Book Reviews

Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916

Book Reviews

Media and social inequality: Innovations in community structure research John C. Pollock Routledge, New York, 2013, $145.00 (hard), pp. 194

John Pollock has established a well-earned reputation as a productive scholar who believes that undergraduates can contribute to knowledge at the same time they are learning about the role that the media of communication play in shaping and reflecting the communities in which they will live. Professor Pollock routinely gives credit to an army of students at The College of New Jersey who have collaborated with him over the years in carving out a special niche in the literature on the relations between community structure and news media content. He does so again in his somewhat unusual introduction to this edited volume. It is unusual because it includes yet another example of Pollock’s research; a test of 11 hypotheses about media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, before and after the group’s eviction from Zuccotti Park in New York City. Although Media and Social Inequality was originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society, Pollock’s expanded introduction and an analysis of newspaper coverage of the universal health insurance mandate written by Pollock and two of his former students are original contributions to this

volume. The other six chapters cover a range of topics from an examination of community, or structural pluralism as a contribution to media and social theory, to a set of recommendations about how agenda-setting and community-structure approaches might be merged. Seunghan Nah and Cory Armstrong make an especially important contribution to this volume through their careful and comprehensive review of the variety of ways that structural pluralism has been utilized as a vantage point through which to understand how society affects the media, rather than the other way around. Although due credit is given to the contributions made by Phillip Tichenor, George Donohue, and Clarice Olien to the study of news media performance, Nah and Armstrong are careful to locate this research within an existing stream of power structure analysis associated with Robert Dahl. In presenting the various concepts and dimensions that have been brought together under the pluralism umbrella, Nah and Armstrong clearly identify what some see as an underlying weakness of the construct. The great variety of indicators and operational definitions of pluralism that have been used from time to time lead some to doubt that we actually have a clear understanding of how the exercise of power or the production of influence over decision making with the media actually works. Masamiro Yamamoto’s contribution to this volume actually takes a stance in

Journal of Communication 65 (2015) E1–E5 © 2015 International Communication Association

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opposition to the dominant trend within the community structure research tradition. Rather than seeking to understand how community structure influences media coverage of social problems, Yamamoto seeks to understand “the role of local mass media in social mechanisms that explain community-level variations in crime and delinquency” (p. 54). Although an examination of the nature and location of axes of power within a community that might work to emphasize or ignore particular problems in their midst would be consistent with this tradition, Yamamoto’s attention is focused on community media as agents of social control that work through their influence on the formation and maintenance of social ties and cultural capital. The characteristics of communities that structuralists might use to explain why the media responds differently to these problems are used by Yamamoto (following Robert Putnam) to explain the failure of media to have much in the way of a positive impact on the lives of the truly disadvantaged. In the chapter that follows, Yamamoto and Douglas Hindman focus more explicitly on variations in social capital and interpersonal trust as examples of media effects. Although Hindman and Yamamoto acknowledge that the “structural pluralism model was developed to help understand variation in local newspaper content and editor attitudes” (p. 76), this is not what concerns them. Instead they offer a hypothesis about “the impact of newspaper use on social trust,” which they assume will be greater in communities with “higher levels of structural pluralism” (p. 77). Although community pluralism was, as E2

they expected, negatively associated with levels of trust within the community, they ignore the more powerful influences, such as race, gender, and political interest, that emerged in their regression analysis (p. 84). More critically, at least for the purpose of advancing community structure research as it relates to media, we actually need to know something about the content readers see in the newspapers of differentially structured communities. Brenda Watson and Daniel Riffe come much closer to this goal in their examination of the relationship between structural pluralism and local public affairs blogging. This is a timely engagement with “place blogging” as an emerging alternative to traditional news media. In one sense, this is a study of the structure of competition between media across communities. Implicitly, at least, they are asking about the impact of structural conditions within a media market that that invites entry into that market by socially oriented volunteers. Watson and Riffe add consideration of community stress, or a need for information, to more traditional expectations regarding the influence of community pluralism. If we grant that bloggers are influenced by whatever rewards they derive from “ratings” or measures of hits, “likes,” and links from other blogs, or even mainstream media, then it is easy to characterize their entry into this marketplace, or arena, as being in response to some structural influence. Watson and Riffe used data from a large number of midsized American cities in order to examine the relation between structure, stress, and the presence of bloggers.


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They find some support for their hypothesis that community pluralism would be associated with more public affairs place blogs. They found greater support for the second hypothesis, which predicted that greater stress would be associated with more blogging. Rather than overclaiming, Watson and Riffe are careful to point out the limitations in their models as reflected in low levels of explained variance, or correct classification. There is little doubt, however, that this expansion of the community pluralism framework to the structure of information environments is an important contribution for structurally oriented researchers to explore in the future. This somewhat gratifying chapter is followed by an effort by Kristen Kiernicki, John Pollock, and Patrick Lavery to apply Pollock’s community structure approach to newspaper coverage of the healthcare policy debate. As is his tendency, Pollock and his coauthors developed 17 hypotheses regarding how structural features of communities relate to direction and prominence operationalized as an “impact vector” (p. 128). Specific structural variables are organized under four theoretically based umbrellas that have been used successfully by Pollock in the past. The “buffer” or “privilege” label is applied to communities that have been “buffered” from economic uncertainty (p. 121). Alternatively, the “vulnerability” hypotheses focus on the behavior of media within communities that we would recognize as disadvantaged or vulnerable. The “stakeholder” hypotheses relate expectations about which identifiable communities of interest have a position of

