New Books in Communications

Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook, and texting) have played in political activism in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon.  Hussain is a new Assistant Professor of Global Media Studies at the University of Michigan and Phillip Howard is Professor of Communication, Information, and International Studies at the University of Washington. Through extensive data collection and fieldwork, the authors bring a multi-method and multi-disciplinary approach to their timely subject. They argue that digital activism typically travels through six steps of protest mobilization starting with capacity building and ends with post-protest information war. This is the third book from the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series featured on the podcast. As with the previous, Political Scientists can learn a lot from the disciplinary perspective brought to the subject of activism from those in Communications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), David Hochfelder provides a taut and consistently intelligent history of the telegraph in American life. The book is notable for both its topical breadth—encompassing war, politics, business, journalism, and everyday life—as well as its focused, argument-driven chapters. Hochfelder describes how the telegraph’s important role in the Civil War set the stage for Western Union’s postwar dominance, which in turn provoked persistent efforts to nationalize and regulate telegraphy up through World War I. Hochfelder lingers on two of the telegraph’s principal clients, newspapers and businessmen, focusing in the latter case on the crucial importance of the telegraph-enabled stock “ticker” for modern financial capitalism. The book traces the telegraph’s effect not just on institutions but also the lived experience of ordinary people, who came to hunger for breaking news and real-time stock updates. The patterns of communication established by the telegraph live on, Hochfelder concludes, in the billions of texts and emails sent along fiber-optic cables—our own wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

I have never been to the Super Bowl, and I will probably never will. I’ve never been to a World Cup match or an Olympic event. I’ve never been to the Final Four or the Rose Bowl. I’ve never been to the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Champions League, the Kentucky Derby or the Masters. The only sporting event of consequence that I’ve ever attended was the World Series. It was game two of a series that went the full seven games. My team won that night, I remember. But I don’t recall much else. I was sitting in the top row, far away in the right-field corner. Certainly, it was fun to be there. But I would have seen more of the game if I had watched it on TV. The history of sports is typically told from the perspective of those who were there, at the stadium: the athletes and managers, the spectators, and the journalists who wrote the first accounts. But most fans watch the great events of sport not in person, but from the comfort of their living room sofa. Even when witnessed from this distance, the events are still moving and memorable. We talk about them for decades afterward, recalling that one game, that one play, that announcer’s one call, to our friends and children. So how does this experience of sport’s historic moments, the experience of the fans watching on TV, fit into the story? This is the question that Martin Kelner sets out to answer in his book, Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV (Bloomsbury/Wisden Sports Writing, 2012). A journalist and BBC radio presenter, Martin wrote a column about sports on television for The Guardian for the last 16 years. For this book, he interviewed past commentators and producers, and dug through the extensive archives of the BBC, to uncover the history of televised sports in Britain. But the book is also the memoir of a fan–Martin’s recollections of panelists and presenters, the excitement of Cup Final day, and the games of street football narrated with the imitated calls of famous announcers. No matter if you grew up watching Match of the Day or Monday Night Football, Hockey Night in Canada or World of Sport, you’ll recognize the common experiences of sports fans on their sofas. And you’ll appreciate Martin’s account of “the joy of not being there.” For more on the history of sports television, listen to past New Books in Sports episodes featuring former ESPN producer Dennis Deninger and historian John Bloom, who discusses his biography of Howard Cosell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Robert W. McChesney, the celebrated political economist of communication, takes the Internet, industry and government head-on in his latest book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013). Digital Disconnect builds on McChesney’s previous works, spinning forward his scholarship to construct a remarkably current look at the Internet’s corporate and political landscape. “Almost all of the other books on the Internet, some of which are very good, sort of try to take a larger view of it,” McChesney says during the interview. “Because of where I’m coming from, because of my interests, I think that’s the one thing I could inject that draws from my past research, where I can speak with greater authority, that’s really not talked about by anyone else.” McChesney uses the book to argue that the Internet has become a hub of “numbing commercialism,” largely the result of failed government policies. Writes McChesney: “When the dust clears on this critical juncture, if our societies have not been fundamentally transformed for the better, if democracy has not triumphed over capital, the digital revolution may prove to have been a revolution in name only, an ironic, tragic reminder of the growing gap between the potential and the reality of human society.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Duke University Press, 2011), Vicki Mayer provides a major theoretical contribution to media production studies. The book self-consciously challenges the idea of the “TV producer” that industry figures and scholars alike often assume. Mayer traces how the “TV producer” category came to be associated with–indeed defined by–creativity and professionalism. Below the Line upends this definition, through four empirical case studies of largely invisible television production: (1) television set assemblers in Brazil, (2) soft-core video cameramen in New Orleans, (3) reality TV casters, and (4) local cable television citizen regulators. The book weaves a theoretical thread through these ethnographic portraits that are themselves framed by political economic analysis of the industry and the broader economy. What once seemed stable–the idea that TV producers are above-the-line creative professionals–lies in elegantly written tatters by the book’s conclusion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead This is the unifying idea of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press, 2013) Those six words – If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead – appear on the back cover, on the inside jacket, and in the very first paragraph of the book’s introduction. The authors focus on the new currencies of media, including user engagement and the rapid flow of information, while debunking the terms we’ve all learned to know and dread, such as “viral” and “Web 2.0.” Jenkins, Ford, and Green set an ambitious agenda, targeting not one but three audiences: media scholars, communication professionals, and those who create and share media and are interested in learning how media are changing because of it. “Perhaps the most impactful aspect of a spreadable media environment,” the authors write, “is the way in which we all now play a vital role in the sharing of media texts.” A review of Spreadable Media can be found in Public Books here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Somewhere along the line, C.W. Anderson became fascinated with digital journalism and the culture that surrounds it: engaged publics, social networks, and the challenges to “legacy” media. Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Temple University Press, 2013) is the fascinating product of Anderson’s research into the Philadelphia journalism scene during the first decade-plus of the 21st Century. Once a thriving hub of traditional journalism, Philadelphia has become a living case study of the collision of digital media practices. Anderson’s ethnographic research and spot-on academic interpretation paints a vivid picture of a sometimes innovative, sometimes meandering journalism scene. Although we are at the beginning of the digital journalism era, in Rebuilding the News Anderson nonetheless walks us through the new ecosystem, what seems to be working, what doesn’t, and where we go from here. “Given all of the pain journalism has experienced in the past decade and a half,” Anderson writes, “it would be a shame to waste this moment.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Did you watch the game last night? No matter if you live in Australia, England, India, Ontario, or the US, chances are you’ve heard that question today. Televised sports are a constant presence in contemporary culture, providing a common set of experiences and references for people in the workplace, the airport terminal, the dormitory, and even, in the case of the World Cup and Olympics, around the world. As individuals, televised sport shapes our everyday speech and behaviors (anybody ever lift their arms in celebration and mimic the roar of the crowd after tossing trash in the bin?). Our life stories are punctuated by moments of watching sports. Among my own fondest memories are hours at the TV, watching hockey with my grandmother, soccer with my children, the Olympics with my wife, and, on one late winter night, the NFL playoffs with a crowd of American travelers in an East European pub. Whenever I catch the replay of a particular moment from an event I have watched years ago–say the closing seconds of the “Miracle on Ice,” or Ali lighting the torch in Atlanta, or Doug Flutie’s “Hail Mary” pass in 1984–the memories are immediate and vivid. I can remember where I was, and who was with me, when I watched it happen live on TV. The hold that televised sport has on our individual and collective memories is all the more remarkable when you consider that the medium is relatively young. The first nationwide broadcasts of events in the US came only in the 1950s. The Olympics first appeared on television in the mid-Sixties, the same decade that brought the rise of professional football, today the most popular sport on American television. Dennis Deninger recounts this history in his book, Sports on Television: The How and Why Behind What You See (Routledge, 2012), beginning with the first televised baseball game in 1939 and taking the story to today’s round-the-clock, global sport networks. But as the subtitle indicates, Dennis’ book is more than a history. As a longtime producer at ESPN, Dennis offers an insider’s view of how televised sport is programmed and packaged, and the ways in which sports television has shaped our culture. If you’re someone like me, who has grown up watching sports on TV, you’ll learn a lot from Dennis’ book, and hopefully our interview, from why the 1987 America’s Cup was an important event in the history of sports television, to how to prepare for the lights going out at the Super Bowl.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity Press, 2012), Nick Couldry provides a sweeping synthesis of his important media theory over the last decade. Couldry reassesses his work on media rituals, media power, and the “hidden injuries” of representation in light of cross-cultural diversity as well as the sudden eruption of social media. The book argues convincingly that these theories remain relevant to a social media age, in a rich, chapter-by-chapter engagement with contemporary social theory. Couldry makes a cogent case for a “practice approach” to media studies that treats a wide range of social activity–and not just production or consumption–as media-related and worthy of study. The book is concerned with big themes–social order, justice and power–but also furnishes a toolkit of mid-range theories that deserve to be applied, and wrestled with, in empirical research. Media, Society, World provides a nuanced verdict on the prospects of digital democracy, advances a de-territorialized notion of “media cultures,” and furnishes a theory of media power through a highly original rethinking of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. The concluding chapter asks readers to engage with a literature–and a set of questions–that media scholars rarely address: media justice in the context of moral and political philosophy. The book is a major statement from the leading media theorist working today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Have you ever illegally downloaded a song from the internet? How about illicitly burned copies of a CD? Made a “party tape?” Bought a bootleg album? You may have done these things, but have you purchased a bootlegged song-sheet? In Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929 (University of Chicago, 2011) Barry Kernfeld fills us in on the history of disobedient music reproduction and distribution since, well, before the advent of recording technology. Along the way he discusses the above mentioned disobedient distribution techniques along with a few others: fake books, music photocopying, and pirate radio round out the book. Kernfeld suggests that the history of pop music piracy is never ending, with battles of different types of disobedience taking similar forms: the music “monopolists” (song owners) attempting to enact prohibitions on illegal production and distribution, the failed containment of said production and distribution systems and, finally, the assimilation of disobedient forms into the mainstream production and distribution industries. Barry Kernfeld is on the staff of the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians and What to Listen for in Jazz, and he is the editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He is also a professional jazz saxophonist playing in Jazza-ma-phone and a clarinetist in local musical theater productions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications