New Books in Communications

How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong, explores this and many other questions of the modern condition. The book offers an accessible overview of key psychoanalytic theories to understand the video game, in particular the video game experience and its...

Who do people turn to when they want to talk about serious issues in their life? Do they end up confiding in people they list as confidants? In his new book, Someone to Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mario Luis Small uses in-depth interviews with first-year graduate students to uncover how intimate conversations are executed in real time. This book is interesting in the way that the inte...

Zek Valkyrie teaches at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. His new book, Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline (Praeger, 2017), takes readers into the world of electronic games and the complex social relationships that they create. With the mainstream reader in mind, it serves as a primer for anyone interested in the how and why of gaming, as well as a...

Today we are joined by Brett L. Abrams, author of the book Terry Bradshaw: From Super Bowl Champion to Television Personality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). It is part of a series called Sports Icons and Issues in Popular Culture. Abrams, an archivist of electronic records in Washington. D.C., does more than just document the football career of Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who won four...

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman, taking into account the device’s controversial origin story, the seismic cultural impact on society in the 1980s, the worries of diminishing social interactions, and the philosophical implications of listening...

In his new book, Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), cultural historian and biographer Bob Batchelor examines the life of Marvel’s Stan Lee one of the most iconic figures in comic book history. Batchelor has written the first biography of Stan Lee. Starting with his childhood as a Depression-era New Yorker born to immigrant parents, Batchelor follows Lee’s career as a t...

How does the idea of ‘meritocracy’ serve to reinforce social inequality? In Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (Routledge, 2017) Dr Jo Littler, Reader in Culture and Creative Industries at City, University of London analyses the history of the term, the political project it has been associated with, and the cultural manifestations of its neo-liberal form. The book charts the...

In her book, Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead (NYU Press, 2017), Jessica M. Fishman examines how death is presented in the media. Researching how media outlets present images of death over the past 30 years, Fishman explores the controversial practice of picturing the dead. Fishman presents the varying ways the press selects the images they choose to use, the way the...

In her new book, Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia’s Identity Anxiety (Anthem Press, 2017), Stephanie Brookes, a Lecturer in Journalism at Monash University, explores the power of election campaign language to offer a window into the Australian national mood and national identity. Using a variety of political and media sources, including speeches, interviews, press conferences, and...

In his recent book, The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2016), John Powers presents a comprehensive overview of propaganda employed by the People’s Republic of China related to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, showing not only how Han Chinese come to believe it, but also how Tibetans work to resist it. Drawing on pr...

One of the defining characteristics of the Nazi regime that ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945 was its attention to presentation as a means of winning support. In Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda (Routledge, 2017), Nicholas O’Shaughnessy details the centrality of political marketing to how the Nazis governed Germany, showing how vital it was to its success. As he exp...

Marvin Scott’s new book, As I Saw It: A Reporter’s Intrepid Journey (Beaufort Books, 2017) tells 26 stories of memorable people and events that the veteran TV journalist gathered during a career spanning more than 50 years. Scott estimates that he’s told more than 15,000 stories and interviewed 30,000 people for print, radio and television. He describes himself as a journalist who has “tried to st...

Seana Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at UCLA. She defends the “thinker theory” of freedom of speech, which holds that a central reason for upholding a moral and legal system of free speech is that such a system is necessary for free thought and reflective action. This view is articulated in her book, Speech Matters:On Lying, Morality, and t...

In the black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) underscores how imprisonment—a site for both political and personal transformation—shaped movement le...

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle. Whether that’s true or not, it is hard to keep up with what’s going on in the White House, and each new uproar makes it difficult to remember what’s already happened. Take Trump’s first cabinet meeting...

How does a book come into being? In Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton University Press, 2017), Clayton Childress, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at The University of Toronto, accounts for the social processes behind the contemporary novel. The book uses a case study of Jarrettsville, a work of historical fiction, to explore the proce...

In Stephen Pimpare‘s new book, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017), the reader is encouraged to think about how we portray poverty and people in poverty in movies. Overall, Pimpare argues that we use the “propertied gaze” (in connection with the sociological concept of the “male gaze”) to view people who are poor or homeless via fi...

Despite the recent booms in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, technology studies still remain scarce: one of the recent attempts to fill the void is Andrea L. Stanton‘s ‘This is Jerusalem Calling’: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (University of Texas Press, 2013). She weaves together different narratives to tell the story of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS), launched in 1936...

Since its infancy, television has played an important role in shaping U.S. values and the American sense of self. Social activists recognized this power immediately and, consequently, set about trying to influence television’s portrayal of those values by securing access to and a voice in the medium. Allison Perlman‘s Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television (Rutgers Uni...

How do women experience and participate in Metal? This question forms the core of Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), the new book from Rosemary Lucy Hill, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Leeds. Hill’s book is both empirically detailed, drawing on analysis of Metal media, and theoretically rich, engaging with a range...

Noel Brown is a film and television scholar at Liverpool Hope University. His research has focused on Hollywood and British cinema (classical and contemporary), family entertainment, children’s culture and animation. His first three books were published by I.B. Tauris and include, The Hollywood Family Film: from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter, Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney...

Two professors from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada have published a book about how American popular culture reinforces militarism in the United States. In Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting and Resisting Militarism in the War on Terror (Lexington Books, 2010) Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter argue that popular songs, Hollywood movies, professional sports, TV news and even children’...

What is life like in the aspirational economy? In (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017) Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, explores the working life of bloggers, social media stars, and online influencers (not) making a living in and around the fashion industr...

Jennifer Fleeger‘s Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine (Oxford University Press, 2014) tells the story of women in film and their representation as aberrations, but also as moments of emancipation and agency. Fleeger’s book discusses exceptional voices such as Kate Smith, known as the First Lady of Radio; Deanna Durbin, whose soprano voice allegedly saved Universal Studios from...

How do metrics rule the social world? In Metric Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) David Beer, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, outlines the rise of the metric and the role of metrics in shaping everyday life. The book outlines the core theoretical concepts, such as neo-liberalism, bio-power, and bio-politics, alongside the characteristics themes of metric power, including practices of...