Book Not es

S. Hjarvard (ed.), News in a Globalized Society. G oteborg: Nordicom, 2001.

14.00. 236 pp.
For a long time the nation has been the major unit of analysis in news studies.
Interests moving beyond this such as cross-national investigations of news
coverage, or media ows between nations were relatively minor in status. The new
social geography entailed in contemporary processes of globalization has decentred
this predominantly national focus, bringing a broader framework to bear on media
analysis. Different cultures become relativized as media infrastructures become
disembedded from national institutions and contexts. In this study of the
relationship between globalization and news, the authors consider the implications
of these changes for public debate and political democracy. News media are both
affected by globalization and contribute to it. This duality informs the rst section
of the book in which Stig Hjarvard discusses the concept of deterritorialization in
relation to the restructuration of public space, and Daniel Biltereyst deals with the
paradox of a decline of audience interest in foreign news coinciding with the
expansion of media capacity to produce and distribute news on a global basis.
Biltereyst also considers how this situation affects citizenship and the way the
concept of citizenship should be understood. These two worthwhile essays are
followed by a section concerned with new media, global news and democracy. Ingrid
Volkmer discusses the signicance of new media for international communication
theory; Chris Paterson explores the movement of major news agencies into
cyberspace; and Klaus Bruhn Jensen considers the impact of virtuality on
democratic communication. Jensens essay is a sort of extension of Michael
Schudsons provocative article on why conversation is not the soul of democracy. The
third section focuses on the regionalization and domestication of global news. Hans-
Henrik Holm looks at the effect of globalization on news selection in the
production of foreign news; Tore Slaata studies Norwegian correspondents on the
Brussels beat following the referendum on EU membership; Norbert Wildermuth
examines changes in television news and current affairs programming in India,
particuarly in relation to Murdochs Star TV and the state broadcaster Doordarshan;
while Claes de Vreese uses framing theory in conducting a cross-national study of
television coverage of the introduction of the Euro. The nal section deals with the
theme of war news in global media. Stig A. Nohrstedt and Rune Ottosen report on
news coverage of the Gulf War in different media in ve countries, and Daya Thussu
looks at CNNs agenda-setting in coverage of the Kosovo War. All in all, this is
another useful collection from Nordicom. It will be a valuable addition to any
university library.
European Journal of Communication Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 17(2): 266280.
[02673231(200206)17:2;266280;023707]
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Werner Fr uh, Gewaltpotentiale des Fernsehangebots. Programmangebot und
zielgruppenspezische Interpretation. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001.
221pp.
This research monograph presents the methods and ndings of a reception study
and a content analysis on television violence. It makes an important and innovative
contribution to the eld as it investigates the amount of violence on television based
on the audiences perception rather than on denitions developed by the researcher.
Violence is conceptualized as individual reception impression of violent acts: 30,000
violence evaluations by more than 900 recipients indicate which content elements
are considered as violence by which segments of the audience. These evaluations are
used as weights in the analysis of ve German television programmes and allow for
a differentiated assessment of television violence. Although the volume explicitly
avoids statements on the impact of violence it casts some doubt on prevalent
assumptions about violence effects because the recipient-oriented assessment of
violence illustrates the widely neglected signicance of individual perception in
research on media effects.
B. Casey, N. Casey, B. Calvert, L. French and J. Lewis (eds), Television Studies:
The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 10.99. 291 pp.
Glossaries outlining key concepts seem to be proliferating. Recent examples relating
to culture and communications include such elds as cinema studies, literary and
cultural theory, popular music, postcolonial studies, language and linguistics, and
feminist theory. Students can nd these useful as fast-track routes to understanding
what a specic concept may involve, but the danger is that they may not follow this
up with a broader exploration of other sources, including those which glossaries
draw on in the rst place. The authors of this new guide to key concepts in
television studies assume that this will not be the case. They offer outlines, of
varying length, covering some 70-odd concepts. It is tempting to play the game of
spot-the-omissions. Anyone could come up with some missing term or topic such
as animation, or religion but the book is actually quite comprehensive in the
range of concepts treated. One avowed aim of the book is to debunk some of the
more technical language (p. viii) which accompanies television studies. This they
do, presenting largely jargon-free entries in clear and accessible prose, but
inevitably, because of the necessity of economy and concision, there are points in
some entries where it seems an important link has been too easily slipped over, a
critical issue is dealt with rather supercially, or a knotty problem simply evaded.
It would have been difcult altogether to avoid these features, and generally they do
not detract from the value of the book. It will no doubt be widely adopted wherever
television studies are taught. If it is then used as its authors intend, as a map of the
territory (p. viii), all well and good, but if students are led to believe that by
studying the map they know the territory, so much the worse.
G. Creeber (ed.), The Television Genre Book. London: BFI, 2001. 14.99.
163 pp.