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influence, such as we might associate with a racial or ethnic group. Stakeholders might also be identified in terms of their political partisanship, or their stage within the lifecycle. Each hypothesis predicts a positive relationship between a structural feature and “favorable coverage of universal healthcare.” The value of these theoretical clusters becomes open to question when only a few hypotheses find support within the data. This kind of difficulty is especially likely when there are no clear indications about which communities, interests, or stakeholders are more likely to suffer or benefit from a public policy that is being formed within a highly contentious and ideologically fractious environment. It is also difficult when the general tendency across cities was for the newspapers to avoid featuring unfavorable coverage. In the absence of much variance to explain, it is not surprising that only 2 of 17 correlation coefficients were statistically significant (p. 138). Leo Jeffres and five of his colleagues provide yet another analysis that further marginalizes the role that variously distributed power and influence plays within communities through, dare I say following Anthony Giddens, its “structuration” of media behavior. The Jeffres team sets out to “merge” three different models that have risen from time to time to explain social relations within variously structured communities. In their review, they call attention to an important distinction between the kinds of communities examined by Tichenor and his colleagues in Minnesota, and the kinds of communities being explored by the so-called “urban communications scholars” (p. 146) who focus their


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attention on the metropolitan areas where the majority of Americans live. Perhaps as an example of searching where the light is better, Jeffres and his colleagues use an expanded array of information about the “environment in which people live” (p. 146) to evaluate this potential merger. Unfortunately, although the respondents in their relatively small national sample (n = 477) were asked about their media use, no attempt was made to characterize the performance of media with regard to coverage of any critical issues. It is not surprising to learn that media use and interpersonal communication is associated with civic engagement. What we do not learn is anything in particular about how variations in media performance might play a role, or about how variations in community structure might affect that performance. The final chapter by Maxwell McCombs and Marcus Funk brings these concerns back to the table. Their expansion of the dominant community structure paradigm actually delivers on the promise of a merger that would advance a common goal. As you might assume, the merger being proposed is between community structure and agenda setting frameworks. The theoretical and analytical challenge is to expand our understanding of how “the external influence of intermedia agenda setting and the internal influence of community structure interact to shape the news agendas of local daily newspapers” (p. 174). It is easy to grant that both community characteristics and “national journalism culture” are likely to influence local news coverage. The challenge is to understand how this happens. What E4

McCombs and Funk offer is not bad as far as it goes. Issue salience at the local level is expected to influence the extent of coverage (p. 177). This is an assumption along the lines of a familiar, if ancient refrain: The media just provide what their audiences want. While McCombs and Funk engage creatively with the problems associated with variations across time in both community structure and national news agendas, there is no attempt to deal with the problems involved in determining what it is that these audiences actually prefer. We cannot simply assume that whatever local papers provide is what the audience wants. To do so is to discard any critically important notions about how power and influence is distributed and applied within different communities over time. I hesitate to characterize Pollock’s efforts with Media and Social Inequality as a glass that is only a little more than half full. Although I have not asked, I suspect he is a bit disappointed that the level and flow in the stream of community structure research is nowhere as high or as fast as he would like, or as the tradition deserves. It is understandable that the increasingly popular focus within media studies on civic engagement would include considerations of community structure. It is also understandable that community structures might be discussed in terms of social inequality or disadvantage. But none of that justifies the marginalization of structural influences on the performance of media, best understood in terms of the content they provide and the issues they tend to avoid.


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Book Reviews

Read selectively, this volume can be need to understand how it is that so used to help undergraduates, not just many things have turned out in the way those with the good fortune to be in one they have. of John Pollock’s classes, but the broad Oscar H. Gandy Jr. mass of young people getting ready enter The University of Pennsylvania into an uncertain future who desperately


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Book Reviews

Inﬂuence from abroad: Foreign voices, the media and U.S. public opinion Danny Hayes and Matt Guardino Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2013 $27.99 (cloth), $22.00 (ebook), $85.00 (hard), 197 pp.

This book overthrows the commonly held thesis that domestic elites are the primary influence drivers behind mass public opinion during international conflict. The exercise in self-restraint to show a united front in international relations has been the conventional wisdom for nearly 70 years in U.S. foreign policy relations. Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenberg, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in postwar 1947, called on his Senate colleagues to lend their support for the Truman Doctrine efforts to challenge Soviet imperialism overseas and said, “we must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge.” That conventional wisdom was in dramatic form in Washington from just after Labor Day 2002 through 19 March 2003 when Democratic Party opposition to the Bush-Cheney military response to Iraq was all but on silent mode. Bush White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained the post-Labor Day timing of the strategic communications campaign, known as the White House Iraq Group (aka White House Information Group or WHIG), this way: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August” (Bumiller, 2002). E6

