New Books In Communications

On November 20, 1983, a three-hour made-for-TV movie The Day After premiered on ABC. Set in the heartland of Lawrence, Kansas, the film depicted the events before, during, and after a Soviet nuclear attack with vivid scenes of the post-apocalyptic hellscape that would follow. The film was viewed by over 100 million Americans and remains the highest rated TV movie in history. After the premiere, ABC News aired an episode of Viewpoint, a live special featuring some of the most prominent public intellectuals of the debating the virtues of the Arms Race and the prospect of a winnable nuclear war. The response to the film proved more powerful than perhaps any film or television program in the history of media. Aside from its record-shattering Nielsen ratings, it enjoyed critical acclaim as well as international box office success in theatrical screenings. The path to primetime for The Day After proved nearly as treacherous as the film's narrative. Battles ensued behind the scenes at the network, between the networ

What (and why) can and can't we say? What do empirical examples both at home and abroad tell us about how we should protect freedom of speech? How do we create an environment where speech is not only permitted but encouraged? Does freedom of speech bring people together or sow discord? Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU and Professor Emerita at New York Law School, brings her decades of expertise to bear explaining why freedom of speech is foundational to so many other fundamental rights. Nadine Strossen is Professor Emerita at New York Law School, and was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991-2008. She is a Senior Fellow with FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford UP, 2018) and Free Speech: What Everyo

Listen to this interview of Cristiano Matricardi, Senior Editor at Nature Communications. We talk about just how closely tied are the research and the communication of the research. Cristiano Matricardi : "From my perspective, that is, as a professional editor, as someone who reads above 500 new submissions a year plus all the papers for due diligence — from my perspective, I see that too many of the submissions are trying to create good narratives to sell the work better — which is okay, sure, but we need to focus on results, and we need to ask just: 'What do you want to do with this paper? What's your reason for attempting to publish it? Is that reason to gratify or oblige the editors? Or is your reason to transfer a concept to your fellow scientists?' Because if you want really to transfer a concept to your fellow scientists, then you need to structure your narrative in a way that they'll be receptive to and in a way that will prove useful for them, that is, useful for these working scientists and not usef

Laila Shereen Sakr's book Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford UP, 2023) explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between

Editor Abigail Bainbridge and contributing author Sonja Schwoll join this discussion of Conservation of Books (Routledge 2023), the highly anticipated reference work on global book structures and their conservation. Offering the first modern, comprehensive overview on this subject, this volume takes an international approach. Written by over 70 specialists in conservation and conservation science based in 19 countries, its 26 chapters cover traditional book structures from around the world, the materials from which they are made and how they degrade, and how to preserve and conserve them. It also examines the theoretical underpinnings of conservation: what and how to treat, and the ethical, cultural, and economic implications of treatment. Technical drawings and photographs illustrate the structures and treatments examined throughout the book. Ultimately, readers gain an in-depth understanding of the materiality of books in numerous global contexts and reflect on the practical considerations involved in their

Privacy is not dead: Students care deeply about their privacy and the rights it safeguards. They need a way to articulate their concerns and guidance on how to act within the complexity of our current information ecosystem and culture of surveillance capitalism. Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2023) edited by Sarah Hartman-Caverly and Alexandria Chisholm, can help you teach privacy literacy, evolve the privacy practices at your institution, and re-center the individuals behind the data and the ethics behind library work. Divided into four sections: What is Privacy Literacy? Protecting Privacy Educating about Privacy Advocating for Privacy Chapters cover topics including privacy literacy frameworks; digital wellness; embedding a privacy review into digital library workflows; using privacy literacy to challenge price discrimination; privacy pedagogy; and promoting privacy literacy and positive digital citizenship thr

Dr. Paul Fisher Davies' book Comics As Communication: A Functional Approach (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) explores how comics function to make meanings in the manner of a language. It outlines a framework for describing the resources and practices of comics creation and readership, using an approach that is compatible with similar descriptions of linguistic and multimodal communication. The approach is based largely on the work of Michael Halliday, drawing also on the pragmatics of Paul Grice, the Text World Theory of Paul Werth and Joanna Gavins, and ideas from art theory, psychology and narratology. This brings a broad Hallidayan framework of multimodal analysis to comics scholarship, and plays a part in extending that tradition of multimodal linguistics to graphic narrative. Dr. Paul Fisher Davies gained his Ph.D. in 2017 at the University of Sussex, where he has also been an associate lecturer and student mentor. He has published in Studies in Comics, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, The Comics Grid

The Middle Ages have provided rich source material for physical and digital games from Dungeons and Dragons to Assassin's Creed. Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games (Bloomsbury, 2023) addresses the many ways in which different formats and genre of games represent the period. It considers the restrictions placed on these representations by the mechanical and gameplay requirements of the medium and by audience expectations of these products and the period., highlighting innovative attempts to overcome these limitations through game design and play.  Playing the Middle Ages considers a number of important and timely issues within the field including: one, the connection between medieval games and political nationalistic rhetoric; two, trends in the presentation of religion, warfare and other aspects of medieval society and their connection to modern culture; three, the problematic representations of race; and four, the place of gender and sexuality within these games and the broader g

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children's human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional--erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing huma

