Welcome to Eszter's Weblog Here you will find my thoughts and comments about all sorts of things from sociology, the Internet, academia, teaching, research, books and movies to current events, fun Web stuff, art, gadgets and just about anything else that comes to mind. If the inspiration strikes you during your visit, feel free to leave a note via the comments link.
I have been meaning to blog about this forever, but have not found the kind of time a post about this deserves. Since there will be a CSPAN2 airing of a related talk tomorrow, I thought I would pass on the longer serious post and just mention the book and speech so people have the opportunity to take advantage of the broadcast.
A new book that should be of interest to many readers of CT is Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. I should say up front that Paul was one of my advisors in graduate school so I am not a completely objective observer here. In fact, Paul has influenced my thinking about IT quite a bit. First, he is great at conveying the idea that studying communication media without a historical context is extremely problematic. Ignoring history is the best way to make unrealistically optimistic or pessimistic assumptions about the potential implications of a new technology. Second, he convincingly argues – as he lays out in great detail in his book – that ignoring the role of political decisions in the evolution of a communication medium misses a major part of the picture. There was a review of the book in The New York Times Book Review last weekend and the New Yorker had a piece a few weeks ago as well.
Paul Starr gave this year’s Van Zelst Lecture at the School of Communication at Northwestern last month. His talk will be aired on CPAN2 tomorrow, June 12th at 10:59am (EST). Paul is a great speaker and extremely careful and engaged scholar so viewers are in for a treat. I highly recommend catching the broadcast and reading the book!
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Eszter Hargittai Communication Studies Department
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois 60208
blog at eszter dot com
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