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Media and Communication
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Media and Communication

Second Edition


October 2020 | 360 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Media and Communication traces the historical development of media and communication studies in the 20th century. 

Paddy Scannell explores how the field formed and developed in both North America and in Europe, expertly introducing and explaining a host of essential media thinkers, ideas and concepts along the way.

Including a new chapter on media events, this second edition of a classic text provides a comprehensive yet personal – and always accessible – analysis of media and communication theory and history. It is an invaluable resource for students across media and communication studies, cultural studies, and sociology.
 
Part I The masses
 
1. Mass communication: Lazarsfeld, Adorno, Merton, USA, 1930s and 1940s
 
2. Mass culture: Horkheimer, Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin, Germany/USA, 1930s and 1940s
 
3. The end of the masses: Merton, Lazarsfeld, Riesman, Katz, USA, 1940s and 1950s
 
Part II Everyday life
 
4. Culture and communication: Leavis, Hoggart, Williams, England, 1930s–1950s
 
5. Communication and technology: Innis, McLuhan, Canada, 1950s–1960s
 
6. Communication as interaction: Goffman and Garfinkel, USA, 1950s–1970s
 
Part III Communicative rationality and irrationality
 
7. Communication and language: Austin, Grice, Sacks, Levinson, UK/USA, 1950s–1970s
 
8. Communication as ideology: Hall, UK, 1960s and 1970s
 
9. Communication and Publicness: Habermas, Germany (USA/UK), 1950s–1990s
 
10. Communication and celebration, Dayan (France) and Katz (Israel), 1990s
 
Conclusion
 
Afterword (2020)
 
Index

This is a lucid, generous, and strikingly original account of the emergence of media and communication studies as a vibrant academic field. Moving across sociology, critical theory, and cultural studies, Scannell takes stock of the key concepts and questions that have come to define the field over the past six decades. In this expanded and revised edition, Scannell identifies what is distinctive about the media of the 20th century - the immense power of live broadcasting and unscripted talk in public in shaping both the eventful and the everyday across much of the world. The result is a milestone intellectual history of media and communication studies that sets the conceptual coordinates for our digital present and future.

Aswin Punathambekar
University of Virginia

Anyone who wants to understand the intellectual roots of the present study of media and communication needs to read this book. Scannell’s achievement is quite unique: he puts the American, the European and the British traditions of inquiry into productive dialogue with each other and shows some surprising affinities between them as well as some prescient foresights. The breadth of his scholarship is invariably enlightening, lucid in its accounts and generous in its judgements.

Martin Montgomery
Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Macau and Visiting Professor in Media at the University of Strathclyde

Interesting, current and quality text for my students

Dr Memory Mabika
Communication and Applied Language Studies, University of Venda
April 27, 2022

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ISBN: 9781446297087
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