New Books In Communications

The conversation about the Web and social media skews toward a discussion of the potential for connections, and how both individuals and organizations are using the media to communicate, to form communities, and to conduct business. Lacking, for the most part, is an investigation of the design of these spaces and how design, both good and bad, encourages or provokes certain kinds of interactions. In her new book, The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press, 2014), Judith Donath, Faculty Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, explores the theory and practice of interface design, and analyzes how design influences online interaction. With a view toward inspiring designers, and others, “to be more radical and thoughtful in their creations,” Donath provides a detailed examination of topics to be considered for beneficial design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…” From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelman‘s new book, the reader is introduced to a way of thinking about documents as tools for creating bodily experience, and as material objects situated within hierarchies and relationships of labor. Working beautifully at the intersection of media studies and history, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a thoughtful and inspiring collection of moments from the expansion of a modern “scriptural economy.” The case studies explore fill-in-the-blank forms in the context of late nineteenth century job printing, typescript books and scholarly communication in the 1930s, photocopies and photocopying in the 1960s and 1970s, and PDF files in the 1990s and beyond. The final chapter is a fascinating exploration of what it might look like to write a situated history of amateurdom and the figure of the “amateur,” a theme that re

Scholars and commentators have used metaphor in an attempt to describe the Web since public access began. Think of ideas like the information highway, cyberspace, the digital library, etc. In her new book, The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2014), Payal Arora, an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, takes a novel approach to the use of metaphor by examining the parallels between public common spaces and Web 2.0. In the book, Arora uses an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the historical, geographical, political and social issues related to public parks. In so doing, Arora, provides a foundation for how policymakers, organizations and individuals may conceptualizes the debates surrounding common spaces, particularly Web 2.0. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the Executive Committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. Lopez investigates the often hidden side of racism. He traces the political history of candidates for office using a set of coded phrases, allusions, and references to call attention to race, without ever uttering the word. In the post Brown v. Board era, Lopez argues, candidates learned a new language of strategic racism, substituting anti-government rhetoric for anti-black, anti-Latino, or anti-immigrant. In doing so, the dog whistle was heard as a much wider criticism of the social welfare state, and thus a direct attack not just on minorities, but on the middle class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The mid-’00s saw the rise of a political movement in Europe concerned with technocratic impositions on the ideals of free culture, privacy, government transparency and other technology policy issues. Led by online file sharers and developers, the Swedish Pirate Party was thrust into the spotlight in 2006 after law enforcement shut down the popular file sharing site The Pirate Bay. In his new book, Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests (MIT Press, 2014), Patrick Burkart, an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University and currently a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki, examines the rise of the Pirate Party in Sweden, and later Germany. To do so, Burkart analyzes ideas about the colonization of Internet communities and resources using critical communications theories. In do doing, Burkart provides a foundation for the examination of the spread of Pirate parties across the globe as well as the rise of similarly aligned political movements. Learn more about your ad choic

John Nathan Anderson’s new book, Radio’s Digital Dilemma: Broadcasting in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2014), documents the somewhat tortured path of broadcast radio’s digital transition in the United States.  Beginning his analysis with rise of neoliberal communications policy in the 1980s, Anderson charts the development of the idea of digitalization by closely examining two key archival sources: The Federal Communication Commission’s extensive archive of rulemaking and public comments and the archives of the two most important trade journals in broadcast radio, Radio World and Current. As Anderson explores in the book, FCC regulatory neglect coupled with the huge consolidation within the radio industry following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 resulted in a digital transition that was dictated largely by commercial interests.  For example, the most important decision about digital radio – the engineering standard for digital broadcasting – was determined by a federation of corporations t

What is the value of music and why does it matter? These are the core questions in David Hesmondhalgh‘s new book Why Music Matters (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). The book attempts a critical defence of music in the face of both uncritical populist post-modernism and more economistic neo-liberal understandings of music’s worth. Hesmondhalgh develops this critical defence of music by exploring its importance to individuals, to places, to communities and to nations, eventually engaging with the global aspects of music’s role and position in society. The book seeks to argue against some common positions in music, reasserting the importance of embodied experiences, such as dancing, whilst taking issue with the idea of the rock star as hero. Moreover Hesmondhalgh shows the social position and social structures surrounding music, whilst remaining attentive to the aesthetic qualities of both genres and individual pieces of music. Most notably the book is ambivalent about much of the promises claimed by the advocates of

