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First published in 1997. Information processing is crucial to social life and an important element of control. Innovations in information processing have the potential to dramatically alter social relations. Understanding the process of technology innovation and diffusion as well as the economic, social, political and cultural impact of a diffusing/diffused technology is crucial to understanding society as technology is often the impetus for social change. This book addresses both the process and impact of technology innovation as it relates to communication technology.
A revealing insight into the links between globalization and the technological advances in communication brought about by the telegraph network.
"Archive Style successfully and beautifully reconciles, or rather intertwines, two viewpoints hitherto considered incompatible—the logic of the archive and the issue of individual style. Robin Kelsey shows, with great historical rigor, how the styles of illustrators Schott, O'Sullivan, and Jones emerged from the very necessities of survey work and from personal resistance to the social and political structures framing such work. Archive Style, visual history at its best, is a landmark study of nineteenth-century American visual and scientific culture."—François Brunet, Professor of American Art and Literature, Université Paris-Diderot-Paris 7, France "In this stunningly original book R...
Telegraphies reveals a body of literature in which Americans of all ranks imagine how nineteenth-century telecommunications technologies forever alter the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine.
Over the course of American political history, political elites and organizations have often updated their political communications strategies in order to achieve longstanding political communication goals in more efficient or effective ways. But why do successful innovations occur when they do, and what motivates political actors to make choices about how to innovate their communication tactics? Covering over 300 years of political communication innovations, Ben Epstein shows how this process of change happens and why. To do this, Epstein, following an interdisciplinary approach, proposes a new model called "the political communication cycle" that accounts for the technological, behavioral,...
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What do we talk about when we talk about "religion"? Is it an array of empirical facts about historical human civilizations? Or is religion what is in essence unpredictable--perhaps the very emergence of the new? In what ways are the legacies of religion--its powers, words, things, and gestures--reconfiguring themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century? Given the Latin roots of the word religion and its historical Christian uses, what sense, if any, does it make to talk about "religion" in other traditions? Where might we look for common elements that would enable us to do so? Has religion as an overarching concept lost all its currency, or does it ineluctably retu...
Through a series of historical analyses, Friedman explores the relationship between the legal system and the development of modern science and technology. The scientific revolution produced major changes in culture; and these in turn led to changes in government and law. The book covers, among other topics, the transportation revolution; the camera and the entertainment industry; the "germ theory" and its influence on modern society; and the role of culture and technology in the sexual revolution.
News consumers made cynical by sensationalist banners--"AMERICA STRIKES BACK," "THE TERROR OF ANTHRAX"--and lurid leads might be surprised to learn that in 1690, the newspaper Publick Occurrences gossiped about the sexual indiscretions of French royalty or seasoned the story of missing children by adding that "barbarous Indians were lurking about" before the disappearance. Surprising, too, might be the media's steady adherence to, if continual tugging at, its philosophical and ethical moorings. These 39 essays, written and edited by the nation's leading professors of journalism, cover the theory and practice of print, radio, and TV news reporting. Politics and partisanship, press and the government, gender and the press corps, presidential coverage, war reportage, technology and news gathering, sensationalism: each subject is treated individually. Appropriate for interested lay persons, students, professors and reporters. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with séances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted—in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in séance parlors—by women. In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers a richly nuanced and culturally grounded...