Revisits the 1955 classic, "Personal Influence : The part played by people in the flow of mass communications," by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld.

«Strictly speaking», James Carey wrote, «there is no history of mass communication research.» This volume is a long-overdue response to Carey's comment about the field's ignorance of its own past. The collection includes essays of historiographical self-scrutiny, as well as new histories that trace the field's institutional evolution and cross-pollination with other academic disciplines. The volume treats the remembered past of mass communication research as crucial terrain where boundaries are marked off and futures plotted. The collection, intended for scholars and advanced graduate students, is an essential compass for the field.

This book offers a wide-scale, interdisciplinary analysis and guide to social media and political communication, examining the political use of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. From disinformation to artificial intelligence, Jeremy Lipschultz explores how social media tools are being deployed by "good" and "bad" political actors. The use of "fake news" or disinformation is clearly contextualized for readers within a wider understanding of the historic uses of propaganda, persuasion and political advertising. Lipschultz also examines how social media is used by activists and social movements to increase civic engagement and amplify social issues. The book surveys traditional media communication theories and methods, exploring newsgatekeeping, propaganda, persuasion and personal influence, and diffusion of new technologies and ideas, teaching vital critical thinking methods for consuming, engaging with, and understanding political social media content from a media literacy perspective. It also includes social network analyses which offer visual representations of social media crowds that influence social movements and political change. Essential reading for students of Media and Cultural Studies, Communication, Journalism, Political Science, and Information Technology, as well as anyone wishing to understand the current intersection of social media and politics.

"A sprightly, critical and intelligent guided tour around the mansion of media and communications/cultural research... enormously useful for students and researchers." - James Curran, Goldsmiths, University of London "A highly comprehensive guide to core concepts in media theory and criticism." - Andrew Goodwin, University of San Francisco "A great resource for new under-grads and something I urge my students to buy and use as a hand first ′port of call′ throughout their studies." - Paul Smith, De Montfort University This book covers the key concepts central to understanding recent developments in media and communications studies. Wide-ranging in scope and accessible in style it sets out a useful, clear map of the important theories, methods and debates. The entries critically explore the limits of a key concept as much as the traditions that define it. They include clear definitions, are introduced within the wider context of the field and each one: is fully cross-referenced is appropriately illustrated with examples, tables and diagrams provides a guide to further reading. This book is an essential resource for students of media and communications across sociology, cultural studies, creative industries and of course, media and communications courses.

David E. Toohey's Borderlands Media: Cinema and Literature as Opposition to the Oppression of Immigrants is an in-depth analysis which explores the immigrant experience using a mixture of cinema, literary, and other artistic media spanning from 1958 onward. Toohey begins with Orson Welles's 1958 Touch of Evil, which triggered a wave of protest resulting in Chicana/o filmmakers acting out against the racism against immigrant and diaspora communities. The study then adds policy documents and social science scholarship to the mix, both to clarify and oppose undesirable elements in these forms of thought. Through extensive analysis and explication, Toohey uncovers a history of power ranging from lingual and visual to more widely recognized class and racial divisions. These divisions are analyzed both with an emphasis on how they oppress, but also how cinematic political thought can challenge them, with special attention to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. David E. Toohey's Borderlands Media is an essential text for scholars and students engaged in questions regarding the effect of media on the oppression of immigrants and diaspora communities.

The Handbook of Communication History addresses central ideas, social practices, and media of communication as they have developed across time, cultures, and world geographical regions. It attends to both the varieties of communication in world history and the historical investigation of those forms in communication and media studies. The Handbook editors view communication as encompassing patterns, processes, and performances of social interaction, symbolic production, material exchange, institutional formation, social praxis, and discourse. As such, the history of communication cuts across social, cultural, intellectual, political, technological, institutional, and economic history. The volume examines the history of communication history; the history of ideas of communication; the history of communication media; and the history of the field of communication. Readers will explore the history of the object under consideration (relevant practices, media, and ideas), review its manifestations in different regions and cultures (comparative dimensions), and orient toward current thinking and historical research on the topic (current state of the field). As a whole, the volume gathers disparate strands of communication history into one volume, offering an accessible and panoramic view of the development of communication over time and geographical places, and providing a catalyst to further work in communication history.

'A frankly brilliant book' - GUARDIAN 'An absorbing exploration ... Pick does not stumble' - TORTOISE 'An extraordinarily engrossing and wide-ranging analysis of a word and a concept. I fell under its spell immediately' - SIMON GARFIELD In 1953, a group of prisoners of war who had fought against the communist invasion of South Korea were released. They chose - apparently freely - to move to Mao's China. Among those refusing repatriation were twenty-one American GIs. Their decision sparked alarm in the West: why didn't they want to come home? What was going on? Soon, people were saying that the POWs' had been 'brainwashed'. Was this something new or a phenomenon that has been around for centuries? The belief that it is possible to marshal scientific knowledge to govern someone's mind gained enormous attention. In an era of Cold War paranoia and experimentation on 'altered states', the idea of brainwashing flourished, appearing in everything from critiques of CIA research on LSD to warnings of corporate groupthink, from visions of automaton assassins to conspiracy theories about 'global elites'. Today, brainwashing is almost taken for granted - built into our psychological and political language, rooted in the way we think about minds and societies. How did we get to this point - and why? Psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick delves into the mysterious world of brainwashing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from The Manchurian Candidate to ISIS, TV advertising to online algorithms. Mixing fascinating case studies with historical and psychological insights, Brainwashed is a stimulating journey into the mysteries of thought control.