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This anthology of hard-to-find primary documents provides a solid overview of the foundations of American media studies. Focusing on mass communication and society and how this research fits into larger patterns of social thought, this valuable collection features key texts covering the media studies traditions of the Chicago school, the effects tradition, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, and mass society theory. Where possible, articles are reproduced in their entirety to preserve the historical flavor and texture of the original works. Topics include popular theater, yellow journalism, cinema, books, public relations, political and military propaganda, advertising, opinion polling, photography, the avant-garde, popular magazines, comics, the urban press, radio drama, soap opera, popular music, and television drama and news. This text is ideal for upper-level courses in mass communication and media theory, media and society, mass communication effects, and mass media history.
This fascinating study focuses on an area neglected in previous studies of the media: the meetings between ordinary people and the media. Couldry explores what happens when people who normally consume the media witness media processes in action, or even become the object of media attention themselves.
One question the authors address: Do network projections based on increasingly sophisticated techniques for "calling" election outcomes well before polls close affect results? At no time has this question been more in the forefront of public consciousness than in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. The Langs draw on their own highly detailed study of voter reactions to election news to assess its effect on turnout, on political attitudes, on candidate strategies, and on legislative initiatives." "As a model of how to study communication effects, this highly readable volume will interest decision makers and analysts, as well as students of journalism, broadcasting, political behavior, and voters looking ahead to the next election."--BOOK JACKET.
How is it that some established artists but not others come to be considered worth remembering? For answers, Etched in Memory looks at how history interacts with personal biography. The authors dig deeply into the archives for material on the careers and posthumous fates of nearly 300 British and American printmakers, half of them women, active during the Etching Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors examine the effects of changing taste on artistic productivity, on building a reputation, and on the selective survival of artists within the collective memory. They document the influence on careers of family milieu, of acces to art education, of sponsorship and networks, of having (or lacking) money, and of being in the right place at the right time. Being remembered requires, at minimum, that the artist's work be preserved and deposited in the cultural archives. It is here that demographics and other circumstances put women at a cumulative disadvantage.
Crowd behavior is one of the most colorful but least understood forms of human social behavior. This volume is a major contribution to the field of collective behavior, with implications for social movement analysis.McPhail's critical assessment of the major theories of crowd behavior establishes that, whatever their particular limitations and strengths, all share a general and serious flaw: their explanations were developed without prior examination of the behaviors to be explained. Drawing on a wide range of empirical studies that include his own careful field work, the author offers a new characterization of temporary gatherings. He presents a life cycle of gatherings and a taxonomy of forms of collective behavior within gatherings, as well as combinations of these forms and gatherings into larger events, campaigns and waves. McPhail also develops a new explanation for various ways in which purposive actors construct collective actions.
The Political Communication Reader gathers together key writings in a unique one-volume resource. The selected texts are grouped into thematic sections, each introduced by the editors, covering such areas as: the exercise of power, media and democracy the media and elections media effects political participation and the media the personalization of politics new technologies and the reshaping of political communication Available as a companion Reader to Brian McNair's Introduction to Political Communication textbook, students will find The Political Communication Reader a valuable resource in this popular subject area.
This book discusses two related themes concerning the role and processes of mass communication in society. The first deals with questions regarding the power of the media: how should it be defined? how is it wielded and by whom? are previous approaches and answers to such questions adequate? The second theme revolves around the divisions between the liberal pluralist and Marxist approaches to the analysis of the nature of the media. These divisions have, in recent years, been fundamental to the debate concerning the understanding of the role of mass communication, and the examination of them in this book will challenge the reader to look more closely at a number of assumptions that have long been taken for granted.
Theories about the decline of legitimacy or a legitimacy crisis are as old as democracy itself. Yet, representative democracy still exists, and the empirical evidence for a secular decline of political support in established democracies is limited, questionable, or absent. This lack of conclusive evidence calls into question existing explanatory theories of legitimacy decline. How valid are theories of modernization, globalization, media malaise, social capital, and party decline, if the predicted outcome (i.e. secular decline of political support) does not occur? And which (new) explanations can account for the empirical variation in political support in established democracies? This book systematically evaluates the empirical evidence for legitimacy decline in established democracies, the explanatory power of theories of legitimacy decline, and promises new routes in investigating and assessing political legitimacy. In doing so, the book provides a broad and thorough reflection on the state of the art of legitimacy research, and outlines a new research agenda on legitimacy.