[ecrea] New eBooks by Octogenarians

Cultstuds might want to check out two new ebooks, a new venture from USC 
Annenberg Press, home of the International Journal of Communication. As 
editor/publisher I am especially pleased that two of our ebooks authors 
are distinguished scholars in their mid-80s, thus challenging any ageist 
assumptions about who is open to trying new ways to engage with 
scholarship and communication.


Howard Becker and Rob Faulkner, sociologists and experienced musicians, 
wrote a book about their musical experiences—Do You Know? The Jazz 
Repertoire in Action [Chicago, 2009]—describing how musicians who didn’t 
know each other could perform competently and interestingly without 
rehearsing, or playing from written music. When they wrote it, they 
lived at opposite ends of the country: Faulkner in Massachusetts, Becker 
in San Francisco. Instead of sitting around talking about their ideas, 
they wrote e-mails. So every step of their thinking, false steps as well 
as ideas that worked, existed in written form. The entire collection of 
this 3-year email correspondence, the exact record of a collaborative 
process now appears as an e-book (which allows linking to available 
performances of the tunes they discussed): Thinking Together: An E-Mail 
Exchange and All That Jazz. It’s one of the most revealing records of a 
scientific collaboration ever made public, and an intimate picture of 
the creative process [available on Amazon/Kindle and iBooks].
Becker played piano in Chicago and Kansas City and taught sociology at 
Northwestern University. Among his books are Art Worlds and Tricks of 
the Trade. Faulkner played trumpet in Los Angeles, got a PhD in 
sociology from UCLA, then taught at the University of Rochester and the 
University of Massachusetts (playing professionally in those places 
too). He is author of two books about the movie business, Hollywood 
Studio Musicians and Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in the 
Hollywood Film Industry.



Now available on Amazon at an advance sale price [$4.79 instead of 5.99] 
Echoes of Gabriel Tarde: What We Know Different or Better 100 Years 
Later, by Elihu Katz, Christopher Ali, and Joohan Kim.

Originally published in 1898, Gabriel Tarde’s essay “Opinion and 
Conversation” can be read as a series of propositions about the 
interaction of press, conversation, opinion and action, anticipating 
today’s “deliberative democracy.” Exploring these themes in a hyper-text 
“dialogue” with Tarde, Elihu Katz, Christopher Ali, and Joohan Kim ask 
what we know better or different 100 years later. The aim is not only to 
reawaken attention to Tarde’s text, but to assess the progress of 
communications research in its light. The e-book’s format makes it 
possible to access the essay as a series of propositions, foreshadowing 
contemporary concerns with issues such as agenda setting, public opinion 
formation, the diffusion of innovation, the two-step flow of 
communication, the role of the press in nation-building, new media 
technologies, the normative role of media in a democracy, media events, 
and the like. The e-book includes an analytic Introduction, a 
biographical postscript and the first full English translation of 
Tarde’s essay. Long overlooked, “Opinion and Conversation” deserves to 
be canonized as foundational for theories that link mass and 
interpersonal communication, especially in the age of social media.



Other ebooks in our series include The Politics of Academic Labor in 
Communication Studies, edited by Jonathan Sterne; Piracy Cultures, 
edited by Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardozo; and Breaking Boundaries 
in Political Entertainment Studies, edited by Dannagal Young and 
Jonathan Gray.





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