office using a set of coded phrases, allusions, and references to call attention to race, without ever uttering the word. In the post Brown v. Board era, Lopez argues, candidates learned a new language of strategic racism, substituting anti-government rhetoric for anti-black, anti-Latino, or anti-immigrant. In doing so, the dog whistle was heard as a much wider criticism of the social welfare state, and thus a direct attack not just on minorities, but on the middle class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The mid-’00s saw the rise of a political movement in Europe concerned with technocratic impositions on the ideals of free culture, privacy, government transparency and other technology policy issues. Led by online file sharers and developers, the Swedish Pirate Party was thrust into the spotlight in 2006 after law enforcement shut down the popular file sharing site The Pirate Bay. In his new book, Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests (MIT Press, 2014), Patrick Burkart, an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University and currently a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki, examines the rise of the Pirate Party in Sweden, and later Germany. To do so, Burkart analyzes ideas about the colonization of Internet communities and resources using critical communications theories. In do doing, Burkart provides a foundation for the examination of the spread of Pirate parties across the globe as well as the rise of similarly aligned political movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications