Media Convergence: The three degrees of network, mass and interpersonal communication

by Jensen; Klaus Bruhn

• ISBN13: 9780415482042
• ISBN10: 0415482046
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2010-02-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The development of digital media presents a unique opportunity to reconsider what communication is, and what individuals, groups, and societies might hope to accomplish through new as well as old media. At a time when digital media still provoke both utopian and dystopian views of their likely consequences, Klaus Bruhn Jensen places these 'new' media in a comparative perspective together with 'old' mass media and face-to-face communication, restating the two classic questions of media studies: what do media do to people, and what do people do with media?ããMedia Convergence makes a distinction between three general types of media: the human body enabling communication in the flesh; the technically reproduced means of mass communication; and the digital technologies facilitating interaction one-to-one, one-to-many, as well as many-to-many.Features include:case studies, including mobile phones in everyday life, the Muhammad cartoons controversy and climate change as a global challenge for human communication and political actiondiagrams, figures, and tables summarizing key concepts beyond standard 'models of communication'systematic cross-referencing. Major terms are highlighted and cross-referenced throughout, with key concepts defined in margin notes.

Author Biography

Klaus Bruhn Jensen is Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Recent publications include A Handbook of Media and Communication Research (2002) and International Encyclopedia of Communication (12 vols, 2008), for which he served as Area Editor of Communication Theory and Philosophy. Current research interests include internet studies, mobile media, and communication theory.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
Preface	p. ix
A critique of communication	p. 1
Introduction: communication - the very idea	p. 3
The end of communication	p. 5
Case study: speaking of the weather - climate change	p. 7
Communication in theory and practice	p. 10
Outline of the volume	p. 13
Erro, ergo sum: communication and pragmatism in the history of ideas	p. 19
Communicating with the classics	p. 20
Re-actualizing Aristotle	p. 22
Kant and other Copernican turns	p. 25
Peircean pragmatism	p. 28
Case study: interpretive communities	p. 32
The linguistic turn	p. 35
A communicative turn	p. 37
Differences that make a difference: the art and science of media and communication research	p. 39
A conflict of the faculties	p. 40
When is meaning?	p. 41
Case study: three differences that make a difference	p. 44
Information into meaning	p. 47
Communication - between transmission and ritual	p. 49
Performativity and interactivity	p. 51
The upper and lower thresholds of communication	p. 55
Programmable media	p. 57
Media of three degrees	p. 59
Media matters: the material conditions of communication	p. 61
Determination in the first instance	p. 62
Material media of three degrees	p. 64
Case study: three-step flow	p. 71
From matter to media	p. 74
A fourth degree	p. 80
Media meanings: the discourses, genres, and modalities of communication	p. 83
The medium was the message	p. 84
Media and modalities	p. 85
Is there a text in this network?	p. 88
Case study: searching media - search engines	p. 92
Meta-communication in three degrees	p. 94
Turns and transitions	p. 100
Media institutions: between agency and structure	p. 103
Institutions-to-think-with	p. 104
The duality of communication	p. 105
Case study: what's mobile in mobile communication? - mobile telephones	p. 108
The right to communicate	p. 110
Some rights reserved	p. 117
The double hermeneutics of media and communication research	p. 123
Media of science: doing communication research	p. 125
Signs of science	p. 126
New media, old methods	p. 127
Information and inference	p. 131
Case study: generalizing about generalization	p. 140
Unification in the final instance	p. 142
The future of communication: pragmatism between modernism and postmodernism	p. 147
"Nothing is as practical as a good theory"	p. 148
Theories in practice	p. 149
Modernist pragmatism	p. 151
Postmodernist pragmatism	p. 156
Case study: cartoon communications - the Fyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy	p. 160
A third way	p. 163
References	p. 167
Index	p. 189
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