Similar worries attend this book, which in many ways complements the one noted
above, edited by Bernadette Casey and others. There are some well-known names in
television studies in this collection, and their contributions cover the main genres of
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television, ranging from drama and soap opera through comedy and childrens
television to news and documentary. A rag-bag section in the middle goes under the
subheading of popular entertainment and deals with quiz and talk shows, sport,
MTV and advertising. The entries on the various genres of television are well
written and informative, and the book is illustrated throughout. There is also an
opening section treating the concept of genre in relation to television, written by
Steve Neale and Graeme Turner. It is largely British centred, and so directed mainly
at British media students, but what is worrying about it is the way it divides up
television studies into small, easily digested academic snacks. In this sense, the book
reproduces the structure of television programming itself, and one cannot help
wondering how students will actually use it. What implications does the text have
for student work? They are offered brief introductions to each genre, with
recommended reading on each amounting to three select items only. The genre
focus and the resulting bittiness of the book overall means that the larger picture of
television as a cultural phenomenon as a form of culture tends to get lost. This
is a shame. It does the study of television a critical disservice.
Christina Holtz-Bacha, Wahlwerbung als politische Kultur. Parteienspots im
Fernsehen 19571998. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000. 270 pp.
This research monograph deals with the development of political advertising on
German television since 1957. The author presents a very useful account of 12
national election campaigns in Germany and a thorough review of US-American
and German research on political advertising. Parties use television spots to
communicate their views and interpretations of current affairs to the audience and
thereby construct political reality. It is argued that the social constructions in the
self-presentations of political parties provide deeper insights into Germanys
political culture than the aggregate of individual political attitudes. Taking this
perspective political culture can be assessed employing a content analytical approach
rather than a traditional survey. The volume presents ndings of a content analysis
of formal characteristics, issues and candidate images, and the use of national
symbols in national election television ads over 40 years. Although there are
considerable similarities between US-American and German spots Holtz-Bacha
nds little evidence of increasing Americanization of television campaigns in
Germany. The self-presentation of political parties in Germany relies on issues
rather than parties, and parties rather than particular candidates.
G. Roberts and P.M. Taylor (eds), The Historian, Television and Television History.
Luton: University of Luton Press, 2001. 16.50. 181 pp.
Once a barely respectable eld on the edges of mainstream history, lm history has
proved itself unworthy of the academic snobbery it once faced. It would be foolish
if television history had similarly to endure an early period of its development out
in the cold. The time is ripe for this development to occur. Film history began to
get off the ground after lm had lost its dominant place in popular culture. With
the age of television coming to a close, there is now an opportunity to build on
some of the methodological procedures of lm history and open up television as a
new eld of serious interdisciplinary research and analysis. This book is intended as
an introductory survey of how the eld might take shape. It brings practitioners and
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theorists together to consider television as a historical source and history as an area
of television production. In relation to programming, history is hardly a television
genre. It can include both Culloden and Dr Who, The World at War and Blackadder.
These last three programmes are given separate chapter-length treatment in the
book. Deriving from the 1999 conference of the International Association of Media
and History, this is a useful ground-clearing exercise. It will help facilitate the
development of this new eld of history and media studies.
G. Roberts and H. Wallis, Introducing Film. London: Arnold/New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001. 9.99. 182 pp.
There are now a number of introductory texts on studying lm. They inevitably
cover much of the same ground. What distinguishes this new introduction to lm
by Graham Roberts and Heather Wallis is that it assumes no previous acquaintance
with lm analysis and lm theory. It is clearly and concisely written, and is pitched
at a level appropriate to those approaching the study of lm for the rst time. The
topics given chapter-length treatment are mise en sc`ene, cinematographhic technique,
editing, narrative, genre, stardom, auteurs, representation and spectatorship, and
both Hollywood and non-Hollywood lms. Each chapter uses bullet point
summaries, box guides, case studies and examples. A nal chapter brings all the
preceding topics together through a close textual and contextual reading of Star
Wars (1977), and the book closes with recommended reading and viewing for each
topic dealt with. A text for tyros, then; one to get you going. Students who t this
category will nd it as good a place as any to become acquainted with key terms and
methods in lm studies.
J. Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry. London
and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000. 14.99. 261 pp.
The aim of this book is to put the dubious back into dub. Throughout, John
Hutnyk is concerned with what is really going on in cultural hybridity, and just
who gains what from its promotion and celebration. A range of targets are robustly
lined up. These include performers who slice a dash of the exotic into their musical
product (Madonna in a bindi), those who co-opt breaking visibility into avour of
the month (A&R reps with an eye on the next main chance) and those whose
benevolent intentions transmute into their opposite (anyone from liberal anti-
racists to music consumers out for a bit of the Other). The lines between culturalist
chic, multiculti marketing and innovative cultural intermixing are at times quite
uid and hazy; cultural authenticity and hype can become indistinguishable. For
Hutnyk, the position is clear. When it comes to appropriation, it is not authenticity
or inauthenticity that matters, but rather the capacity to prot from culture (p. 9).
