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This textbook provides students with a concise introduction to the development of communication theory. Written in an engaging style, it offers an account of the development of all the major theoretical approaches in communication and media studies. The book summarizes clearly and methodically the range of existing theories; explains how and why the diverse currents and schools of thought emerged; and contextualizes all the major approaches, including those of cultural studies and political economy, in their historical, social and intellectual setting. Theories of Communication is an essential text for all students of media, communication and cultural studies. It will also be welcomed by anyone seeking to understand the changes that have accompanied the rise of the so-called information society'.
In the age of satellites and the Internet, worldwide communication has become increasingly unified amid overblown claims about the redemptive possibilities of international networks. But this rhetoric is hardly new. As Armand Mattelart demonstrates in Networking the World, 1794-2000, globalization and its attendant hype have existed since road and rail were the fastest way to move information. Mattelart plates contemporary global communication networks into historical context and shows that the networking of the world began much earlier than many assume, in the late eighteenth century. He argues that the internationalization of communication was spawned by such Enlightenment ideals as universalism and liberalism, and examines how the development of global communications has been inextricably linked to the industrial revolution, modern warfare, and the emergence of nationalism. Throughout, Mattelart eloquently argues that discourses of better living through globalization often mask projects of political, economic, and cultural domination.
Video surveillance, public records, fingerprints, hidden microphones, RFID chips: in contemporary societies the intrusive techniques of surveillance used in daily life have increased dramatically. The “war against terror” has only exacerbated this trend, creating a world that is closer than one might have imagined to that envisaged by George Orwell in 1984. How have we reached this situation? Why have democratic societies accepted that their rights and freedoms should be taken away, a little at a time, by increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of surveillance? From the anthropometry of the 19th Century to the Patriot Act, through an analysis of military theory and the Echelon Project, Armand Mattelart constructs a genealogy of this new power of control and examines its globalising dynamic. This book provides an essential wake-up call at a time when democratic societies are becoming less and less vigilant against the dangers of proliferating systems of surveillance.
The classic, critical and humorous study of cultural imperialism and children's literature; how the Disney fantasy world reproduces the "American Dream" fantasy world, and the disastrous effect of Disney comics and other "mass" cultural merchandise on the development of the so-called "Third" World. In 1973 this work was banned and burned in Chile, and later the English edition was banned for more than a year by the US government. In comic book format with cartoon examples, introduction by David KUNZLE on the Disney world, a bibliography of left writings on cultural imperialism and the comics, and an appendix by John Shelton LAWRENCE on the book's US censorship and the legal-political issues involved in the right to criticize Disney
First published in 1971 in Chile, where the entire third printing was dumped into the ocean by the Chilean Navy and bonfires were held to destroy earlier editions, How to Read Donald Duck reveals the capitalist ideology at work in our most beloved cartoons. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney--curiously parentless, marginalized, always short of cash--Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart dissect the narratives of dependency and social aspiration that define the Disney corpus. Disney recognized the challenge, and when the book was translated and imported into the U.S. in 1975, managed to have all 4,000 copies impounded. Ultimately, 1,500 copies of the book were allowed into the country, the rest of the shipment was blocked, and until now no American publisher has dared re-release the book, which sold over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into seventeen languages. A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman.
Mattelart unpacks the notion of the information society, and examines why it has become the dominant paradigm for social change. He also asks why the notion has come to be dominant in the absence of any critical examination of the conditions under which it has been produced.
A survey of the changes in the advertising industry in the last twenty years including coverage of the emergence of international conglomerates and the diversification of the agencies into public relations and media buying.
Uitgave in boekvorm van het tijdschrift Critical studies vol. 3, no. 1 (1991) met als gastredacteur Roberta L. Salper. Bevat onder meer een interview met Salper door Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak en het artikel 'Gender and ideology in Caribbean narratives' van Salper.