Over the past 45 years, award-winning sociologist David L. Altheide has illuminated how media formats and media logic affect our understanding of social issues, of how political decisions are made, and of how we relate to each other. In this masterful, summative work, Altheide describes the media syndrome: how these factors shape our expectations of, and reactions to, both public and personal events. Ideal for courses on mass media and political communication, the book provides a detailed description of the media syndrome and its impact on daily life; uses historical and contemporary examples from Watergate to Edward Snowden; includes the changes in the ecology of communication from mass media to social media and its social impact.
Throughout the world, the mass media are responsible for shaping the form and content of experiences. In this book, David L. Altheide examines how the mass media, including news and popular culture, have cast terrorism, propaganda and social control post 9/11. Altheide shows how fear works with terrorism to alter discourse, social meanings, and our sense of being in the world. Emphasis is placed on the different institutional interventions and how these particular stories become framed and inform the wider media narratives of terror. The author argues that post 9/11 we are witnessing the emergence of new communication formats that not only constitute counter-narratives, but also shape future communicative experience. The text is suitable for scholars and students interested in the ongoing relationship between the media and terror post 9/11.
The creative use of fear by news media and social control organizations has produced a "discourse of fear"--The awareness and expectation that danger and risk are lurking everywhere. Case studies illustrates how certain organizations and social institutions benefit from the exploitation of such fear construction. One social impact is a manipulated public empathy: We now have more "victims" than at any time in our prior history. Another, more troubling result is the role we have ceded to law enforcement and punishment: we turn ever more readily to the state and formal control to protect us from what we fear. This book attempts through the marshalling of significant data to interrupt that vicious cycle of fear discourse. David Altheide employs a method, which he calls "tracking discourse", to map how the nature and the extent of the use of the word "fear" has changed since the 1980s; how the topics associated with fear, the topics of media discourse, have also changed over the same period (for example, the emphasis "moves" over time across AIDS, crime, immigrants, race, sexuality, schools, and children); and how certain news sources prevail over others, thus protectively insulating themselves from criticism of the premises of their discourse frames.
Altheide's new book advances the argument set in motion some years ago with Media Logic and continued in Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era: that in our age, information technology and the communication enviroments it posits have affected the private and the social spheres of all our power relationships, redefining the ground rules for social life and concepts such as freedom and justice., Articulated through an interactionist and non-deterministic focus, An Ecology of Communication offers a distinctive perspective for understanding the impact of information technology, communication formats, and social activities in the new electronic environment.
Drawing on social science and communications theory, Gonzo Governance offers a new interpretation of presidential power that shifts focus to the media dynamics that surrounded Donald Trump. The former president’s unhinged behavior and skilled media and digital manipulations changed the nature and process of significant governance at the federal and state levels, including denying election results and restricting voting opportunities. He went "Gonzo" – promoting himself without regard for conventional norms and practices – and blasted ideological fault lines into explosive political fragments, resulting in so much dissensus that numerous legislators would not recognize the newly elected President Biden, nor would they agree to take a potential life-saving vaccine because it had been associated with a politicized virus, COVID-19. Nurtured by media logic and a communications ecology that has wedded people to digital technologies and formats that govern the structure, grammar, form, expectations, and meanings of messages that can entertain, enlighten, and disinform, this form of governance alters the fundamental way that information is communicated. David L. Altheide emphasizes how these changes informed Donald Trump’s electoral strategies as well as the insurrection attempt on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Altheide's new book advances the argument set in motion some years ago with Media Logic and continued in Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era: that in our age, information technology and the communication environments it posits have affected the private and the social spheres of all our power relationships, redefining the ground rules for social life and concepts such as freedom and justice. Articulated through an interactionist and non-deterministic focus, An Ecology of Communication offers a distinctive perspective for understanding the impact of information technology, communication formats, and social activities in the new electronic environment. As more routines, rituals, and activities incorporate such technologies within their organizational cultures, new sorts of activities are added and previous ones are changed according to an underlying logic explored in these pages. Various chapters illustrate some of these altered and redefined organizational cultures: bureaucracy, the mass media, computer formats, war, surveillance, and testing, among others.
Altheide (School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State U.) examines how the American mass media and popular culture have contributed to the use of fear as a form of social control, allowing elites to manipulate national and international priorities by referencing pervasive fears of crime and terrorism. He discusses the social construction of
This thoughtful text demonstrates how the mass media constructs a politics of fear in the United States. Using a social interactionist perspective, the chapters examines such issues as the expansion of surveillance on the Internet, the construction of a terrorism-fighting hero to promote patriotism, the use of social media by terror groups, the fear of the other fostered by the refugee crisis and western radicalization, as well as the mass-mediated reaction to recent terrorist attacks. Also covered are the politics of fear involving disease (Ebola, Zika), social control efforts, and harsh attacks on American governmental officials for not keeping people safe from harm. All chapters in this new edition have been updated with descriptions and relevant analysis of significant events, including two Israeli-Hamas wars, terrorism attacks (e.g., Boston Marathon, Charlie Hebdo, San Bernadino, etc.), global reactions—often hostility—to refugees in the United States and especially Europe, the development of ISIS, surveillance (Wiki Leaks, Snowden, NSA), and the growing significance of social media. The text explains how the social construction of fear is used to steer public and foreign policy, arguing that security policies to protect the citizenry from violence have become control systems that most often curtail privacy and civil liberties.
The concept of media logic, a theoretical framework for explaining the relationship between mass media and culture, was first introduced in Altheide and Snow's influential work, Media Logic. In Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era, the authors expand their analysis of how organizational considerations promote a distinctive media logic, which in turn is conductive to a media culture. They trace the ethnography of that media culture, including the knowledge, techniques, and assumptions that encourage media professionals to acquire particular cognitive and evaluative criteria and thereby present events primarily for the media's own ends.
Throughout the world, the mass media are responsible for shaping the form and content of experiences. In this book, David L. Altheide examines how the mass media, including news and popular culture, have cast terrorism, propaganda and social control post 9/11. Altheide shows how fear works with terrorism to alter discourse, social meanings, and our sense of being in the world. Emphasis is placed on the different institutional interventions and how these particular stories become framed and inform the wider media narratives of terror. The author argues that post 9/11 we are witnessing the emergence of new communication formats that not only constitute counter-narratives, but also shape future communicative experience. The text is suitable for scholars and students interested in the ongoing relationship between the media and terror post 9/11.
Altheide's new book advances the argument set in motion some years ago with Media Logic and continued in Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era: that in our age, information technology and the communication enviroments it posits have affected the private and the social spheres of all our power relationships, redefining the ground rules for social life and concepts such as freedom and justice., Articulated through an interactionist and non-deterministic focus, An Ecology of Communication offers a distinctive perspective for understanding the impact of information technology, communication formats, and social activities in the new electronic environment.
The creative use of fear by news media and social control organizations has produced a "discurse of fear" - the awareness and expection that danger and risk are lurking everywhere. Case studies illustrates how certain organizations and social institutions benefit from the explotation of such fear construction. One social impact is a manipulated public empathy: We now have more "victims" than at any time in our prior history. Another, more troubling resutl is the role we have ceded to law enforcement and punishment: we turn ever more readily to the state and formal control to protect us from what we fear. This book attempts through the marshalling of significant data to interrupt that vicious cycle of fear discourse.
Drawing on social science and communications theory, Gonzo Governance offers a new interpretation of presidential power that shifts focus to the media dynamics that surrounded Donald Trump. The former president’s unhinged behavior and skilled media and digital manipulations changed the nature and process of significant governance at the federal and state levels, including denying election results and restricting voting opportunities. He went "Gonzo" – promoting himself without regard for conventional norms and practices – and blasted ideological fault lines into explosive political fragments, resulting in so much dissensus that numerous legislators would not recognize the newly elected President Biden, nor would they agree to take a potential life-saving vaccine because it had been associated with a politicized virus, COVID-19. Nurtured by media logic and a communications ecology that has wedded people to digital technologies and formats that govern the structure, grammar, form, expectations, and meanings of messages that can entertain, enlighten, and disinform, this form of governance alters the fundamental way that information is communicated. David L. Altheide emphasizes how these changes informed Donald Trump’s electoral strategies as well as the insurrection attempt on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
David E. Toohey’s Borderlands Media: Cinema and Literature as Opposition to the Oppression of Immigrants is an in-depth analysis which explores the immigrant experience using a mixture of cinema, literary, and other artistic media spanning from 1958 onward. Toohey begins with Orson Welles’s 1958 Touch of Evil, which triggered a wave of protest resulting in Chicana/o filmmakers acting out against the racism against immigrant and diaspora communities. The study then adds policy documents and social science scholarship to the mix, both to clarify and oppose undesirable elements in these forms of thought. Through extensive analysis and explication, Toohey uncovers a history of power ranging from lingual and visual to more widely recognized class and racial divisions. These divisions are analyzed both with an emphasis on how they oppress, but also how cinematic political thought can challenge them, with special attention to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. David E. Toohey’s Borderlands Media is an essential text for scholars and students engaged in questions regarding the effect of media on the oppression of immigrants and diaspora communities.
Over the past 45 years, award-winning sociologist David L. Altheide has illuminated how media formats and media logic affect our understanding of social issues, of how political decisions are made, and of how we relate to each other. In this masterful, summative work, Altheide describes the media syndrome: how these factors shape our expectations of, and reactions to, both public and personal events. Ideal for courses on mass media and political communication, the book provides a detailed description of the media syndrome and its impact on daily life; uses historical and contemporary examples from Watergate to Edward Snowden; includes the changes in the ecology of communication from mass media to social media and its social impact.
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