No surprise, then, to nd that after the introduction he kicks off the book with a
strong attack on the annual Womad festival. This, we are told, is among other
things, a reconstructed version of the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth century
(p. 21). The adjective reconstructed begs questions of course, as do all unqualied
historical parallels, but the dismissal of world music celebrants is only a prologue
for his critical assault on hybridity as a popular commodity and hybridity theory as
an intellectually quietist sideshow. The book moves between two forms of political
assessment. First there is the music, and Hutnyks sharp dissection of the practice of
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a range of artists according to whether they show counter-cultural potential or
simply offer another version of Asian kool. Second, there is the cultural theory, and
Hutnyks denunciations of culturally hip academics whose radical posturing
conceals their role as agents of incorporation, domestication and pacication in the
service of new elitism (p. 9). Alternating across these forms of assessment, the
mission of the book is to critique wigga-type consumptionalism. Yet even as you
nod in agreement at another hard-hitting point, it all becomes rather relentless,
even a little wearying at times, as Hutnyk descends sharply into pompous
denunciation. This is to take nothing away from the importance of what he says, in
what is a timely and justied remonstration. But the ringing, declarative tone
reduces its effectiveness, and when towards the end we nd an almost prophetic
stance being struck, with Hutnyk crying out in the capitalist wilderness that the
time for more than haphazard culturalism and difference-mongering is nigh (p.
232), his own form of radical posturing may produce little more in response than a
wry smile.
M. Stroinska (ed.), Relative Points of View: Linguistic Representations of Culture.
New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001. 17.00. 228 pp.
The complex intersections of language and culture produce different ways of seeing
the world and these are rooted in peoples social and historical experience. This is
the focus of the collection put together by Magda Stroinska. Her own introduction
outlines various questions relevant to this focus, such as linguistic relativity and the
translatability of worldviews. Two essays follow dealing with linguistic issues
relating to metaphor. Others examine the use of language in political discourse, the
use of scientic terminology in non-scientic texts, language and gender identities,
international business and cross-cultural communication, language and intercultural
awareness, emotional labour and religion and language. The overall choice of topics
for discussion seems in some ways rather arbitrary, but its various contributions
explore what are individually interesting and worthwhile aspects of the relations
between language and culture.
M. Hoey, Textual Interaction. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 16.99.
203 pp.
Interactivity is a relational movement between writers, readers and texts. It is vital
in the production of meaning and has various linguistic implications. Such
interactivity is the focus of Michael Hoeys useful primer on written discourse
analysis. He eschews any conception of it as a linear relation, partly because of the
hierarchical organization of texts the topic of Chapter 4 and partly because of
the cultural factors involved in understanding the character and function of
narratives or texts. Such factors make them seem familiar to us as narratives or texts
of particular kinds. Chapters 79 deal with these culturally popular patterns of text
organization. The main aim in the book is to attend to certain basic nuts-and-bolts
properties of texts. Among such properties are generic conventions, and it is then
one mark of creativity when deviations are made from what is familiar and expected
from texts because of their conventional organization. Texts are sites of variation and
change where grammar is not. The same distinction applies to discursive interaction
since it is also a site of convention and innovation, though this is subject to
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judgement on both sides of the interaction, and these are not necessarily congruent.
All this is explored through a wide range of examples of writer/reader dialogue.
They relate to both immediate and deferred questions a reader can expect a text to
answer as he or she moves between moments of textuality and intertextuality. Hoey
has produced a valuable handbook on applied linguistics, offering step-by-step
methodological approaches to the analysis of narrative and non-narrative texts, clear
expositions of particular concepts, and bibliographical end-notes at the conclusion
of each chapter. It will prove a valuable guide to techniques that can be adapted in
the analysis of media texts and discourses.
M. Lehtonen, The Cultural Analysis of Texts. London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi: Sage, 2000. 15.99. 174 pp.
Mikko Lehtonens focus differs from Michael Hoeys in moving beyond the level of
signs and texts to study how meanings or meaning potentials are realized in their
cultural contexts. Indeed, as the books opening page announces, radical con-
textualism forms its basis of operation, and from this basis Lehtonen explores the
formation of meanings through the component areas of language, media, texts,
contexts and readers. Here also is interaction, though all these components work in
widely different ways, both within themselves and in their interaction, which means
that individually at least they need to be approached from different perspectives.
Lehtonen approaches texts in terms of a poetics which explores the variable meaning
potentials they open up, and contexts in terms of the particular potentials that can
be taken up in the ways they are read. A hermeneutics of contexts in turn suggests
a need to focus on the subjectivity and identity of readers, viewers and listeners in
the way textcontext relations have repercussions for the forms they realize. The
various informing factors in the development of meaning are thus mutually
dependent. In following this approach, Lehtonen provides chapter-length treat-
ments of his key components of meaning-production. Students will nd this a
useful, rst-level introductory text. It is lucidly written and offers many examples,
from Madonna to milk cartons, to help bring home what the cultural analysis of
texts involves.
