Communications and Culture

= World Wide Web = Blackboard course documents/Electronic Reserves
= photocopy = Firestone Reserve/graduate sociology library room = University Store

Note: Three of the books assigned for April are being published that month; hardcover copies should be available by that time.

March 25. Media effects

Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (Glencoe, Il: Free Press, 1955), 15-25, 31-33.
Todd Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm," Theory and Society 6 (1978), pp. 205-24.
Jack Goody and Ian P. Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in History and Society 5 (1963), pp. 304-45.
Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News (W.W. Norton, 2003), Chs. 1-3.
Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. and Susan Nall Bales, "Strategic Frame Analysis: Reframing America’s Youth" Social Policy Report 15 (2001), 3-12.

April 1. Communication, ritual, and identity

James W. Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication, " in James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (Unwin Hyman, 1989), 13-36.
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Harvard University Press, 1992), 1-77.
Tamar Liebes, "Television's disaster marathons: a danger for democratic processes?" in Tamar Liebes and James Curran, eds., Media, Ritual and Identity (Routledge, 1998), 71-84.
Larry Gross, "Minorities, Majorities, and the Media," in Liebes and Curran, Media, Ritual and Identity, 87-102.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed (London: Verso, 1991), 67-82.

April 8. The development of the public sphere

Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT, 1991), 14-31.
Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Harvard University Press, 1989), Ch. 5.
David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton University Press, 2000), Introduction.
Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (Basic, 2004), Introduction, Part I.

April 15. Cultural hierarchy, moral regulation, and the formation of the media

Starr, The Creation of the Media, Part III.
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard University Press, 1988), 85-242.

April 22. ... And now the news

Schudson, The Sociology of News, Chs. 4-10.
James Hamilton, All the News That's Fit to Sell (Princeton University Press, 2004), Introduction, Chs. 1, 3, 6, 8. .

April 29. Technology, property rights, and cultural innovation

Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (Penguin, 2004), Preface, Chs. 1-5, 7-14, Afterword.