What if there was an instruction manual for television? Not just for the casual consumer, but for college students interested in learning about the culture of television, written by some of the field’s top scholars?

What does religion have to do with technology? Many people think that religious practitioners are inherently opposed to new technological developments. The reality of the situation is that religious communities have a very complex relationship with tec...

When I was growing up the only cooking show on TV I remember was Julia Child. I sometimes watched “The French Chef,” not so much to learn anything about cooking, but rather just to watch Julia. She was a hoot.

George Brock approached his book about newspapers and journalism in the digital age unwilling to write another gloom-and-doom narrative about the death or decline of the industry. When he studied the historical development of journalism and current tre...

In our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches. Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from the internet than from newspapers. But how irrelevant has paper really become?

Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation (Palgrave, 2013) is written by David Beer, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at York University in the UK. He blogs here and tweets here. The book attempts to describe and analyse the impact of ne...

In Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2013), Sarah Banet-Weiser scrutinizes the spread of brand culture into other spheres of social life that the market–at least in our imaginations–had left untouched: politics,

Brian Michael Goss, professor of communication at St. Louis University in Madrid, has taken one of media’s most studied theories and given it a facelift. In Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century (Peter Lang,

The advent of very powerful computers and the Internet have not “changed everything,” but it has created a new communications context within which almost everything we do will be somewhat changed. One of the “things we do” is governance, that is,

“Power through freedom.” Michael Serazio‘s Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013) traces the mushrooming world of guerrilla marketing–defined to include word-of-mouth, viral, and advergaming, along with a host of other,

Nicco Mele is the author of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). He is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy,

“The humans are dead.” Whether or not you recognize the epigram from Flight of the Conchords (and if not, there are worse ways to spend a few minutes than by looking here, and I recommend sticking around for the “binary solo”),

Dan Kennedy envisioned a massive book project, a big-picture investigation into current issues facing journalism and media. Instead he found everything he needed in New Haven, Conn., inside the small but productive office of the New Haven Independent.

Humans understand the world through stories, some short and some long. But what happens when the stories become so short that they, well, aren’t stories at all? In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, 2013),

Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook, and texting) have played in political activism in Tuni...

In The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), David Hochfelder provides a taut and consistently intelligent history of the telegraph in American life. The book is notable for both its topical breadth—encompassing war,

I have never been to the Super Bowl, and I will probably never will. I’ve never been to a World Cup match or an Olympic event. I’ve never been to the Final Four or the Rose Bowl. I’ve never been to the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Champions League, the...

Robert W. McChesney, the celebrated political economist of communication, takes the Internet, industry and government head-on in his latest book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013).

In Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Duke University Press, 2011), Vicki Mayer provides a major theoretical contribution to media production studies. The book self-consciously challenges the idea of the “TV...

If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead This is the unifying idea of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press,

Somewhere along the line, C.W. Anderson became fascinated with digital journalism and the culture that surrounds it: engaged publics, social networks, and the challenges to “legacy” media. Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age...

Did you watch the game last night? No matter if you live in Australia, England, India, Ontario, or the US, chances are you’ve heard that question today. Televised sports are a constant presence in contemporary culture,

In Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity Press, 2012), Nick Couldry provides a sweeping synthesis of his important media theory over the last decade. Couldry reassesses his work on media rituals, media power,

Have you ever illegally downloaded a song from the internet? How about illicitly burned copies of a CD? Made a “party tape?” Bought a bootleg album? You may have done these things, but have you purchased a bootlegged song-sheet?

It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Marshall Poe does just that.