S. Titscher, M. Meyer, R. Wodak and E. Vetter, Methods of Text and Discourse
Analysis. London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage, 2000. 17.99.
278 pp.
This more advanced textbook brings together a dozen different methods relating to
textual and discourse analysis. It is intended primarily for social science students. It
will probably be used selectively, as surveys of particular methods are required, but
it is also worth sampling the text as a whole. The three main sections of the book
present an overview of methodological issues in textual analysis, detailed discussion
of the methods covered in the book, a bibliometric survey of the take-up of these
methods, and a comparative assessment of them. Among the methods investigated
are content analysis, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, grounded
theory, the ethnography of speaking, functional pragmatics and narrative semiotics.
Its value for students is enhanced by an annotated reading list in each chapter and
an end-of-book glossary of technical terms. The book will prove a useful teaching
and learning resource.
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Nancy Macdonald, The Grafti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity and Identity in
London and New York. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001. 45.00.
256 pp.
It is so much a part of the scenery, gliding past us as our train cuts into the city, that
we hardly notice it. Grafti now blends into the urban landscape as an expected
background. Yet sometimes we pause in our interior preoccupations with the
contents of our portable music players, newspapers and books, and start to look
closely once again at these open-air spectacles and displays. We may admire the
artistry of their leaping letters and bold arabesques of colour and shape, yet we do
not know how to read them, or what they signify, beyond some vague notion of
their ritualistic rewriting of territory. Such is urban subcultural grafti. As Nancy
Macdonald says in her introduction to this study: Reasons, motives, meanings; all
too often these are missing from the picture, and all too often this leaves grafti
carrying its label as mindless, senseless vandalism (p. 2). Her purpose is not only
to challenge this mindless, senseless dismissal. She also seeks to bridge the gulf
between researcher and researched by focusing on the meanings people make, or
apply to, their experiences, on how they see their own social worlds from their own
insider perspectives. Her ethnography took her beyond qualitative interviewing
into writing forays along railway tracks, including at least one participant visit to
a New York subway depot. Macdonalds rst three chapters are scene-setting
considerations of theory and method, and include a critical review of subcultural
studies. The 1970s CCCS preoccupation with social class is seen as a shortcoming,
and for Macdonald youth and gender need to be given much greater salience. It is
around the middle of the book that we enter the chapters dealing with her empirical
ndings. We learn about grafti writing as a career, progressing from tagging to
piecing, about grafti subculture as a site of masculine construction, and about the
importance of illegality for contesting issues concerning power, control, ownership
and space. This is not the rst study of this vernacular artform of the metropolis
Armando Silvas (1987) Punto de Vista Ciudadanoa is one forerunner but it offers
a fascinating portrayal of what is still a little-explored youth subculture. It is
worthwhile particularly because of its focus on gender, on male adolescence in the
inner city, and its attentiveness to what grafti writers do and say. This last feature
of the book is illustrated by the Afterword, where Macdonalds informants are given
space to comment on how they have been represented. Their responses are generally
favourable. The book is to be recommended both in itself and as a contribution to
what is building up as a more collective reappraisal David Muggletons recent
book being another such contribution of subcultural theory and the sociology of
youth.
T. Miller (ed.), A Companion to Cultural Studies. Malden, MA and Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001. 80.00. 579 pp.
Companion volumes are rife these days, and no wonder, with the word companion
being so benign and chummy. Heres one thats jumbo-sized, coming to nearly 600
pages, though its bulk is in some ways par for the course with edited collections on
cultural studies. What is it about cultural studies that breeds such big books? It
covers a broad expanse of course, as does the term culture perhaps too broad for
its own conceptual good. But lets check this for what it brings in its heavily laden
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arms. The book is in four parts. In the rst, contributors explore the relations
between cultural studies and various adjacent disciplines and elds of study, such as
sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy, anthropology, law and even
archaeology. The second section looks at cultural studies across national and
transnational contexts, such as Latin America and the US, Australasia and Europe,
while we move on to specic topics in the third part. These include sport, feminism,
music, fashion, youth culture, race and globalization. The nal section offers a
bibliography divided by topic but without commentary or criteria of selection.
There are various interesting individual contributions here, and some which
denitely repay attention, but how are you meant to read collections as large as
this, covering such a wide range of issues and topics? Anyone consuming it from
one end to the other would be a diligent reader, dedicated to the eld, and with a
good deal of time at hand. As a source to sample, trying out new chapters on
successive occasions, it is a different affair. The intervals between reading may even
help, as some chapters not appealing on one occasion may prove of more interest at
the next. Some readers will only be interested in certain aspects of what the
collection has to offer, which is presumably one justication for its many pages.
While it is certainly a handy resource in which any university or college interested
in contemporary cultural studies will want to invest, it would be difcult to
recommend it as a student text, precisely because it is best dipped into. Toby Miller
is to be thanked for putting together this latest cultural studies collection, but
it will probably be favoured more as an occasional rather than a constant
companion.
S. Taylor (ed.), Ethnographic Research. London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New
Delhi: Sage, in association with the Open University, 2002. 17.99. 277 pp.
This introduction to ethnographic research consists of 10 chapters culled from
recently published work, such as Philippe Bourgoiss study of El Barrio and the
Puerto Rican experience in the US, and Tim Edensors book about tourists visiting
the Taj Mahal. The national contexts range from Britain to Australia, France to
Lebanon. Each chapter shows the different ways in which data can be collected. The
topics covered include drug use, gender identity, work practices, consumption and
the provision of medical services. Relatively modest in scope, this collection is
nevertheless a good sampler of contemporary work in ethnography. It will provide
tyro researchers with a feel for what this kind of social science research involves, and
hopefully lead them further on into its plentiful pastures.
R. Gomm, M. Hammersley and P. Foster, Case Study Method. London, Thousand
Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage, 2000. 18.99. 276 pp.
Case study research has long been a staple of sociological enquiry, from such classics
as Thomas and Zhanieckis The Polish Peasant in Europe and America onwards. This
collection brings together important articles directed at this approach and the
various issues it entails. It is in two parts. The rst half of the book pursues the
question of generalizability, while the second considers the relation of case study and
theory. The capacity of case studies to produce general conclusions, and the concern
with theoretical inference, are crucial issues, and they are tackled here from a variety
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of perspectives. This is a valuable collection. It deserves to be widely taken up in the
social sciences.
Ulrike Handel, Die Fragmentierung des Medienpublikums. Bestandsaufnahme
und empirische Untersuchung eines Ph anomens der Mediennutzung.
Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000. 203 pp.
This book makes an empirical contribution to the debate on audience fragmentation
and its potential effects on society. Whereas Handels theoretical reections are
somewhat underdeveloped especially regarding the issue of societal integration
the value of this research monograph lies in the knowledgeable discussion of
different approaches to the empirical assessment of fragmentation. Based on
conceptualizations currently prevalent in scientic discourse, Handel develops a
denition of fragmentation that focuses on individual media use rather than on the
expansion of media content. Applying her measure to the analysis of German survey
data on media use, she nds considerable degrees of audience fragmentation. Yet
there is no evidence for a threatening disintegration as the results also show a large
amount of communication about the individual experiences.
Stefan Dahlem, Wahlentscheidung in der Mediengesellschaft. Freiburg/Munich:
Alber, 2001. 578 pp.
In this volume the author describes theories, methods and ndings of voting
research from the disciplines of political science and mass media studies. Merging a
voter-oriented perspective and a media-oriented approach with a strong focus on the
process of decision-making, Dahlem develops an integrated model of voting
decision. He discusses a variety of internal and external factors including party
identication, ideology, personality, candidate and issue images, the general political
situation and the social environment and directs special attention to the specic
impact of media content on voting decisions Although the argument is sound and
the model is carefully developed, the value of the book lies in the detailed review of
the elds state of the art rather than in the originality of the theoretical
perspective.
D. Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
9.99. 273 pp.
There is something of an irony in the publication of this textbook. It comes at a
time when semiotics has settled into place as one among a range of analytical
techniques in the study of cultural texts and no longer carries the same self-
proclaimed eclat as it did in the 1970s during the days of its ascendancy. Back then
an accessible and informed outline such as this would have been invaluable. That
was precisely what was lacking when students had to struggle with books about
semiotics which, as Daniel Chandler points out, frequently seemed almost
impossible to understand (p. xv). If his book is 25 years too late for those long-
graduated students, their present-day counterparts will have much to thank
Chandler for. His focus is more on Saussurean and post-Saussurean rather than
Peircean semiotics, but some selectivity is inevitable in such a diverse eld. The
book can be used in conjunction with an online version, offering the advantages of
hyperlinks as well as an extended glossary, the URL for this being available in the
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preface. Chandler styles the book as a readers companion, and as such it will help
demystify semiotics as well as providing a clear and comprehensive guide.
Harald Berens, Prozesse der Thematisierung in publizisitischen Konikten.
Ereignismanagement, Medienresonanz und Mobilisierung der

Offentlichkeit am
Beispiel von Castor und Brent Spar. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001.
335 pp.
Investigating the event management strategies of political actors, media resonance
and public mobilization in two series of protest events in the 1990s, Berens presents
a highly instructive analysis of the process of thematization in the public sphere.
The Anti-Castor movement and the Brent Spar protests serve as examples for the
empirical analysis. Whereas the Castor case can be described as a German national
issue with a great deal of dissent in the public debate, the events regarding Brent
Spar represent an international scandal with high levels of consent. The detailed
account of approaches on agenda-setting, agenda-building, issue cycles, key events
and priming draws on communication and media studies as well as social movement
research and thus provides a variety of possible explanations for different courses of
thematization. The empirical analysis based on time series of issue coverage shows
that key events are the strongest predictors of successful issue careers in the media.
The medias situation denitions and the strategies of the actors involved interact
with each other and lead to a highly erratic rather than a continuous development
of the conict.
S.J. Sauls, The Culture of American College Radio. Ames: Iowa State University
Press, 2000. $34.95. 216 pp.
Sauls writes clearly and accessibly about the radio stations which are licensed to
institutions of higher education in the US and the unique culture that they offer to
their listeners. He indicates the ways in which their character and programming are
distinctive and how they are staffed and nanced. This is less of a social
investigation and more of a practical manual than its title suggests but it gives a
vivid account of one area of American radio which the European media scholar
might easily overlook.
B. Lochte, Kentucky Farmer Invents Wireless Telephone! Murray, KY: All About
Wireless, 2001. $16.95. 229pp.
Lochtes subject is Nathan Stubbleeld, an obscure self-taught inventor from
western Kentucky who is alleged to have developed wireless telephony in 1892,
some 10 years before anybody else. Though packaged as popular history with
copious illustrations, the book has been written by an academic and is of great
interest to media scholars. Most fascinating is its account of what has happened
since Stubbleelds death in 1928 on the one hand, the attempt of his home town
to exploit his achievements by describing itself as the birthplace of radio; on the
other, the efforts of scholars to determine just how signicant his work was in the
history of wireless invention. The book is obtainable via a website: www.nathan
stubbleeld.com
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N. Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
13.99. 154 pp.
The work of Niklas Luhmann (192798) operated largely within the area of systems
theory, and it is no surprise to nd on the rst page of this book the statement that
the media are an effect of the functional differentiation of modern society. What is
surprising is that Luhmann came so late in his life to any systematic consideration
of the media, particularly as we are also told on page 1 that whatever we know
about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the
mass media. Theres nothing like an inated claim to get the reader going, and
thats a strong one. We may pause after this opening sentence and ask how Luhmann
himself escaped that knowledge (however partially) in order to write this book. It
reads like nothing you will come across on television. It is in fact an extension of his
theory of social systems to the mass media and their role in the construction of
social reality. Hence, the media are portrayed as recursive, self-referential and
autopoietically closed, constructing only limited horizons on social reality out of the
limited horizons from which they proceed, and so producing a future that cannot see
forward into itself. The media are locked into their own systemically differentiating
binary codes and logics, and spiral ever on in the schema of their own descriptions
and observations. Or so it seems, for it is difcult knowing quite where you are
going or what is being said in the dense, even turgid prose of this book. The
insights that seem to glitter quickly become lost in the thick mix of thought. Take
this, for instance: The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie,
therefore, in the reproduction of non-transparency through transparency, in the
reproduction of non-transparency of effects through transparency of knowledge. This
means, in other words, in the reproduction of future (p. 103). Neither the italics
nor the reproduction of its meaning in other words seem to help. Indeed, the
meaning could hardly be less transparent, but then that is ne because we are
dealing with paradox here, and when it comes to paradox, you get it in great ladles.
For Luhmann, the diversion of paradox is necessary for sociology if it is to
understand communication. This reader, for one, remains unconvinced of any such
necessity and prefers his paradoxes in more measured spoonfuls.
B. Winston, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. London: BFI, 2000. 14.99.
186 pp.
The title of this book hardly suggests any faith in documentaries as being able to
provide accounts in which you can believe, whether more or less. One of Brian
Winstons favourite lines of analysis in documentary studies is that documentary
lm and television makers deserve this fate when they try to convince us that what
they produce are faithful records, as in the sense of objective documents. For
Winston, the idea of documentary truth is devalued by the journalistic claim to be
depersonalized witness. This wrongheaded idea came to the fore in the sense of
outrage surrounding the 1996 Carlton television documentary The Connection. The
discovery that this programme had resorted to fakery, including feigned identities
and continuities, revealed for Winston the various follies of current television
regulations and codes of practice. A similarly inated notion of fakery is at work
elsewhere, in similar scandals in the rest of the world. All this raises questions about
the ethics of documentary. The majority of Winstons new book on documentary
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explores the legal and ethical framework regulating the production of documentary.
This is a really worthwhile discussion, culminating in Chapter 6 with the ethical
consequences of the divide between journalism and art in documentary. Though
documentary is best conceived as an always uneasy fusion of the two, it is clear that
much of what goes on in evaluation and judgement of the form is a confusion about
documentary programming and the narrower objectives of journalistic reporting.
Goodbye naive literalism, farewell fake truth-telling codology that seems to be
the message, and it is worth following Winston all the way to see how it is reached.
If it leads to freer documentary expression, it will have served us well.
S. Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York:
Routledge, 2000. 12.99. 199 pp.
Stella Bruzzis focus in this book is on recent documentaries, attending to these in
the light of recent theoretical discussion. Judging from the cover and the way it
starts, the book seems conned to documentary lm, but it does consider television
as well and, indeed, has a whole chapter on docusoaps. The early chapter on
newsreels and archive lm is a welcome inclusion in the book, along with the one
on docusoaps, and there is some astute discussion throughout. The book has three
main limitations, though. Bruzzis approach is mainly directed at the questions of
documentary forms and texts. This serves her well in her treatment of recent styles
and modes of documentary lmmaking, but broader contexts are lost. Second, where
the new documentary starts, and what it really consists of, is not as clear as it could
be, while third, the book is not the fresh and challenging theorization of
documentary it claims to be. These limitations aside, Bruzzi is certainly worth
reading. Her book is a useful contribution to our understanding of contemporary
documentary practice.
M. Conboy, The Press and Popular Culture. London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi: Sage, 2002. 16.99. 194 pp.
Martin Conboy hits the nail right from the start of this book by rejecting present-
centred approaches to the study of popular culture. Such approaches leave our
understanding of the popular considerably impoverished. Focusing on the ways in
which the popular press has always relied on a rhetorical appeal to the people,
Conboy traces the complex permutations of this appeal from the early 19th century
development of the popular newspaper in the USA and Britain. The appeal depends
on an articulation of the life world of many ordinary people (or important aspects of
this) with the content of popular newspapers, for it is only on this basis that the
press can claim to represent the people. The problem of course is that there is never
any uniform version of this life world, the category of the people is heterogeneous,
and the popular itself is a historically shifting, mutable phenomenon. In divided
societies, this generates the need for a continuous reconstruction of the popular as
well as for contestations of versions of the popular which are alternative or
oppositional to that in hegemonic ascendancy. The people are then inseparable from
their rhetorical guration, and the legitimacy of this has always to be re-established
in the discourse of the popular press. Even then there is always an ambivalent
relationship between the popular press and popular readerships. Conboy works
through all this, and provides an accessible, historically based outline of the popular
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press, but he is to some extent a victim of his own ambition. In a book of this
length, depth is inevitably forfeit when, as in this case, the author opts for breadth.
It then becomes difcult to avoid the appearance of a potted account. It is, for
instance, questionable whether a single chapter on the early modern period was
advisable, not only because it cannot cover much in under 20 pages, but also
because it takes away valuable space that could have been used to give greater scope
to a later period. The book is a useful introductory text even if students will have
to be directed on past it to fuller, more specialized analytical histories.
Otfried Jarrren, Kurt Imhof and Roger Blum (eds), Zerfall der

Offentlichkeit?
Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000. 207 pp.
This edited volume on the fragmentation of the public sphere focuses on the
relevance of political communication for the legitimacy of modern power relations
and support and rationality as its prerequisites. The volume is no exception from the
usual conference reader as it includes both weak and strong to excellent
contributions to the debate. Its achievement, however, is the seminal and mostly
coherent combination of theoretical and empirical approaches, historical, socio-
logical, political science and media studies perspectives on the public sphere. The
marginalization and mediatization of politics are the central concepts discussed in
this volume. These phenomena are dealt with from four perspectives which
determine the structure of the book. The rst chapters investigate the medias
impact on public meetings, the second part of the book examines the structural
changes in the public sphere, and the third part analyses the interaction between
media, politics and economy. In the nal chapters the conditions of electronic
democracy are discussed.
K.G. Wilkins (ed.), Redeveloping Communication for Social Change. Lanham,
MD, Boulder, CO, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littleeld, 2000. 19.95.
216 pp.
Development communication is concerned with projects and strategies for applying
communication technologies and processes in the promotion of social change. This
collection of essays is based on the premise that the eld of development
communication needs to resituate its discourse and practice within contexts of
power. The rst part of the book is therefore dedicated to reconceptualizing
development communication theory by taking power dynamics centrally into
account. Power dynamics in gender relations are the rst to be considered, with
Leslie Steeves attending to the gendered agendas of international development
agencies, and Ronald Greene investigating the role of women in the construction of
development policy, focusing specically on population issues. Srinivas Melkote
extends the work of reconceptualization by stressing an understanding of power and
control differentiations across communities and institutions. The rst section
concludes with an essay by Thomas Jacobson on cultural hybridity, stressing the
importance of linking strategies for social change with political processes. The
second part of the book moves to practice, with pieces focusing on topics relating
to such countries as Mexico, India and Nepal. The third and nal section considers
processes of social change in development communication. Arturo Escobar
articulates the role of place in social change; Bella Mody writes on the power of the
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media and contexts of power; while Karin Gwinn Wilkins concludes the book with
an overview of critical debates relating to the central theme of the book. Built
around recognition of the ability of dominant groups to retain hegemonic control
and the potential of marginal communities to resist, this anthology provides a useful
llip for a eld long in need of renewal.
D. Di ` ene (ed.), From Chains to Bonds: The Slave Trade Revisited. New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books/Paris: UNESCO, 2001. 18.50. 470 pp.
The transatlantic slave trade represents the rst major historical linkage between
Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. The trade transformed all these
geocultural regions, and the legacy of the transformations it brought about have
been lived through ever since. The massive deportation of men and women
upwards of 12 million which it entailed was not only a degrading trafc in human
bodies. It also involved the movement of ideas, values, practices, religions and
traditions which, although long-suppressed in many cases, nevertheless became a
subterranean set of cultural and spiritual resources which enabled people to survive,
endure, adapt and resist the long aftermath of the initiating diasporic shifts. These
resources were blended with others; cross-fertilized, rebuilt, reworked from
generation to generation, they have had an enormous shaping inuence on popular
cultures across the Atlantic and beyond. The slave trade introduced new forms of
cultural encounter and exchange, new forms of communication and interdepend-
ence, which have had untold social, economic and political ramications throughout
modernity. Of course it also laid the basis for huge prosperity in some areas, and
huge devastation in others. We have been continuing ever since to rethink the
consequences of the trade in relation to such issues as development, human rights,
racism and cultural pluralism. This diverse collection of papers revisiting the
transatlantic slave trade derives from UNESCOs Slave Route project. The
launching conference for this project took place at Ouidah (Benin) in September
1994, and brought together scholars and writers from Africa, the Americas, Europe
and the Caribbean. It is divided into ve parts dealing with the history of the trade,
its demographic impact, its economic and social dimensions, the abolition of both
the slave trade and slavery, their consequences for cultural dynamics in the
Americas, and the history of the trade in relation to international cooperation.
Certainly, there is some unevenness of quality between the papers, and while a
useful set of notes on contributors is provided at the rear of the collection, a volume
of this length is impoverished by the lack of any kind of index. Nevertheless, this
is a valuable assembly of papers dealing with a vitally important issue. Doudon
Di` ene is to be thanked for having edited such a trove of historical scholarship and
analysis.
H.L. Dreyfus, On the Internet. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 127 pp.
Few philosophers pay sustained attention to technology and its social implications.
Hubert Dreyfus is a celebrated exception. In this new book, he considers the
promises and dangers of the Internet. His line of argument is that the positive
claims for the value of the Internet which are currently being made are, for the most
part, hype. In pursuing this argument, the rst stage Dreyfus takes us through
concerns pathways of information. The Net allows links to proliferate wildly
because of the absence of any system of evaluation for discriminating between them.
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Anything can be linked, in principle, to anything else. Connections between the
accumulation of information on the Internet are without principle, for it is scope
rather than signicance which counts. What is valued is the quantity rather than
the quality of connections. In this respect the Internet is a world without tradition.
In the conditions this sets up, how do you measure the worth of one hyperlink
against another? The answer is you cannot. We are all familiar with the frustration
this leads to when we are conducting a cyber-search, for we are in a realm that is
short on relevance and meaning, and without ways for sorting how these should be
recognized. This has serious implications for the dream of using the Net as a mode
of distance learning. What is the extent of learning involved here? For Dreyfus, the
student is unlikely to move beyond a level of problem-solving competence. Moving
beyond this level requires taking risks, such as making an interpretation that may
be mistaken, and so rendering yourself vulnerable. It requires learning from
mistakes and adding this to experience. It is reliant on our ability to distinguish
what is relevant from what is not, and it is only possible when genuine involvement
and commitment are given. Unless such advances are made, students will never
attain real prociency and expertise, will never progress from rule-based knowledge
to the know-how of phronesis. Such attainment and progress are dependent on
experience and the gradual maturing of experience. They go with getting what
Merleau-Ponty called an optimal grip on the world. This is again where telepresence
falls short. Telepresence lacks in embodied presence, in the intercorporeality found
in everyday social encounters and the concrete contextuality in which such
encounters take place. Both are vital to getting a proper grip on objects or
situations. Virtuality denies us the grounds for acquiring expertise. This involves
imitation rather than instruction, and then going beyond imitation to a stage where
you come into your own style of mastery. In Dreyfuss view this cannot be acquired
in disembodied cyberspace. The Net gives us everything except what is vital for
experience, for a sense of reality and for leading meaningful lives. It gives us
everything indiscriminately mixed up together, as in Bob Dylans nihilistic scenario
in Highway 61 Revisited, which Dreyfus quotes from as a chapter epigraph.
Biblical sacrice, red, white and blue shoe strings, a simulated version of the next
world war, and a thousand telephones that dont ring, are all laid out together on
the information highway. It is the attening out of all qualitative distinctions which
makes such a scenario nihilistic. The most signicant is constantly set side by side
with the most trivial, and we can travel between each with equal, risk-free ease.
Welcome to the world of the Web. To the extent that the world of the Web can be
justiably characterized in this way, then for Dreyfus, the idea of living in
boundless Cyberia, where everyone is telepresent to everyone and everything, makes
no sense (p. 92). In the face of that prospect, this book makes abundant sense. It is
good to have the Internet subjected to such cool, sceptical appraisal. Dreyfus
deserves to be widely read.
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