New Books In Communications

The millennial generation (those born from 1980 through the beginning of the 21st century) now comprises the largest voting bloc in the American electorate. In Media, Millennials, and Politics: The Coming of Age of the Next Political Generation (Lexington Books, 2016), Alison N. Novak argues that these 50 million young citizens are misunderstood, marginalized and sometimes overtly insulted by the news media. Writers, newscasters and pundits label them “apathetic, uninvolved and entitled,” while ignoring clear evidence that many millennials are deeply concerned about the course of the nation. Novak examines coverage of millennials in cable television and online news, finding that journalists often substitute stereotypes and rhetorical shortcuts for rigorous examination of how members of this generation think and act. She concludes by calling the media to task and demanding that it present a fuller, more nuanced picture of a group that will soon inherit the reins of power in the United States. James Kates is

In his new book The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Ethan Michaeli charts the riveting history of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s longest running and most significant black periodicals. Founded in 1905 by publisher Robert S. Abbott, the Defender came to play a central role in regional and national black politics; drawing African Americans north to Chicago as part of the Great Migration out of the South, condemning Jim Crow and bolstering the electoral power of black America, and helping to secure the election of presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. Relying on exhaustive research, including dozens of interviews and extensive archival material, Ethan has constructed the most in-depth and illuminating history of the Defender ever published – highlighting not only the impact of publisher Abbott and iconic columnists such as Ida B. Wells and Langston Hughes, but also the hundreds of other journalists and editor

In a fragmented media world where anyone can speak, professional journalists are no longer the “gatekeepers” who decide what the public will see and hear. Instead, citizens are barraged with claims, assertions and innuendo that have not been subjected to the journalistic discipline of verification. Fact-checking, pioneered by bloggers and developed by professional news organizations, attempts to get at the elusive truth by subjecting political figures’ words to careful scrutiny. In Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2016) Lucas Graves examines the fact-checkers’ work and plumbs its potential, its limits and its hazards. He concludes that fact-checking, while imperfect, is a genuine reform movement that is reshaping American journalism and the long-cherished ideal of objectivity. James Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philade

I serve on a planning committee for the annual Holocaust Commemoration in Wichita, where I live and teach. Every year when we convene, we remind ourselves that we need to invite survivors to speak. With survivors aging, the time is quickly approaching when we will no longer be able to hear about their experiences firsthand. But of course this isn’t quite true. For more than a quarter century, organizations have devoted time, attention and resources to preserving the memories of survivors. In this way, those of us interested in hearing these stories–whether academic researchers or ‘ordinary’ people–can access the power and authenticity of survivor narratives through recorded video testimony. All of this is a good thing. But as Noah Shenker reminds us, the appearance of authenticity can distract us from the very real impact of the ways interviews are staged. Previous scholarship has alerted us to the need to consider the dynamics between the interviewer and interviewee in. In Reframing Holocaust Testimony (In

With the 2016 presidential election in full swing and rhetoric surrounding each candidate becoming more polarized, how does gender impact the way that people behave politically? Monika McDermott in her new book Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2016) seeks to answer this question. In her analysis, McDermott argues that gendered personalities are a powerful determinant of political behavior and involvement. The campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump also provide interesting insights into how the politics of gendered personalities are enacted in the contemporary political climate. Monika McDermott is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University as well as an election polling analyst for CBS News and The New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It feels like schools are in the midst of unprecedented change — sometimes more in different places and sometimes more in different ways. Many people are thinking about education differently than they did a few years ago. Others still are learning and assessing in new ways, using different tools, and collaborating with different partners. But in what ways are schools changing the most? What happens when multiple changes occur simultaneously? How can people who have different relationships to schools prepare themselves and support change? In Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Milton Chen draws upon his years of experience using television and the Internet to share educational material in order to explain what schools look like when separate school innovations begin to converge. Chen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @miltonchen2. Trevor Mattea is an educational cons

Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), it was he who pioneered the concept of wireless global communications. As a teenager he was fascinated by the recent discovery of radio waves, and by the time he was in his early twenties he had developed an apparatus that used these waves to transmit and receive messages. Traveling to London, he demonstrated a gift for publicity as he established himself as a technological pioneer in an age of rapidly emerging wonders. Thanks to his unassailable patents, Marconi soon created a global communications empire, one that made his name synonymous with radio and was so dominant that it brought the nations of the world together in an unprecedented international agreement to regulate the field of wireless telegraphy. Raboy recounts Marconi’s roving life as a celebrated figure, the development of his multinational business concern

New technology has made us more connected than ever before. This has its advantages: instantaneous communication, expanded circles of influence, access to more information. And, of course, our connectedness has concomitant drawbacks including issues with privacy and safety. In Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life (Sage, 2016), Mary Chayko, a professor at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, examines the influence technology is having on society and the ways that members of society are shaping the uses of new technology. Using scholarship from communications, information studies, sociology and other fields, Chayko weaves together an interdisciplinary analysis of what our myriad connections mean for the present and for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International Communication at City University London, charts the beginnings of the format for TV shows, through the globalization of the trade in TV formats, to conclude with reflections on the future of local and global TV markets. The book uses an eclectic set of theoretical frames, including Global Value Chains, World Systems Theory and work of the Annales School, to chart the political economy of the TV format. Using a wide range of examples, detailed case studies of local markets and local production systems (including the UK), the book shows how the format is now crucial to the modern television industry encompassing everything from the game show to the long form drama. The book will be of interest to all media and communications scholars, as well as anyone keen to know why we have the sorts of television programmes we have on our screens. Learn more about your

Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kreiss is associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Why did it take more than 20 people to write a tweet for the Romney campaign? Why did dozens of new companies emerge from recent Democratic campaigns? Prototype Politics argues that each party has adopted digital technologies in some very different ways and that these differences have had major consequences. Democrats and Republicans have had varied approaches to investing in technology and in technology expertise. Once the technology leaders, Republicans have lagged behind Democrats in recent cycles, investing smaller amounts of money overall and placing much less organization emphasis on digital strategy. It remains to be seen how these difference

In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches this endeavor from the perspective of a legal and cultural historian, tracking the correlation between a growing American image consciousness and the rise of laws, such as the tort of invasion of privacy and damages for emotional distress, which enabled individuals to control and defend their public persona. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seinfeld is often referred to as the greatest television show of all time. Although this may be debated, there few who would argue that it holds a prominent place in television history and popular culture. In her new book, Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything (Simon and Schuster, 2016), author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong presents the history of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld’s “silly little show” from its struggling beginnings to its life today beyond the screen. Keishin Armstrong brings readers behind-the-scenes of Seinfeld’s inception and into the world of a show which blurs the lines between television and reality. Well-researched and thoughtfully written, Seinfeldia introduces readers to the many levels of Seinfeld’s success. From David and Seinfeld’s unorthodox way of running a television show and the writers’ negotiating for their bit in a script to the myriad of ways Seinfeld is still relevant in todays popular culture, Seinfeldia presents a thorough and easy to read history of a show

Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland, 2014) analyzes how and why cases of child sexual abuse have been systematically concealed in Orthodox Jewish communities. The book (the first of its kind) thoroughly examines a number of recent cover-ups in detail, showing how denial, backlash against victims, and the manipulation of the secular justice system have placed Orthodox Jewish community leaders in the position of defending, protecting, and enabling child abusers. The book also examines the disappointing treatment of this issue in popular media, while dissecting the institutions that contribute to the cover-ups, including two–rabbinic courts and local Orthodox “patrols”–that are more or less unique to Orthodox Jewish communities. Finally, the book explores the cultural factors that have contributed to this tragedy, and concludes with hopes and proposals for future reform Michael Lesher, a writer and a lawyer, has published a number of articles about child abuse and is c

