New Books In Communications

When you hear “Twentieth Century Fox,” I doubt you know where the source of “Fox” in the name. In her book, The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (Harper, 2017), Vanda Krefft presents a detailed biography of one of the founders of the American film industry, whose successes are largely unknown because of his ultimate downfall.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) is an anthology of essays from Dorothy Noyes, professor of English and Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University and president of the American Folklore Society. The collection of essays takes aim at some of the critical questions that the discipline of folklore faces in the twenty-first century. From seminal keyword essays (monsters, she calls them) on group, tradition, and aesthetics that set out the state of the field, to studies of the historical uses of tradition at different moments across Europe, to critiques of present-day slogan-concepts like Intangible Cultural Heritage and resilience, Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) sets out to see how the discipline of folklore, with its emphases on vernacular theorization—as opposed to grand or high theories—provides unique insights into society more broadly. Ultimately, it seems, the strength and weaknesses of folklore might simul

As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of second-order systems theory to the analysis of literature and media more broadly. The staggering scope of Clarke’s multidisciplinary erudition is on full display in the monograph, Neocybernetics and Narrative, out from University of Minnesota Press in 2014. In picking up Niklas Luhmann’s neologism “neocybernetics” in place of a more standard second-order cybernetic label, Clarke carves out a theoretical continuum for his thinking that runs along a trajectory from Heinz von Foerster’s notions of the observer, through George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition, and right up to, and including, Niklas Luhmann’s controversial extension of autopoiesis theory to metabiotic social systems; a theoretical move most often excluded from more orthodox second-order cybernetic thinking. The fo

Shanto Iyengar is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He has written extensively on news media and political communication in contemporary democracy. His most recent book is titled Media Politics: A Citizen’s Guide (W. W. Norton, 2015); new edition is forthcoming this year. His current research focuses on political polarization, framing effects, and political affect. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Literacy is often portrayed as a social good. Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Hoda Yousef has a different take on it, portraying it as a tool. Yousef uses reading and writing to interrogate how new social practices were changing Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrating how they were used to further divide or fracture the public sphere. Literate, illiterate, and semi-literate Egyptians all engaged in the written word via different means, be they petition-writers, those who appealed to scribes, or coffee-house frequenters who all gathered to hear a newspaper be read. Ultimately, it was the emergence of this diversely literate population that shaped the Egyptian nation that emerged in the twentieth century. Hoda Yousef is assistant professor at Denison University, previously she served as an assistant professor of history at Franklin and Marshall College. She is a historian of the modern Middle

In Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (Yale University Press, 2016), Christine E. Evans reveals that Soviet television in the Brezhnev era was anything but boring. Whether producing music shows such as Little Blue Flame, game shows like Let’s Go Girls or dramatic mini-series, the creators of Soviet programming in the 1950s through 1970s sought to produce television that was festive. Evans demonstrates that television programmers conducted audience research and audience voting as they attempted to meet Soviet citizens’ expectations and hold their interest. Rather than stagnating, the producers and filmmakers experimented with multiple forms, in particular in presenting the news. In this interview, Christine Evans discusses her thoroughly researched and entertaining study, and what we can learn about Soviet society in the Brezhnev era through the television it created and watched. Christine E. Evans is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Amand

Aidan Smith has written a timely and important analysis of the way that we understand images, masculinity, and femininity, especially through the lens of presidential campaigns and political advertising. Smith’s book, Gender, Heteronormativity, and the American Presidency (Routledge, 2017) explores the idea of heteronormativity within our implicit and explicit conceptions of the American presidency—thus focusing not only on how masculinity is deployed to create particular images of candidates running for office, but also how femininity is used for both first ladies, and for female candidates for the White House who must negotiate an even more complicated set of expectations given our two hundred year history with the occupants of the Oval Office. Smith delves into the complexity of gender performance in presidential politics, and how embedded expectations of patriarchy, fatherhood, manly success, and particular experiences (wartime, boardroom, etc.) all contribute to expectations that are applied to those run

Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, including the present book Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia (Oxford University Press, 2016) which won the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize. Bringing together two of her longstanding areas of research interest in this book, Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and applies it to the evolving political situation in Catalonia. In this interview, Woolard discusses the key theoretical and contextual elements of the book, broadly following its three-part structure. First, the concepts of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, sociolinguistic naturalism are introduced, and Woolard sets out the changing ideological grounding of linguistic authority there over the course of twe

In his book Reality TV (Routledge, 2017), author Jon Kraszewski explores reality television’s relationship to the American cityscape. Starting with show such as Candid Camera and An American Family, Kraszewski positions reality television in cities where individuals were able to thrive regardless of social class. In this space, early reality television created a laboratory for individuals. Moving to the early 1990s and beyond, Kraszewski challenges the ways in which reality television persisted in this relationship with the city although most viewers do not have the means to live in cities. Using case studies of how the Bravo network exploits the urban servant, the examination of “Boston” Rob Marino and Tiffany “New York” Pollard as reality show representative of major global American cities, and how shows such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Alaska: The Last Frontier, and Swamp People, Krasweski present the complex and often problematic relationships between American urban space and the way in which reality tel

How do technological advances and changing archival practices alter historical memory? In what ways have developments in the preservation and dissemination of historical material already impacted how scholars and the public engage with the past? These are questions that Jeffrey Shandler, Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, grapples with in his new book, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press, 2017) Shandler’s thought-provoking and skillfully written book addresses these problems through the lens of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. Specifically, he examines the wealth of material curated by the Shoah Foundations Visual History Archive, which houses a wealth of over 50,000 newly-digitized videos of interviews conducted with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. Shandler analyzes this footage by reading “against the grain” and using the testimonies for purposes other than those intended by the Archive’s creators when

Christopher Grobe’s The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York University Press, 2017) traces the ways the performance of confession permeated and transformed a wide range of media in postwar America. Grobe explores how confession—from the confessional poets of the 1960s to contemporary reality TV—is both constructed and authentic, artful even in its ostensible artlessness, and always on the move between and across media. The work’s archive is expansive, placing in conversation poetry, performance art, comedy, legal confession, film, and reality TV, genres whose conventions transform and whose boundaries blur when confronted with artists impulses to confess, to stage what Grobe calls “breakthroughs” out of both generic and sociocultural containment. Laying bare the ways confessional performances are stylized and mediated to elicit “a satiety of experience which can be taken as reality” while taking seriously artists’ attempts to reveal and perform an authentic se

With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine as it was coined in the subtitle of Norbert Wiener’s field defining book of 1948. While the reflexive turn of second-order cybernetics in the 1970s led the field down new paths (and, unfortunately, to the margins of mainstream academia) in the West, Soviet thinkers continued to develop the control scientific implications of the field in a manner that remained central to the scientific enterprise of that nation. In his densely packed book, Cybernetics: Past to Future (Springer Verlag, 2016), Dmitry Novikov provides a detailed and erudite analysis of the fields development as a kind of meta-science or philosophy of the varied strands of control theory across technological, biological, and social systems. As the current Director of the Institute of Control Sciences of the Russian Academy of Science, Dr. Novikov i

As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on going “Digital Revolution,” you would certainly get the impression that a Brave New World is emerging, one nothing like anything that we’ve seen before. And, in a way, this is true: we—meaning humans—have never lived in an environment with smartphones, social media, and the firehose of “information” that is the Internet. We’re always on and always connected in a way we have never been before. But, as Andrew Keen points out in his smart new book How To Fix The Future (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018), there is also a sense in which we have been here before, namely, in the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century. Then, too, technology and new forms of organization upended the way almost everyone in the industrializing world lived. (For more, see Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim, unless you l