“A centerpiece of the strategy, White House officials said, is to use Mr. Bush’s speech on 11 Sept. to help move Americans toward support of action against Iraq, which could come early next year.” Couching the Iraq military invasion in the rally-round-the-flag syndrome of post-September 11, the bipartisan support for a military option against Iraq caught on in short order and with little notable dissent. On 11 October 2002, a three-quarter majority of the Senate, including many Democrats (77-23), notably 2008 presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, authorized the use of military force against Iraq. This united front created an information vacuum that was filled by foreign elite voices opposed to the Bush administration in substance or procedure; even kingpins in the Senate were given a stage that did not reverberate. The book devotes an entire chapter, “Byrd Gets No Word,” to Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) and his eloquent, but futile, quest to amplify Democratic Party dissent: “Listen. You can hear a pin drop” (p. 51). An interesting footnote is that Hayes and Guardino show that the Department of Defense attempt to use military analysts to make the case for war in Iraq “did not appear to pay significant dividends for the Bush Administration, at least on network television before the war” (p. 40). Many of the foreign voices that impacted domestic opinion are long gone from the headlines today. They


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include Swedish U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and Ghanian Kofi Annan of the United Nations, both of whom were not speaking like antiwar activists in the streets, but were using rhetoric that favored nonviolent diplomatic resolutions (substance) or letting the investigation of weapons of mass destruction proceed until its proper conclusion (procedure). Blix spoke at the University of California-Berkeley to a sold-out crowd amid mournful ticket seekers with signs that read “Blix Tix?” Journalism Dean Orville Schell said, “Who would have thought a year ago that 2,000 people would come to hear a weapons inspector speak?” (Powell, 2004). By then public opinion was beginning to turn against the Bush administration, but not enough to favor his Democratic challenger John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. As the old Texas saying goes, “Dance with the one what brung ya,” and the events of 11 September 2001 were still very much in the forefront of most Americans’ minds. Hayes and Guardino are quite persuasive in arguing that foreign voices in the domestic mass media, particularly the traditional elite broadcasters, play a far more important actor role in shaping foreign policy than we have heretofore acknowledged. It’s not to say that we don’t have plenty of studies on the media’s coverage of politics but usually such studies are of how journalists cover conflicts after the policy has been rolled out, not before (Mowlana, Gerbner, & Schiller, 1992). This book uses a more comprehensive methodology than we normally see in mass media studies. Statistical models such as regression analysis reveal conclusions at the individual and survey level. They illustrate opposition voices

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in aggregate and the percentage of their inclusion in domestic mass media reports in that important last stage before the overseas international conflict goes live. Foreign elite voices become the opposition actors when domestic opposition has left the stage. This study of the influences on media and public opinion in foreign affairs is a short but meaty read in that it compels political communication scholars to value more the roles played by journalists who seek a pro/con balance in their news reportage. If there is no credible partisan opposition, then journalists will have to seek out alternative voices, in this case, elites from overseas. Influence From Abroad is a solid contribution to our understanding of dissent in public opinion and mass media, but raises more questions about why left-leaning domestic nonpartisans who raise the same criticisms as these foreign leaders are not included in domestic news coverage. The book concludes that U.S.-based antiwar activists, “activists” like myself, and independent media outlets like Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now did not have measurable impact on domestic public opinion because the Big Three traditional broadcast media outlets ignored them and focused on dissenting foreign elite voices. (Figure 2.4 shows negligible impact of antiwar groups in the Distribution and Direction of Source Quotes in Prewar Network News Stories.) Heretofore, research focuses almost exclusively on persuasion and social influence of domestic political elites and now foreign elites. The book fits well into the public diplomacy and nation branding genre: “Our findings suggest that political


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observers and scholars no longer assume that foreign voices are irrelevant to U.S. public opinion, especially in an increasingly interconnected world marked by the global flow of people, information, and commerce” (p. 6), leaving us some cautionary notes that need more scholarly attention. This book is about elite media coverage of elite foreign voices. We will have to wait for other works that can investigate the full spectrum of dissenting opinion from elite and nonelite sources. Otherwise, nonelite media and voices may as well be spitting in the wind in terms of any measurable elite influence. Second, the explosion of social media and smart phone technology happened after the period under examination in this book. We have to begin to empirically measure our assumptions that social media and the blogosphere have a chaotic and often polarizing impact on political attitudes, the result in part of new voices from home and abroad. Political polarization in the United States has led some scholars like Robert J. Lieber to conclude that “politics can be delayed at the water’s edge, but it certainly doesn’t

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stop for long.” Here’s a wish for Hayes and Guardino to expand their methodological research on politics and media to accommodate digital and diplomatic democracy in the post-Bush era. Nancy Snow Keio University References Bumiller, E. (2002, September 7). Traces of terror: The strategy; Bush aides set strategy to sell policy on Iraq. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www. nytimes.com/2002/09/07/us/traces-ofterror-the-strategy-bush- aides-setstrategy-to-sell-policy-on-iraq.html. Mowlana, H., Gerbner, G., & Schiller, H. (1992). Triumph of the image: The media’s war in the Persian Gulf: A global perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Powell, B. (2004, 18 March). U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix faults Bush administration for lack of “critical thinking” in Iraq. UCBerkeleyNews. Retrieved from http://www.berkeley.edu/ news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix. shtml.



Book Reviews

Media and the city: Cosmopolitanism and difference Myria Georgiou Polity, Cambridge and Malden, MA, 2013 $64.95 (hard), $22.95 (paperback), 216 pp

In Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference, Myria Georgiou attends to the distinct condition characterizing today’s global city: the increasing entwinement of its intense mediation and urbanization. She pays attention to how the media depend on the city for its overconcentration of infrastructure, talent, imaginaries, and consumers. She also looks into how the city depends on the media, for promoting its brand and for managing as well as encouraging its many layers of diversities. Through this, Georgiou makes the significant double move of contributing to and dialoguing with the literature on global cities (e.g., Sassen, 2000; Short, 2004; Taylor, 2004) and on urban communication (e.g., Gumpert, 2008; Matsaganis, Gallagher, & Drucker, 2013; McQuire, 2008). The book is particularly concerned with understanding how the global city allows for diverse kinds of cosmopolitanism to emerge, be sustained, and be challenged. This is because of how this city, so highly mediated and urbanized, serves as a powerful lens from which to vividly see the “urban trajectories in [today’s] global times” (p. 2) and, crucially, the promises and problems that

such trajectories hold for “how we live in close proximity to each other and how we communicate across difference” (p. 2). Throughout the book, Georgiou meticulously builds a simultaneously comprehensive and nuanced approach to unpacking how “media and the city become shaped by and shape cosmopolitanization” (p. 6). To undergird this approach, she weaves together several key concepts, which she establishes in Chapter 1 but develops across the work. One key term is mediation, which the book uses to capture how media shape the city. Drawing on the work of Roger Silverstone, Georgiou uses this term to refer to the “dialectical processes in which institutions and audiences are involved in the circulation of symbolic forms enabled through the media, but not exclusively located within the media” (p. 15). As in the case of other scholars who draw inspiration from Silverstone (e.g., Cabañes, 2014; Madianou, 2005; Thumim, 2012), this inclusive definition of mediation means that she takes into account diverse forms of communication practices—from the interpersonal to the mediated—that generate meanings about what it means to be urban and, equally important, to be cosmopolitan. Parallel to this is the street-level approach that the book deploys to analyze how the city shapes media. Here, Georgiou builds on her earlier pioneering work on flânerie (Georgiou, 2006) and, in so doing, has helped to spur the increasingly prominent “spatial


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thinking” in media studies, especially in works that reemphasize the interrelationship between digital and physical environments (e.g., see Aiello, Oakley, & Tarantino, forthcoming; Rovisco & Ong, forthcoming). What Georgiou does is to walk and explore the urban space, a la Walter Benjamin, as a way of “understanding the city as a site of struggle, as an unequal place, but also as an unpredictable place, precisely because it has always been a point of meetings of difference” (p. 9). Echoing recent scholarship that seeks to complement the established top–down approach to the global city with a more bottom–up perspective (e.g., Massey, 2007), she sheds light on how various urban agents—from the government to corporations to ordinary citizens to consumers—deploy, define, and redefine media. Finally, there is the concept of cosmopolitanization, which the book defines as “the process through which urban subjects are constantly exposed to difference through mediated and interpersonal communication” (p. 3). In relating this concept to the global city, Georgiou establishes one of the most significant innovations in her work. To be sure, she draws on already existing scholarship to describe the different cosmopolitan visions present in the global city: (a) neoliberal cosmopolitanism, which pertains to a neoliberal ethos of selectively celebrating difference for profit in order to “sustain the city’s symbolic power and appeal to global audiences, consumers and capital” (p. 145); (b) vernacular cosmopolitanism, which pertains to the reflexive sensibilities and a sense of responsibility for others that organically emerge from being surrounded E10

by “diverse and divergent world views, practices and moralities” (p. 146); and (c) liberatory cosmopolitanism, which pertains to a progressive political vision that builds on the experiential quality of vernacular cosmopolitanism and “raises questions about the significance of difference in advancing equality, recognition and redistribution” (p. 146). Georgiou’s key contribution, however, is that she simultaneously brings to bear these concepts in assessing the empirical realities of the global city. Through this, she is able to capture the complex and contradictory ways that these cosmopolitan visions relate with media and the city. To ground her discussion, Georgiou focuses on the case of London, one of the most mediated and urbanized global cities in the Global North (Chapter 2). From this empirical starting point, she develops insights that she argues may be applied comparatively to other global cities. Specifically, Georgiou considers four key interfaces of media and the city and what they mean for cosmopolitanization. First, the book looks at the interfaces of consumption (Chapter 3) and identity (Chapter 4). Georgiou uses distinct urban cases—the redevelopment happening in Stratford and Shoreditch as well as the inner-city music and graffiti emerging from Hackney—to illustrate what happens on the ground when two cosmopolitan visions interact and, at many points, collide. She particularly talks about a top–down, neoliberal cosmopolitanism geared toward selectively appropriating and celebrating difference with a view to commodification vis-à-vis a bottom–up cosmopolitanism that articulates contrapuntal narratives


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and practices rooted in the city’s long and continuing history of migration. The book then moves on to examining community (Chapter 5). By comparing the mediated and interpersonal communication of diverse urban groups—the Arab Diaspora in Europe, the multiethnic communities in inner-city London, and the community of elite trans-urban “nomads”—Georgiou reveals the surprising ways in which communicative practices can reinforce and challenge neoliberal cosmopolitanism. Finally, the book focuses on civic action (Chapter 6). It is here that Georgiou deals most directly with the possibility of instantiating liberatory cosmopolitanism. She takes the case of recent London protests, such as the 2011 urban riots and the Occupy Movement, to underscore the pitfalls of being able to make visible difference without a clear political vision, but also the promise of being able to articulate difference and claim recognition when it is premised on strong political intentionality. In the epilogue (Chapter 7), Georgiou emphasizes that the book allows us to see how media “mediate communication, miscommunication, and frame meanings of we-ness or other-ness” (p. 157). Indeed, one of the key values of this work is that by deploying mediation as a concept, it is able to account for how the meanings and values attached to cosmopolitanism are constantly circulated, contested, and transformed across the global city and beyond. Ironically, this move is also one of the crucial calculated risks the book takes. In choosing to emphasize mediation over media, it foregoes the opportunity to also understand how the

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affordances of the communicative platforms and technologies within the city matter in cosmopolitanization. What are the possibilities and limitations offered by the very medium of music (Hesmondhalgh, 2013)? Photography (Cabañes, forthcoming)? Polymedia (Madianou & Miller, 2012)? Georgiou also concludes by reflecting on the implications of the global city, with its intense mediation and urbanization, on the emergence of cosmopolitan skills and on the possibility of justice. In looking at the contemporary conditions of the global city, the book is able to offer empirically rich and deep insights about these two concerns. But again, this is another crucial calculated risk of the book. By strategically focusing on the “now and here” (p. 17), it foregoes the chance to take into account the particularity of the historical forces that have shaped the trajectory of the global city in the Global North. As such, the book leaves us with the question of whether and how its insights might apply to the major cities of the Global South, what with their very different colonial histories and postcolonial trajectories (Ong, 2006; Robinson, 2006; Simone, 2010). Is the relationship between media and the city in these urban spaces similar? Will they have visions of cosmopolitanism that are similar? Despite the questions that the book leaves unanswered, I have to say that I find the work an inspirational project. Throughout the monograph, Georgiou carefully and rigorously constructs and applies a robust conceptual approach that will undoubtedly have a significant impact on various fields of scholarship, from media and communication, to


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geography, to sociology, and to cultural Madianou, M., & Miller, D. (2012). Migration and new media: Transnational families studies. This seminal book will certainly and polymedia. London, England: serve as an important roadmap for the Routledge. future of research on media, the city, and Massey, D. B. (2007). World city. Cambridge, cosmopolitanism.

England: Polity Press. Matsaganis, M., Gallagher, V., & Drucker, S. Jason Vincent Cabañes (Eds.) (2013). Communicative cities and University of Leeds, UK urban communication in the 21st century. New York, NY: Peter Lang. References McQuire, S. (2008). The media city: Media, Aiello, G., Oakley, K., & Tarantino, M. (Eds.) architecture and urban space. London, (forthcoming). Communicating the city. England: Sage. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Cabañes, J. V. A. (2014). Multicultural Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. mediations, developing world realities: Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Indians, Koreans and Manila’s Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary cities: Between entertainment media. Media Culture & modernity and development. London, Society, 36(5), 628–643. England: Routledge. Cabañes, J. V. A. (forthcoming). Photography Rovisco, M., & Ong, J. (Eds.) (forthcoming). and the mediation of migrant voices: On Taking the square: Mediated dissent and producing and consuming photo essays occupations of public space. London, about the lives of Indian and Korean England: Rowman & Littlefield. Diasporas in Manila. Visual Studies. Sassen, S. (2000). Cities in a world economy. Georgiou, M. (2006). Diaspora, identity and Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. the media: Diasporic transnationalism Short, J. R. (2004). Global metropolitan: and mediated spatialities. Cresskill, NJ: Globalising cities in a capitalist world. Hampton Press. London, England: Routledge. Gumpert, G. (2008). Communicative cities. Simone, A. (2010). City life from Jakarta to International Communication Gazette, Dakar: Movements at the crossroads. 70(3–4), 195–208. London, England: Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013). Why music Taylor, P. J. (2004). World city network: A matters. Chichester, England: Wiley global urban analysis. London, England: Blackwell. Routledge. Madianou, M. (2005). Mediating the nation: Thumim, N. (2012). Self-representation and News, audiences and the politics of digital culture. New York, NY: identity. London, England: UCL Press. Palgrave-Macmillan.

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Book Reviews

Teaching communication activism: Communication education and social justice Lawrence R. Frey and David L. Palmer (Eds.). Hampton Press, New York, NY, 2014 $125 (Cloth) $47.95 (Paper), pp. 539.

My experience with communication activism in higher education guides me to read this edited volume with great excitement and a fair dose of skepticism. I have served in an unpaid position as a Service Learning liaison for a local nonprofit, an experience that has left me doubting that activist-oriented communication education is possible within the context of Service Learning. The majority of instructors I have worked with have expected the organization to provide time-intensive outreach, orientation, and evaluation for students who put in a small number of “service” hours over the course of a semester. Student volunteer hours were consistently attached to assignments that were disaligned with their service or beyond the students’ trained capacity, burdening both our part-time office staff and formerly incarcerated clients. Students were not given sufficient time or course-based direction to successfully address their continued participation in systems of oppression or their personal biases, but were asked by their instructors, sometimes against the explicit desire of the community partners, to become spokespersons for an undersupported cause or already disenfranchised community that they

failed to identify with or understand. Conversations with representatives of other agencies that had hosted similar communication-oriented projects (rather than meeting a basic agency need, like sorting inventory) revealed that my experience was unfortunately common: Service learning advocacy projects were regularly manifesting as a burden on community organizations and local movements, while resulting, ultimately, in unintentionally premature and sloppy communication interventions. I begin with my personal experience because it reveals the way traditional Service Learning can ultimately hurt rather than extending the local social justice platform, and it also leads me to mark the important intervention that this book makes. Teaching Communication Activism builds a welcome response to the failures of Service Learning advocacy. It places responsibility on educators to build liberatory communication pedagogy that supports social justice activism and student empowerment. The editors draw heavily on critical pedagogy, but locate their intervention within communication, claiming that “Activism, fundamentally, is an accomplishment of (constituted in), and is accomplished through, communication. Moreover, from a communication perspective, social justice results from reinfranchising people who have been shut out of relevant discourses that have significant material consequences”