In the early twentieth century, American ragtime and the Parisian tango fuelled a dancing craze in Britain. Public ballrooms were built throughout the country, providing a glamorous setting for dancing. The new English style, defined in the 1920s and followed by the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, ensured that ballroom dancing continued to be the most popular British pastime until the 1960s, rivalled only by cinema. Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion, 2022) by Dr. Hilary French explores the vibrant history of ballroom and Latin dancing: the dances, lavish venues, competitions and influential instructors. It also traces the decline of couple dancing and its resurgence in recent years with the hugely popular TV shows Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitati

In How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of journalistic storytelling dating back nearly two centuries. Literary journalism arose in the decades before the U.S. Civil War alongside the era's sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, literary journalism encouraged readers to empathize with subjects by presenting more nuanced and engaging stories than typical news coverage. While women writers were central to the formation and ongoing significance of the genre, literary journalism scholarship has largely ignored their contributions. How the News Feels re-centers the work of a range of writers who were active from the 1830s until today, including Catharine Williams, Margaret Fuller, Nellie Bly, Winifred Black, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Alexis Okeowo. Offering intimate access to their subjects' thoughts, motivations, a

Scholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018; Robb, 2020), ʿulama and Islamic jurisprudence (Tareen, 2020) and relations between Islam and colonial modernity (Robinson, 2008; Osella & Osella, 2008). This special issue of International Journal of Islam in Asia (Sept, 2023) instead offers fine-grained investigations on technology and labour; print landscapes, networks and actors; subaltern languages; and popular Islam. We critique the idea of an “epistemic rupture” brought about by colonial modernity, providing a more systematic analysis of continuities and changes in Islamic knowledge economy. Examining two centuries of print authored by South Asian Muslims, the articles in the issue provide new ways of thinking about questions of knowledge production, distribution, circulation and reception. The issue broadens the scope of earlier scholarship, examining genres such as cosmology, divination, devotional poe

Listen to Episode No.2 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about TMC — Too Much Communication. In the 2000s, people complained about the demand to know more stuff. Not today. It's amazing if you stop to think — if you can find the peace to stop for anything — but such a short time ago, media were about information. Now it's just communicate — post, tweet, share, text, send, upload, access, retweet, like, promote, influence, watch, listen, follow... we do a lot of activity on that surface of our devices. Well, surface is what communication is. That's it. It’s, make available — that’s communicating. And whether there's too much of it or the wrong kind, one thing is for certain: There’s tons of it. Communication is spread everywhere. And what it's all about is not really the question. The pressing question right n

Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando - before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book At War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict (Basic Books, 2023), acclaimed historian Dr. Andrew Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture - from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank - has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war - and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more abou

The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind in The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (Bloomsbury, 2023). To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere. What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging

Honesty is an important virtue. Parents want to develop it in their children. Close relationships depend upon it. Employers value it in their employees. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have said very little about the virtue of honesty over the past fifty years. In Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (Oxford UP, 2021), Christian B. Miller aims to draw much greater attention to this neglected virtue. The first part of the book looks at the concept of honesty. It takes up questions such as: What does honesty involve? What are the motives of an honest person? How does practical wisdom relate to honesty? Miller explores what connects the many sides of honesty, including not lying, not stealing, not breaking promises, not misleading others, and not cheating. He argues that the honest person reliably does not intentionally distort the facts as she takes them to be. Miller then examines the empirical psychology of honesty. He takes up the question of whether most people are honest, dishon

The SAGE Handbook of Human-Machine Communication (Sage, 2023) has been designed to serve as the touchstone text for researchers and scholars engaging in new research in this fast-developing field. Chapters provide a comprehensive grounding of the history, methods, debates and theories that contribute to the study of human-machine communication. Further to this, the Handbook provides a point of departure for theorizing interactions between people and technologies that are functioning in the role of communicators, and for considering the theoretical and methodological implications of machines performing traditionally ‘human’ roles. This makes the Handbook the first of its kind, and a valuable resource for students and scholars across areas such as communication, media and information studies, and computer science, as well as for practitioners, engineers and researchers interested in the foundational elements of this emerging field.  Among the chapters you will find in this book are: Machines are Us: An Excursio

In this episode of High Theory, Geoffrey Sanborn tells us about Plagiarism. A concept emerged with the idea of originality, plagiarism challenges some of our most deeply held notions of individualism and status. Hatred of plagiarism is so baked into our culture that it evokes a gut response of disgust, which prevents us from actually analyzing it as a form of social behavior. In the episode, Geoff talks about websites that promise to “humanize” chatGPT content, like the AI Text Converter and the Plagiarism Remover. He talks about postcolonial theory, as a tool that might help us analyze plagiarism, and invokes Homi Bhabha’s idea of “colonial mimicry,” which appears in his 1984 article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” He also talks about the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, and references David Graeber’s book Debt, which we ran an episode on way back in 2020. It was in the early days of High Theory, so apologies for the audio quality, but we think you’ll like it. Geoff is

How do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future? In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary significance. Baillot marshals her considerable expertise in the field of digital humanities to establish a philological overview of the changing boundaries of ‘access’ to literary heritage over centuries, deconstructing the western tradition of archiving and how it has led to current digital dissemination practices. Rigorously examining the negative environmental impact of digital publishing and archiving, Baillot proposes an alternative model of preservation and dissemination which reconciles fundamental traditions with the values of social responsibility and sustainability in an era of climate crisis. Integrating histor

Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, Kat Mustatea's Voidopolis (MIT Press, 2023) is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City. Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante's Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita. Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec's A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts th