Theorizing Communication: A HistoryThis book offers the first detailed intellectual history of communication study, from its beginnings in late nineteenth-century critiques of corporate capitalism and the burgeoning American wireline communications industry, to contemporary information theory and poststructuralist accounts of communicative activity. Schiller identifies a problematic split between manual and intellectual labor that outlasts each of the field's major conceptual departures, and from this vital perspective builds a rigorous critical survey of work aiming to understand the nexus of media, ideology, and information in a society. Looking closely at the thought of John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Daniel Bell, and others, Schiller carefully maps the transformation of ideas about communication and culture as issues of corporate power, mass persuasion, cultural imperialism, and information expansion succeed one another in prominence. Bringing his analysis of communication theory into the present, Schiller concludes by limning a unitary model of society's cultural/informational production, one that broadens the concept of "labor" to include all forms of human self-activity. Powerful, challenging, and original, Theorizing Communication: A History offers a brilliantly constructed overview of the history of communication study, and will interest scholars working in the field as well as those working in critical theory, cultural studies, and twentieth-century intellectual history. |
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academic activity agency Althusser Althusser's American analysis capitalism capitalist communica communication study comprised concept contemporary context continued corporate critical critique of cultural cultural imperialism cultural studies Culture and Society culture industry declared Dewey's discourse domination E. P. Thompson economic effects effort emergent emphasized experience forms Foucault Hall's historical human Ibid idea ideology increasingly intellectual John Dewey Journal labor language latter Lazarsfeld Left Review London Long Revolution Lukacs mainstream Marx Marxism Mass Communication mass culture mass media mass persuasion material means Merton Mills organized intelligence Perry Anderson political economy popular postwar practice production propaganda public opinion radical radio Raymond Williams reform reification role Schiller significant social relations social totality socialist Sociology sought specific structural Marxism structure struggle Stuart Hall t]he telegraph television theoretical Thompson tion tradition transnational turn white-collar Williams's workers Wright Mills wrote York
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Page vi - I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name...