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(p. 24). The collection establishes frameworks for professors who are entertaining advocacy-centered service learning experiences or projects in their courses and are seeking resources and structure to facilitate transformative learning for students who often lack the tools, experiences, ethics, and direction to be able to make connections between their class and service experiences or provide supportive social justice interventions. For individuals already deeply invested in critical pedagogy and communication activism, the collection provides a cohort of like-minded teacher-activists who seek and volunteer imaginative possibilities for robust social-justice-oriented communication education. The book is unabashedly clear in its politics: It aims to revitalize education’s civic mission and build relevant connections between the academy, local communities, and justice politics. Peter MacLaren argues that “Education now is more the problem than it is the solution, with many teachers operating within that educational system being depoliticized and demobilized intellectual laborers for the status quo who sustain the problem” (p. 6). The book’s forward, introduction, and first chapter set the terms of communication activism pedagogy (CAP) and critique the market-focused education that is privileged across disciplines, including the field of communication. The authors refuse the assumption that the dominant educational structure is apolitical, and examine the unjust politics and practices that corporate education supports. Critical pedagogy and CAP are established as hopeful solutions in building educational models that counter capitalist politics and address social E14

injustice. The book is in clear dialogue with the former Communication Activism volumes (reviewed by Pezzullo in issue 59 [2009] of this journal), and, as with the other books in the series, provides bibliographies that are expanded extensively online and a strong and concise literature review in the intro. The first four chapters provide a structure for CAP, exploring the history and rationale, theoretical frameworks, critical concepts and challenges, considerations for ethical practice, and an examination of the way CAP fits within and comes to modify community engagement through increasingly popular, and as I have noted, sometimes problematic, Service Learning initiatives. The editors reveal that “CAP is defined more by its goals than by its teaching tactics” (p. 26). The last 11 chapters, divided into three sections, confirm this point. They provide a wide array of reflexive contextualized examples of CAP practices, providing inspiration, but absent of rigid or formulaic prescription. Authors draw from diverse communication traditions and innovations ranging from theater and performance, health communication, rhetoric, organizational communication, media studies, applied communication, political communication, environmental communication, gender communication, speech communication, legal communication, and interpersonal communication. The reader represents intervention in a diversity of social justice issues, amplifying marginalized voices from stigmatized and disenfranchised populations. Some of the best interventions by CAP teacher-activist-scholars model personal investments not only in a generalized


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social justice but also in a specific context and course topic. These topics include representation of Holocaust survivors and members of habitually oppressed indigenous communities, gender violence and the policing of identities, incarceration, health care deficiencies and international global responsibility, community activism within migrant Latina/o communities, logging on public lands, bullying in schools, and mobilizing at the intersections of environmental energy and economic injustice. Chapters 5–8 provide examples of entire courses devoted to CAP, including specific pedagogical practices and syllabi examples. Highlights include a consideration of how students have been mobilized to reimagine communication activism as a critical part of their education and citizenship, teacher-decentered discussions, and navigating participation in advocacy communities. Chapters 9–11 return to the question of how to strengthen and challenge existing Service Learning paradigms, centering pedagogical practices that do not exacerbate community vulnerabilities and oppressions. Authors consider ways to create invested impact within habitually disenfranchised communities. Acknowledging that the semester’s timeline provides a major constraint for the work of social justice, more than one example employs Service Learning methodology beyond the semester, sometimes for multiyear projects. Authors who build CAP for Service Learning insist on extending collaborations, deepening investment and possible impact, and building capacity in students not only as learners but also as engaged, well-equipped facilitators in our communities. Chapters 12–15 extend

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CAP beyond traditional and Service Learning classrooms, imagining more expansive educational frames for social justice encounters. Chapters 12 and 13 are strengthened because they are cowritten by educators and their advocacy community partners, modeling a collaborative networked approach, not only between communication education scholars but also in partnership with individuals and representatives of institutions and collectives that address injustice. The editors argue that collective community-based change means “arming activists with effective rhetorical practices and creating a community-driven sense of empowerment that their ideas could make a difference” (p. 22). This education within community sets the groundwork for the possibility of increasing collaborative scholarship that includes those most affected by social injustice, not only as subjects but also as coparticipants in the research and writing—a feature of CAP that is emphasized in the pedagogy, and which will hopefully be modeled further in our research practices. Acknowledgments

L.N.B. facilitates Applied Rhetorical Democracy, Speech, and Advocacy classes and ongoing community think tanks for university students and incarcerated students in the Monroe County Jail. She is the recipient of the 2015 Central States Communication Association Cooper Award for Outstanding Teaching and the Indiana University Communication and Culture Award for Applied Communication. L. N. Badger Indiana University, Bloomington


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Book Reviews

The real cyber war: The political economy of internet freedom Shawn M. Powers & Michael Jablonski University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2015.

“Connection” already feels like the 21st century’s most overworked trope. Usually featured in advertising copy for digital products, “connection,” and specifically the “freedom to connect,” is also the lodestar for U.S. diplomacy under the Obama Administration. The “freedom to connect” was articulated in a speech titled “Remarks on Internet Freedom” that then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered on 21 January 2010, on the heels of the so-called Twitter Revolution that followed the 2009 Iranian presidential election but before the “Arab Spring.” The idea of the “freedom to connect” initiated an Internet freedom agenda that continues as the beating heart of the United States’ public diplomacy. The development of an Internet freedom agenda was a welcome acknowledgement of the increasing centrality of internetworked communication in public life. However, as Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski’s excellent The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom demonstrates, the rhetoric of connection and freedom often conceals a dynamic struggle over the political economy of the Internet. This struggle, which they deem the “real” cyber war, is an important one to attend to for scholars from communication, political science, law, and economics. E16

Practitioners and policymakers, too, will find in The Real Cyber War the historical context, key stakeholders, and ongoing tensions that shape policy developments related to information law, Internet governance, public–private partnerships, cybersecurity, surveillance, and democracy promotion. Powers and Jablonski execute the close knitting that is the hallmark of careful political economy work—The Real Cyber War documents the interests at play in contemporary international communication and issues a clarion call to think otherwise about how the Internet might serve global interests rather than parochial ones. In the introduction and first chapter, Powers and Jablonski situate their work as an extension of recent scholarship (primarily by Jill Hills, Vincent Mosco, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Dan Schiller, Herbert Schiller, and Milton Mueller) that conceptualizes telecommunication technologies as deeply imbricated with geopolitical and economic forces. Although public and scholarly invocations of “cyber wars” often refer to cybersecurity (pointing to the implications of hackers, viruses, and netwars), Internet governance (especially as it relates to politicization of network protocols), or activism and public deliberation stimulated and mediated by the Internet (as political dissidents and social critics use the Internet to “war” against convention), none of these cyber wars can be understood without a more robust consideration of corporate and state


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interest. Powers and Jablonski, through careful historical contextualization, make two observations that pithily capture the thesis of The Real Cyber War: “The first is the persistent discourse suggesting that unfettered access to information promotes democracy and global peace. The second is an empirical understanding of how fettered access to information, such as occurs with copyright and patent restrictions, promotes U.S. business interests” (p. 32). Although the (constrained) flow of copyrighted information is a quintessential example of the inconsistencies inherent to the Internet freedom agenda, Powers and Jablonski’s investigation pushes far beyond intellectual property rights. The second chapter, “The InformationIndustrial Complex,” traces the growth of information and communication technologies out of ARPANET, through key regulatory hurdles surmounted by the Clinton/Gore Administration, and into the current post-9/11 environment. Surprises abound here, including the CIA’s role, via the In-Q-Tel corporation, in bankrolling technology companies after the dot-com bubble bust of 2000. “Google, Information, and Power,” the next chapter, does a deeper dive into the information-industrial complex’s key actor, Google. This chapter effortlessly weaves in quotations from Silicon Valley leaders and government officials, while highlighting the revolving door between the two sectors, in a way that confirms the tensions at the heart of the Internet freedom agenda. (The Real Cyber War is worth reading just for the collection of gobsmacking quotes from Google’s Eric Schmidt.) Google is at the vanguard of spreading connectivity around the

Book Reviews

world so that global citizens can leverage the power of the Internet, but their business model is built on the commodification of personal information that such connectivity yields. Conceptually, this chapter usefully disaggregates the “data market” into four facets of information commodification: production, extraction/refinement, infrastructure, and demand. This nuanced treatment of the “information economy” may well, as the authors write, “facilitate thinking about the type of regulatory intervention required to prevent the monopolization of the entire sector” (p. 96). In Chapter 4, “The Economics of Internet Connectivity,” and Chapter 5, “The Myth of Multistakeholder Governance,” Powers and Jablonski show how the internationalization of Internet governance bolstered the actors who already had advantages in the new economy. As they note, “the greater congruence between regulatory environments and technical standards, the more able Western corporations are to expand confidently into new markets and quickly turn investments into revenue” (p. 108). Put simply, established corporations have economies of scale that give them substantially advantages in all things e-commerce. Although the International Telecommunications Union, as an international organization regulating international communication, could conceivably sort out information inequities between nation-states, the United States tends to dominate negotiations there in ways that privilege corporate actors such as AT&T, Cisco, and Google. The “myth” of multistakeholder governance, according to Powers and Jablonski, is that it works fairly to generate consensus.


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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Such a myth is grounded in outmoded Habermasian accounts of the public sphere as a site where disagreements can be openly negotiated. In practice, advantaged actors exercise their advantage, by using asymmetries in information, skilled negotiation, or sheer bullying. Civil society actors hoping to shape international Internet governance, either through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Society, or the Internet Engineering Task Force—all discussed in the chapter—are caught in a catch-22. Either they participate in these negotiations and risk legitimating decisions that simply authorize the interests of the powerful, or they do not participate and are seen as recalcitrant ideologues unwilling to negotiate. Powers and Jablonski point us, in Chapter 6, “Toward Information Sovereignty,” as a more supple way to navigate the policy questions raised by the regulatory issues related to the Internet. “Information sovereignty,” they explain, “refers to a state’s attempt to control information flows within its territory” (p. 165). As they note, through four case studies of Egypt, Iran, China, and the United States, states use a mix of “law, technology, subsidy, and force” to assert information sovereignty (p. 174). Although states do assert information sovereignty, The Real Cyber War could have investigated the normative rationale for state exercise of information control more extensively. While the specter of global extremism and need for competitive advantage drives states to information control, the pressing question is not if information sovereignty is E18

