The media system in the United States could have developed into something very different than what it is today. In fact, there was an era in which significant media reform was considered. This was a time when media consumers were tired of constant adve...

Bridget Conor’s new book, Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice (Routledge, 2014), looks closely at the creative practice and profession of screenwriting for film and television in the US and UK.

It’s been 100 years since the start of the First World War, a conflict that cost millions of lives. In his recently revised book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2013), Randal Marlin writes that Britain pioneered propaganda techniques to sell ...

“This is a book that wants you to surpass and destroy it.” Eric Hayot‘s new book has the potential to transform how we teach and practice academic writing, and it invites the kind of reading and engagement that makes such a transformation possible.

Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania,

In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as never before. However, as Ethan Zuckerman argues in Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age ...

What would a truly ‘social’ social media look like? This is the core question of From Corporate to Social Media: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries (Routledge, 2014),

There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. But the changes that we are seeing are far from novel. In fact,

An interview with Brooke Erin Duffy

Julia Azari has written Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Cornell University Press, 2014). Azari is assistant professor of political science at Marquette University.

Social media is a phenomenon that continues to grow and attract much attention in the form of consternation, commentary, criticism and scholarly research. Any attempt at truly understanding social media communication practices and tools requires interd...

The social and cultural historian Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK is interested in the everyday moments between great events. In his books Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from ...

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,

“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 experi...

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 ...

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,

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,

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.

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-moder...

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 ...

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.

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.

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,

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,

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).