Archive for May 2014

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[ecrea] New eBooks by Octogenarians

Wed May 07 05:39:59 GMT 2014




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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