Paul Roquet’s wonderful new book begins with an offering of jellyfish and proceeds to teach us how to read the air. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) looks carefully at the phenomenon of ambient subjectivication or, the emergence of self with and through ambient media in modern Japan. Beginning in the 1970s, atmosphere was becoming ambient, according to Roquet, and the emergence and proliferation of new techniques of ambient subjectivication reflected a shift in how the person was understood, away from collective self-understanding and toward a model rooted in a liberal ideal of autonomy and self-determination. Each chapter of the book looks at some specific way that music, film, video, and literature from the 1970s onward have incorporated forms of ambient subjectivication, from the Erik Satie boom and the birth of environmental music of the late 1970s to the music of artists like Hatakeyama Chihei (whose 2006 Minima Moralia I highly recommend!), to films like

In Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York University Press, 2014), Josh Lambert, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UMass Amherst, explores the role of Jews in the history of obscenity in America. Through a series of case studies, he shows how Jews battled censorship as writers, editors, publishers, critics, and lawyers. In their engagements in battles over obscenity, Jews have played a previously underappreciated role in transforming American culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Something we might think of as the Soviet internet once existed, according to Benjamin Peters‘ new book, and its failure was neither natural nor inevitable. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016) traces the history of early efforts to network the Soviet state, from the global spread of cybernetics in the middle of the 20th century (paying careful attention to the different ways that cybernetic thought was articulated in different international settings) to the undoing of the All-State Automated System (OGAS) between 1970-1989. The book argues that the primary reason that the Soviets struggled to network their nation rests on the institutional conditions supporting the scientific knowledge base and the command economy. In developing this argument, Peters guides readers through a story about economic cybernetics, the relationships between military and civilian sectors of Soviet society, computer networks as metaphors for brains or bodies, saxophone-playing robot

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. – Richard Brautigan, 1967 By the time Richard Brautigan distributed his fifth collection of poetry, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, on the streets of San Francisco, his reference to “a cybernetic ecology” was not an obscurantist metaphor so much as a direct nod to a pervasive and generative intellectual discourse. In The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015), historian of technology Ron Kline traces the emergence of this protean discourse, along with the shifting demarcations occurring within and around it as cybernetics worked its way between technology and theorization of the social world. In doing so, he provides perhaps the most comprehensive and incisive history to date of American cybernetics and information theory. While c

How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Studies and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, explores are range of examples to probe the decade of Right Wing government between 2002 and 2012. Drawing on the implicit/explicit distinction in cultural policy studies, Ahearne considers how core cultural concepts have changed in France, for example the French idea of ‘laicity’ and state secularism, as well as discussing specific cultural examples. These include television and media policy, museum building, eduction policy and the political uses of French history. Overall the book is framed by the continuities and differences between the Chriac and Sarkozy regimes in France, along with the struggle for hegemony over culture and thus over government. The book will be of interest to cultural policy, cultural and media studies and French scholars, as wel

The application of behavioral science inside government has gained steam over the past few years with the creation of so-called “Nudge units” popping up in countries around the world. Their goals are simple: Use the lessons of behavioral science to make government work better. The Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom and the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences team in the U.S. Canada has a team now. Australia. Singapore. All the Scandinavian countries. Behavioral science teams now have a bit of buzz.  Before this buzz, there was BIAS – the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, the first major opportunity to apply a behavioral science lens to programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States. The project, which began in 2010 funded through the Administration of Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, sought to apply behavioral insights to issues related to the design and implementation of social service programs

Meredith Conroy is the author of Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). Conroy is assistant professor of Political Science at California State University, San Bernardino. Joining the conversation is Lilly Goren, professor of political science at Carrol University. Does gendered language relate to electoral success? Does the most masculine candidate win the race? In this book, Conroy unpacked how sex, gender, and identity interact during presidential campaigns. She finds that the media portrays presidential candidates as masculine, feminine, or neutral, and that these descriptions relate to candidate success. In the last several elections, only Barack Obama in 2008 won despite being portrayed as the less masculine candidate. Conroys findings provide a lens through which the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump can be better understood, and suggest ways that subtle gender bias shapes elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices