Theorizing communication

by Dan Schiller

This book offers the first detailed intellectual history of communication study, from its beginnings in late nineteenth-century critiques of corporate capitalism and the burgeoning American wireline communications industry, to contemporary information theory and poststructuralist accounts ofcommunicative activity. Schiller identifies a problematic split between manual and intellectual labor that outlasts each of the field's major conceptual departures, and from this vital perspective builds a rigorous critical survey of work aiming to understand the nexus of media, ideology, andinformation in a society. Looking closely at the thought of John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Daniel Bell, and others, Schiller carefully maps the transformation of ideas about communication and culture as issues of corporate power, mass persuasion, cultural imperialism,and information expansion succeed one another in prominence...