Communication and Information Science – serie

This books uses information to reveal the current interconnections between domestic and foreign economic, cultural and political developments in the information sector. It analyzes the international and national factors promoting the development of the emerging information society and exmaines the weaknesses of existing information systems, critiquing their durability, applicability and ultimate desirability.

This step is a step toward greater internationalization of mass communication research. Existing differences between the mass media of North American and Western European countries provide a basis for comparative anlayses that illustrate how differences in national mass media systems can contribute towards intellectual understanding of communication behavior. The world of communication scholarship can be divided into two main schools, the empirical school and the critical school. This volume represents some of the leading scholars of each school and is dedicated to the intellectual merging of the schools by means of fostering an improved understanding of each other.

Open-planning introduces citizens to the institutions that make policy as one way of bolstering democractic technological decision making. Specifically, the book explores the application of open planning to the policies that direct and design the operation of technology-based information systems. The use of these systems so far has produced dangerous dichotomy between those who are part of the knowledge elite and those who merely accommodate themselves to technological change.

This book describes the available options, and the rationale for selecting among them, for observing, measureing or assessing process of communication. This approach contrasts radically to the one taken in many preceding volumes which explain the applicability of general types of quantitative research, for example, content analysis, laboratory experiments, and statistical analysis, to the study of communication. This approach focuses on the methodological problems and solutions unique to the study of communication. It provides the readers with an outline of the problems and/or alternatives that face the researcher.