In this sharply argued book, McChesney explains why we are in the midst of a communication revolution which is at the centre of 21st century life. Yet this profound juncture is not well understood, in part because media criticism and scholarship haven't been up to the task. McChesney's concise history of media studies shows how communication scholarship has grown increasingly irrelevant in recent years, even as the media became a decisive issue of these times. The revolution in communication calls for a transformation in the way we think about media.

This book contains original empirical studies conducted within a programme of research in the Information, Networks and Knowledge (INK) research centre at SPRU, University of Sussex.

Revolutions in Communication offers a new approach to media history, presenting an encyclopedic look at the way technological change has linked social and ideological communities. Using key figures in history to benchmark the chronology of technical innovation, Kovarik's exhaustive scholarship narrates the story of revolutions in printing, electronic communication and digital information, while drawing parallels between the past and present. Updated to reflect new research that has surfaced these past few years, Revolutions in Communication continues to provide students and teachers with the most readable history of communications, while including enough international perspective to get the most accurate sense of the field. The supplemental reading materials on the companion website include slideshows, podcasts and video demonstration plans in order to facilitate further reading.

Inspired by the vision and framework outlined in Christopher Alexander's classic 1977 book, A Pattern Language, Schuler presents a pattern language containing 136 patterns designed to meet these challenges. Using this approach, Schuler proposes a new model of social change that integrates theory and practice by showing how information and communication (whether face-to-face, broadcast, or Internet-based) can be used to address urgent social and environmental problems collaboratively. Each of the patterns that form the pattern language (which was developed collaboratively with nearly 100 contributors) is presented consistently; each describes a problem and its context, a discussion, and a solution. The pattern language begins with the most general patterns ("Theory") and proceeds to the most specific ("Tactics"). Each pattern is a template for research as well as action and is linked to other patterns, thus forming a single coherent whole.

This very readable book describes the recent social changes in Indian society, resulting from the various applications of new communication technologies. The authors discuss the various processes at work in the country both at the governmental level and in private enterprise, the rapid technological developments and their impact on Indian society, the growth of software technology parks, the internet revolution, and the lessons learned so far. They also highlight the role played by the pioneers, visionaries and innovators.

Presenting profiles of the mathematicians, engineers, and other scientists who helped create and develop communications technologies, Bray (Imperial College London) begins his volume in the mid-18th century, looking at people like Ampere, Ohm, Faraday, and Hertz, who created the mathematical and scientific foundations of telecommunications. He proceeds to offer chapters on telegraph and cable engineers, telephone engineers, inventors of the thermionic valve, pioneers of radio and television broadcasting, microwave radio-relay engineers, the inventors of the transistor and the microchip, the creators of information theory and digital techniques, satellite communication engineers, pioneers optical fiber communications, and inventors of the Internet and mobile communications. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Unbuttoned McLuhan! An intimate exploration of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas in his own words In the last twenty years of his life, Marshall McLuhan published – often in collaboration with others – a series of books that established his reputation as the pre-eminent seer of the modern age. It was McLuhan who made the distinction between “hot” and “cool” media. It was he who observed that “the medium is the message” and who tossed off dozens of other equally memorable phrases from “the global village” and “pattern recognition” to “feedback” and “iconic” imagery. McLuhan was far more than a pithy-phrase maker, however. He foresaw – at a time when the personal computer was a teckie fantasy – that the world would be brought together by the internet. He foresaw the transformations that would be wrought by digital technology. He understood, before any of his contemporaries, the consequences of the revolution that television and the computer were bringing about. In many ways, we’re still catching up to him. In Understanding Me, Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines have brought together eighteen previously unpublished lectures and interviews by or involving Marshall McLuhan. They have in common the informality and accessibility of the spoken word. In every case, the text is the transcript taken down from the film, audio, or video tape of the actual encounters – this is not what McLuhan wrote but what he said. The result is a revelation: the seer who often is thought of as aloof and obscure is shown to be funny, spontaneous, and easily understood.

An analysis of the impact of new communication technology on early 20th century British society, with comparisons to the digital revolution of today. We are all familiar with the digital revolution that has swept across the developed world in recent years. It has ushered in an age of smartphones, laptop computers and ready access to the internet. A little over a century ago, a similar explosion took place in the field of information and communication technology. This revolution was not digital but analogue, and it saw the birth of mass media such as newspapers, cinema and radio. In The Analogue Revolution, Simon Webb examines the impact that developments in printing, photography, wireless telegraphy, gramophones and moving pictures had in the years preceding the First World War, and shows how the modern world was shaped by the media used to record it. From the first mass-circulation newspapers to cameras so cheap that everybody could afford them, from early experiments in radio broadcasting to cinema films in color, The Analogue Revolution charts the history of the first information revolution of the twentieth century. The parallels with the modern world are uncanny, ranging from anxiety about the use of new technology to distribute pornography, to worries about children losing interest in reading because they prefer to watch films. For anybody wishing to understand the modern world, this book is an essential primer in the nature of information revolutions and the way in which they affect the world.

The fledgling United States fought a war to achieve independence from Britain, but as John Adams said, the real revolution occurred “in the minds and hearts of the people” before the armed conflict ever began. Putting the practices of communication at the center of this intellectual revolution, Protocols of Liberty shows how American patriots—the Whigs—used new forms of communication to challenge British authority before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. To understand the triumph of the Whigs over the Brit-friendly Tories, William B. Warner argues that it is essential to understand the communication systems that shaped pre-Revolution events in the background. He explains the shift in power by tracing the invention of a new political agency, the Committee of Correspondence; the development of a new genre for political expression, the popular declaration; and the emergence of networks for collective political action, with the Continental Congress at its center. From the establishment of town meetings to the creation of a new postal system and, finally, the Declaration of Independence, Protocols of Liberty reveals that communication innovations contributed decisively to nation-building and continued to be key tools in later American political movements, like abolition and women’s suffrage, to oppose local custom and state law.

In this work, Bridgette Wessels offers a unique insight into the ways in which core public institutions and powerful organizations develop digital communications and services within the public realm. The book draws on her ethnographic research with the London Metropolitan Police Service during their engagement in an innovative project to improve communication with the public using digital technology. As one of the largest, most advanced and highly respected police services in the world, working in a socially, culturally and demographically complex city, the Metropolitan Police Service offers a highly revealing case study of technology and the human processes which it is designed to serve. The ethnographic research is used to develop a new theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between social action and technological change, addressing the way in which technology is socially shaped and culturally informed. The book also discusses the role of ethnography as a tool for researching complex multi-perspective, multi-sited networks of the innovation of digital technologies as forms of communication in late modern western society.