Leilani Nishime‘s Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014) challenges the dominant U.S. cultural narrative that imagines multiracial people as symbols of a future United States where race has ceased to function as a viable category. Nishime considers how representations of mixed race people often negate the significance of race by seeing racial mixture as an unprecedented social development that can promise a future free of race. By reading an archive of visual pop-culture that includes the celebrity of Tiger Woods, the film series “The Matrix” and reality television, Nishime considers how various narratives of multiracial Asian Americans can rupture naturalized notions of racial difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, educators, and legislators concerned with issues of privacy, harm prevention, and and cyberbullying. In her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP, 2014), danah boyd, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Research Assistant Professor at NYU, and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, demystifies teen use of social media for communication. In particular, boyd uses ethnographic interviewing and observation techniques to examine the how, what and why of youth use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Oxford University Press series on digital politics has produced several new books that we have featured on the podcast. Interviews with Dave Karpf, Dan Kreiss, and Muzammil Hussain are available in previous podcasts. One of the latest from the series is Jennifer Stromer-Galley new book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (OUP 2014). Stromer-Galley is associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. This excellent new book is a bit of a walk down memory lane. Do you remember the early search features on Yahoo! and those slow loading webpages of the late 1990s? Stromer-Galley pieces together the use of the internet from 1996 through 2012. We learn about some of the ways the promise of the internet to democratize the presidential campaign process has largely failed. Presidential websites have nearly always sent information out, but rarely invited information back in. And even when they have, that information has never been as central to the campaign as often promised

Digital Communications Technologies, or DCTs, like the Internet offer the infrastructure and means of forming a networked society. These technologies, now, are a mainstay of political campaigns on every level, from city, to state, to congressional, and, of course, presidential. In her new book, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age  (Oxford University Press, 2014), Jennifer Stromer-Galley, an associate professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University, discusses the impact of DCTs on presidential campaigning. In particular, Stromer-Galley takes a historical look at the past five presidential campaigns and the use of the Internet by incumbents and challengers to win the election. The promise of DCTs with respect to political campaigning was greater citizen participation in the democratic process. Stromer-Galley analyzes whether DCTs have lived up to this promise, or if the idea of the Internet promoting great political engagement is merely a myth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho

We tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possible because of standards. In his book Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dr. Andrew L. Russell examines standards and the standardization process in technology with an emphasis on standards in information networks. In particular, Russell examines the interdisciplinary historical foundations of openness and open standards by exploring the movement toward standardization in engineering, as well as the communication industry. Paying careful attention to the politics of standardization, Russell’s book considers the ideological foundations of openness, as well as the rhetoric surrounding this ideology. Notable also is the consideration of standardization as a critique of previous ideology and a rejection of centralized control. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Twenty years ago, when I was studying abroad in Europe, the only way to keep track of my teams back in the US was to sneak looks in The International Herald Tribune at the newspaper kiosk (the price of the paper was beyond my meager budget). Twelve years after that, when I returned to Europe as a researching professor, I was able to watch any event I wanted online. I read the commentary on my home teams in my hometown newspaper. I tracked the rumors of trades and signings on the fan sites. The only obstacle I faced in following my teams was the difference in time zones. Even though the games were available, I seldom had the energy to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch them. The consumption of sport has changed profoundly in the last two decades. Higher bandwidths and faster processors now bring events to our laptop with the same crispness and color as our televisions. Sports leagues and networks are making more and more events available online. And we have a glimpse into the private lives of star athlet

Karma Chavez is the author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Illinois University Press, 2013). Dr. Chavez is assistant professor of Communication Arts and Chicano and Latina Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also the co-founder of the Queer Migration Research Network and co-editor of Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices Feminist Practices in Communications Studies. Queer Migration Politics focuses on the intersection of political interest between immigration activists and LGBT activists. Chavez shows some of the inclusionary approaches taken by mainstream groups to advocate for a small handful of common policy objectives. The campaign to change US law to permit gay and lesbian citizens to sponsor foreign partners was prominent on the agenda. But Chavez’s approach challenges conventional politics by offering a “differential vision” of what coalitional politics might mean. The book has a lot for political scientists and sociologists, as

In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book details the country’s halting attempts to craft a copyright regime responsive both to its position as a net importer of published work and to its peculiar political geography as a British dominion bordering the United States. Bannerman charts Canada’s early, largely unsuccessful effort to craft a less restrictive policy in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 1886 Berne Convention-the multilateral agreement that established the enduring framework for the international copyright system. The main obstacle, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was Britain’s insistence on a uniform and Berne-friendly policy throughout the empire. Even as those imperial constraints fell away over the first half of the 20th century, Canada increasingly aligned with powerful net exporters like France and Britain–in large part, Bannerman shows,

“When we criticize the news, who are we really criticizing?” This is the final question asked by Professor Joseph Uscinski in his book, The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism(NYU Press, 2014). The answer, Uscinski says in his interview, is us–the consumer. News producers, he writes, are merely responding to the demands of consumers, adjusting news content based on ratings, polls and audience demographics. The People’s News views news through the lens of news as a commodity beholden to market forces, not as a type of media. Combining the academic disciplines of media effects and political economy, The People’s News is a well-researched and well-reported look at what happens when the concepts of free press and democracy collide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Darnton, author of books, articles, and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. Darnton joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the future of libraries, the printed press, and his project – the Digital Public Library of America, or D.P.L.A. – which he hopes will foster a culture of “Open Access” to help promote the free communication of knowledge and sharing of intellectual wealth in order to create this “digital commonwealth.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Burkart‘s Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Conflicts (MIT Press, 2014) considers the democratic potential and theoretical significance of groups espousing radical perspectives on intellectual property and cyber-liberty. Focusing on the Swedish Pirate Party, Burkart details the history of these movements, noting the ways in which they have impacted both the local politics of Europe and the international culture industries. Employing conceptual models drawn from both critical theory and new social movement theory, Burkart makes a compelling case that the politics of piracy must understood as a defense of common culture. Just as social movements have come together to protect the environment, pirate politics aim to keep the Internet a space in individual and communal rights are not overrun by the interests of governments and corporations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Videography is a powerful tool for recording and representing aspects of human society and culture, and anthropologists have long used – and debated the use of – video as a tool to study indigenous and traditional peoples. Indigenous people themselves, however, have increasingly turn video towards their own cultural and communal ends, and this indigenous use of video raises its own questions: who in indigenous communities will control video production? How can video be integrated into indigenous life? And how should indigenous videomakers relate to state and institutional forces. In Indigenous Media in Mexico: Culture, Community, and the State (Duke University Press, 2013), Erica Cusi Wortham examines these issues in the case of “video indígena” in the  Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas during the 1990s.  Indigenous Media in Mexico places video indígena into the historical context of 1990s Mexico, a period marked by both the constitutional recognition of indigenous groups as integral to the Mexican stat

In Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity, Melissa Aronczyk locates the rise of nation branding as a response to the perceived need to sculpt national identity in the face of a fiercely competitive global economy. In tracking the history of the nation-branding phenomenon, Aronczyk recounts the rise and spread of the very idea of national “competitiveness,” a discourse that, in effect, created a market that branding specialists then tapped. The book engages with the large scholarly literature on nations and nationalism, arguing that nation branding should not be dismissed as merely the invasion of business practices into the national imaginary–though it has this character, undeniably–but that the practice should also be read as a discourse that maintains, extends, and reconstitutes the nation. Based on dozens of interviews with nation-branding specialist over a five-year period, Aronczyk develops major case studies of Poland and Canada in particular, and substantial treatments of a numbe