Media and Communication

Paddy Scannell worked for many years at the University of Westminster (London) where he and his colleagues established, in 1975, the first undergraduate degree program in Media Studies in the UK. He is a founding editor of Media, Culture and Society which began publication in 1979 and is now issued six times yearly. He is the author of A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1939 which he wrote with David Cardiff, editor of Broadcast Talk and author of Radio, Television and Modern Life. He is currently working on a trilogy. The first volume, Media and Communication, was published in June 2007. Professor Scannell is now working on the second volume, Television and the Meaning of ′Live.′ The third volume, Love and Communication, is in preparation. His research interests include broadcasting history and historiography, the analysis of talk, the phenomenology of communication and culture and communication in Africa.

This is a lucid, generous, and strikingly original account of the emergence of media and communication studies as a vibrant academic field. Moving across sociology, critical theory, and cultural studies, Scannell takes stock of the key concepts and questions that have come to define the field over the past six decades. In this expanded and revised edition, Scannell identifies what is distinctive about the media of the 20th century - the immense power of live broadcasting and unscripted talk in public in shaping both the eventful and the everyday across much of the world. The result is a milestone intellectual history of media and communication studies that sets the conceptual coordinates for our digital present and future.

• Part I The masses1. Mass communication: Lazarsfeld, Adorno, Merton, USA, 1930s and 1940s2. Mass culture: Horkheimer, Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin, Germany/USA, 1930s and 1940s3. The end of the masses: Merton, Lazarsfeld, Riesman, Katz, USA, 1940s and 1950sPart II Everyday life4. Culture and communication: Leavis, Hoggart, Williams, England, 1930s–1950s5. Communication and technology: Innis, McLuhan, Canada, 1950s–1960s6. Communication as interaction: Goffman and Garfinkel, USA, 1950s–1970sPart III Communicative rationality and irrationality7. Communication and language: Austin, Grice, Sacks, Levinson, UK/USA, 1950s–1970s8. Communication as ideology: Hall, UK, 1960s and 1970s9. Communication and Publicness: Habermas, Germany (USA/UK), 1950s–1990s10. Communication and celebration, Dayan (France) and Katz (Israel), 1990sConclusionAfterword (2020)Index