Sue Curry Jansen - Böcker

Critical theorist, feminist, and censorship expert Sue Curry Jansen brings a fresh perspective to contemporary communication inquiry. Jansen engages two key questions at the heart of a critical politics of communication: What do we know? And how do we know it? The questions are not unique to our era, she notes, but our responses to them are our own. Looking at issues of globalization, science, politics, gender, social inequality, and other social formations that shape our world, this insightful book advocates a new agenda not only for communication research, but also for the writing_and language_that comes out of it.

Public relations is, by design, the least visible of the persuasive industries. It operates behind the scenes, encouraging us to consume, vote, believe and behave in ways that keep economies moving and citizens from storming the citadels of power. In this important new book, Sue Curry Jansen explores the ways in which globalization and the digital revolution have substantially elevated PR's role in management, marketing, governance and international affairs. Since the best PR is invisible PR, it violates the norms of liberal democracy, which require transparency and accountability. Even when it serves benign purposes, she argues, PR is a commercial enterprise that divorces communication from conviction and turns it into a mercenary venture. As a primary source of what now passes as news, PR influences much of what we know and how we know it. Stealth Communications will be an indispensable guide for students of media studies and public relations, as well as anyone interested in the radical transformation of PR and the democratization of public communication.

Public relations is, by design, the least visible of the persuasive industries. It operates behind the scenes, encouraging us to consume, vote, believe and behave in ways that keep economies moving and citizens from storming the citadels of power. In this important new book, Sue Curry Jansen explores the ways in which globalization and the digital revolution have substantially elevated PR's role in management, marketing, governance and international affairs. Since the best PR is invisible PR, it violates the norms of liberal democracy, which require transparency and accountability. Even when it serves benign purposes, she argues, PR is a commercial enterprise that divorces communication from conviction and turns it into a mercenary venture. As a primary source of what now passes as news, PR influences much of what we know and how we know it. Stealth Communications will be an indispensable guide for students of media studies and public relations, as well as anyone interested in the radical transformation of PR and the democratization of public communication.

Walter Lippmann has been widely misrepresented in media and communication scholarship. Classified as a utilitarian and characterized as an antidemocratic adversary of philosopher John Dewey in a legendary debate in the 1920s about the role of the public in modern democracies, Lippmann has been portrayed as the bête noir of the post-1980s revival of pragmatism and humanistic studies within the field. Consequently, his formative contributions to the field have not only been under-valued, but more importantly, the richness and continuing relevance of his generative work to the challenges of the twenty-first century are largely under-appreciated.There are, however, some recent signs of the beginnings of a Lippmann renaissance. Focusing primarily on his early career when Lippmann directly addressed the challenges posed to democracy by the emergence of new communication technologies, this book is part of that renaissance. It presents a radical reconsideration of Lippmann’s thought and legacy and offers a broad-based introduction to his theories of mass communication. Arguing that he was a political ally rather than an adversary of Dewey as well as a humanist and a democrat, influenced by William James’ pragmatism and George Santayana’s critical realism, Jansen contends that Lippmann developed a fully formed social constructivism decades before Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman’s seminal 1966 treatise, The Social Construction of Reality. She boldly concludes that Lippmann deserves to be recognized as a founder of the field of media and communication research.