In The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Kevin Patrick examines the history of The Phantom—an American comic strip superhero that made his debut in 1936. Although not popular in the United States, The Phantom knows a long history and popularity in Australia, Sweden, and India. In The Phantom Unmasked, Patrick explores this history. By tracing the publication history of The Phantom and connecting its success to the media licensing industries starting in the 1930s and 40s, Patrick presents an under-explored history to show the role of this comic in international markets and its importance for understanding how international markets worked. In The Phantom, Patrick assesses how historical, cultural, political, and economic conditions impacted The Phantom’s rise in popularity in Australia, Sweden, and India. In addition, he surveys Phans in order to explain how they have come to love the superhero. Well researched and informative, The Phantom Unmasked adds to the burgeo

Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. In his new book for the MIT Essential Knowledge Series, The Future (MIT Press, 2017), Nick Montfort examines the writings of previous futurist writers, thinkers, and designers to provide an understanding of how the future can be constructed. In so doing, Montfort argues that the future is something we can shape instead of only predict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Corvino is Professor of Philosophy at the Wayne State University in Detroit. His academic work focuses on topics in moral, social, and legal philosophy surrounding sexuality, gender, marriage, religious conviction, and discrimination. But John is also an active public philosopher who frequently participates in public debates over these topics. He produces and appears in a popular YouTube series of short videos devoted to the philosophical discussion of controversial topics. He is the author of What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, co-author (with Maggie Ghallagher) of Debating Same Sex Marriage, and.co-author (with Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis) of Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, all published with Oxford University Press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!

Can we have sound media that is ecologically sound? Can we fine tune our media production and consumption habits to a greener key? How can an environmental perspective on sound media contribute to our understanding of how media culture is involved in the ecological crisis? These are just some of the questions Jacob Smith is trying to answer in his latest book, Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015). The book brings an ecological critique to the history of sound media technologies and contributes with an environmental perspective to the field of sound studies. It is more than a methodological and theoretical exploration. It is a reckoning with our media consumption practices in an age where speed and volume are taken for granted, and alternatives to the digital are disregarded with huge costs. Hartz Canary Training Record is the jingle used in the episode and was kindly provided by Jacob Smith. It was cut and edited for the purpose of this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

The list is the origin of culture. At least, that’s according to Umberto Eco, whose words open Liam Cole Young‘s new book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Young follows shifting functions of the list through history, revealing a form that “mediates boundaries between administration and art, knowledge and poetics, sense and nonsense” (10). Where systems of order surround and enframe human society, the list is there. Lists shape and shift the social world as new uses for the list are discovered, adapted, modified, and abandoned. As a searching exploration of the way that our intellectual tools “simultaneously conceal and reveal, enforce and subvert social systems,” List Cultures proves to be a rewardingly vigorous and sweeping intellectual history. List Cultures restores formal analysis to a critical discourse divided between analyses of institutions, contexts, and particular historical uses of texts. Beginning with a rereading of the earli

Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from the origins of telegraphy in the early 1800s to the advent of computing in the 1950s – the book explores the at times fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity. It covers some of the earliest and varied attempts to make the Chinese script fit for Western communication systems, taking the reader on a journey through Chinese telegraphy, Morse code, typewriters and early computing. In addition, Mullaney includes reference to the many failed attempts, ideas and approaches in the history of Chinese information technology through a series of lively and insightful stories and people. Perhaps most interestingly, Mullaney covers how various inbuilt linguistic inequalities in turn eventually led to the evolution of innovative strategies and technologies, including input method and predictive text. Ric

The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford University Press, 2017) dispels the myth that transparency of information will result in a perfect government. Dr. Mark Fenster discusses the motivations of transparency movements and justifications for state secrecy. Through the lens of communications theory, Fenster raises questions about the utility of disclosed information and how it may or may not be deemed valuable by the public. Fenster also examines the state’s ability to keep secrets and what, if any, outcomes result from information disclosure. In conclusion, Fenster asserts transparency, on its own, will not fix the state, but focused efforts on good governance just might. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices