Elihu Katz

Paddy Scannell

Is television dead? The classic television era of the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by limited choices of programs broadcast on over the air channels to families as if they were seated around a hearth – and to a nation as if gathered around a campfire – has indeed ended. Throughout the drastic evolution of this media, thousands of studies have examined the short-term effects of television, such as the evaluation of persuasion campaigns. Yet there is scant research on the overreaching sociological impacts of television and its centrality to Western culture over the past 60 years. This compelling volume of The ANNALS is the first collection of rigorous articles devoted to studying ways in which television has impacted our values, ideologies, institutions, social structure, and culture.

Its Impact on the World (So Far)

The End of Television?

Written by one of the foremost and widely-respected writers in the field, this volume sheds new light on the forms and premises of the communicative experience. In doing so, it challenges the theoretical positions of marxist and "political economy of media" analysts who focus largely on the structure of economic and social power within the media. Instead, Scannell explores the structuring of engagement of the viewer/listener with the broadcaster by analysing the communicative intentions of the broadcaster and the understanding by the audience of those intentions. This powerful and accessible book makes an important contribution to media studies in showing students how the history of the media can be enriched by communications theory.

Radio, Television and Modern Life

Love and Communication is an intriguing philosophical and religious inquiry into the meaning of “talk” – and ultimately the meaning of “being human.” Taking an historical approach, Paddy Scannell argues that the fundamental media of communication are (and always have been) talk and writing. Far from being made redundant by twentieth-century new media (radio and television), these old media laid the foundation for today’s technologies (AI and algorithms, for instance). Emphasizing these linkages, Scannell makes the case for recognizing what a religious sensibility might reveal about these technologies and the fundamental differences between a humanmade world and a world that is beyond our grasp. Drawing on the pioneering work of John Durham Peters, the book proposes that communication and love go together, which can be understood in two ways: as a human accomplishment, or a divine gift. Ultimately, the essential conundrum of today is highlighted: do we wish to remain in a human> This book draws on a lifetime of academic work and the author’s personal experience. It will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication, who will welcome this highly original and searching examination of love as communication.

Love and Communication

David Cardiff

This is a history of broadcasting and its impact on modern life in Britain from its origins in the 1920s to the outbreak of the Second World War. Its concerns are with programmes and their makers and with the audiences for which they were made. It is a pioneering work of cultural and social history.

Volume 1 - 1922-1939, Serving the Nation

A Social History of British Broadcasting

This volume demonstrates the relevance of talk and its analysis to understanding the communicative process in television and radio. As the contributors to this book illustrate, the study of talk on radio and television addresses central questions of how institutional authority and power are maintained, how the media construct audiences and how audiences make sense of programme output. In terms of styles of discourse, the book covers the range of broadcast talk, both formal and informal. Theoretically, it draws on ideas from discourse and conversational analysis, pragmatics and critical linguistics, and on the ideas of Goffman, Garfinkel and Habermas.

Broadcast Talk

Media and Communication traces the historical development of media and communication studies in the 20th century. Paddy Scannell explores how the field formed and developed in both North America and in Europe, expertly introducing and explaining a host of essential media thinkers, ideas and concepts along the way. Including a new chapter on media events, this second edition of a classic text provides a comprehensive yet personal – and always accessible – analysis of media and communication theory and history. It is an invaluable resource for students across media and communication studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

Media and Communication

This book is about the question of existence, the meaning of ‘life’. It is an enquiry into the contemporary human situation as disclosed by television. The elementary components of any real-world situation are place, people and time. These are first examined as basic existential phenomena drawing on Heidegger’s fundamental enquiry into the human situation in Being and Time. They are then explored through the technological and production care-structures of broadcast television which, routinely and exceptionally, display the situated experience of being alive and living in the world today. It shows routinely in the live self-enactments of persons being themselves and the liveness of their ordinary talk on television. It shows exceptionally in television coverage of great occasions and catastrophes as they unfold live and in real time. Case studies reveal the existential role of television in salvaging the possibility of genuine experience, and in revealing the world-historical character of life today. To explore these questions, the agenda of sociology - its concern with economic, political and cultural life - is set aside. Being in the world is not, in the first (or last) instance, a social but an existential question, as an existential enquiry into television today discovers. Passionate and sweeping in scale, this new book from a leading media scholar is a major contribution to our understanding of the media today.

Paddy Scannell

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