legitimate, but what degree of information sovereignty merits public support. As the Snowden NSA revelations proved, information sovereignty is too often abused, shielding states’ efforts to track everyday citizens, civil society actors, and even the lovers of NSA employees. Nonetheless, Powers and Jablonski sketch the parameters for a more productive conversation that puts the discourse of Internet freedom into closer contact with consideration of information sovereignty. The final chapter, “Internet Freedom in a Surveillance Society,” picks up these issues in the context of anonymity’s perceived challenge to national security and to e-commerce. The book concludes with a call to develop international protocols “governing the scope of acceptable surveillance online … [ensuring] a qualified guarantee of secrecy of correspondence” (p. 206). Although “acceptable” and “qualified” are the stickiest of sticky words, Powers and Jablonski usefully orient scholars and practitioners to the key issues for Internet policy in the future. Their caution to scholars about naively invoking the idea of Internet freedom and their warning that civil society actors ought to dodge multistakeholder processes where commercial interests dominate is similarly welcome. The rhetoric of the “real,” as it is invoked in the title The Real Cyber War, is useful in orienting our attention to an underappreciated phenomenon—in this case, the political economy of Internet freedom. But the rhetoric of the real also risks consigning all else to the status of epiphenomenon, obscuring possible connections and interactions between the different layers of


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cyber war (cybersecurity, governance, activism/public deliberation, and political economy). In privileging political economy as the master hermeneutic for understanding Internet policy, Powers and Jablonski elide the ways in which the networked public sphere (a term that represents a post-Habermasian vision of global public deliberation stimulated by internetworked media) might ultimately reconstitute the political economy of Internet freedom. For example, the public outcry over the revelations about corporate collusion with NSA spying had tangible effects on the political economy of international communication. The question of the optimal mix of information sovereignty and information freedom, similarly, is not one that should be left to technocratic decision-making by international organizations. Both the “right to be forgotten” and the “right to personal data” have bubbled up as a result of conversations stimulated by the networked public sphere. What effect might the codification of these rights in international regulatory agreements,

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rather than the right to have a qualified guarantee of secrecy of correspondence, have on the political economy of new communication technologies? These are pressing regulatory questions related to the Internet, requiring considerably more public, and scholarly, deliberation to address. Powers and Jablonski deserve credit for crystallizing the stakes of this conversation, warning us off unproductive paths, and developing conceptual tools to sharpen our analytic capacities. Damien Smith Pfister (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 2009) is an assistant professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His book Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere (Penn State, 2014) reflects his research interests in internetworked communication and public deliberation. His personal site can be found at www.damiensmithpfister.net. Damien Smith Pfister University of Nebraska-Lincoln


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Book Reviews

Feeling mediated: A history of media technology and emotion in America Brenton Malin New York University Press, New York, 2014, $25.00 (paper), ISBN: 978-0-8147-6057-4, $79.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8147-6279-0

In his book Feeling Mediated, Brenton Malin connects the ways we understand emotion with the ways we understand technology. He shows how cultural views of emotion—assumptions about what emotion is, from where it stems, its larger purpose, where and how it should be performed—are contexts for using and integrating new technologies as well as criteria for assessing and studying their power. Malin also flips this argument, showing how new technologies have helped shape visions of emotion in a reflexive historical relationship. Playing the role of neutral-observertime-traveler-tour-guide, Malin brings readers along on his romp through the first three decades of the twentieth century, the period marking the origins of electronic mass media such as motion pictures, phonographs, telegraph, and radio. Malin guides readers past the presentism conjured by their contemporary historical moment and transports them back into history, encouraging them to take a new look at old communication technology innovations. For a work of print, the book feels remarkably immersive. E20

Although the meat of the work focuses on a rather narrow but important period of history, in his analysis Malin casts his historical net wide, back to Socrates, to reveal how communication technologies were understood in affective terms as mechanisms to: disembody and amplify emotion, detach and destroy emotional intimacy, speed up the world, reconfigure norms that dictate (in)appropriate public or private expression, perform emotions publicly, seamlessly or intimately connect in private, as well as to trick the mind or allow it access to deeper truths. He details how presumptions about effects of technologies on emotions emboldened critics and supporters alike, polarizing debates about the innovations along historically specific lines. Uniquely, Malin does not do this to indict one side or another or to vindicate who ultimately won, but to understand why the range of responses and common sense visions emerged in those historical moments in the first place, to outline what he calls the “various rhetorics of emotion and technology” (p. 10). His search for these rhetorics—his treasure hunt for mentions of emotion—was obviously challenging, leading Malin into unconventional archives and creative applications of established archives. This is, I think, one of the biggest interventions of this work: to drop anchors into the historical conversations that occurred in, through, and about communication technologies and emotion, to discuss what those conversations meant for


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technological development, American culture, law, and politics. In mapping the often-unpredictable roles emotion played in our technological history, Malin demystifies both emotion and technology, shows how technologies are deeply embedded in preexisting cultural values about emotion at the same time as they work to transform those values. For example, cultural visions of emotion as a “broad social and public good” shaped the telegraph’s reception—the ways it was understood when it first appeared—as well as its uses—the types of messages sent, the ways those messages were received, etc. These visions led to legal decisions—such as holding telegraph companies legally responsible for the emotional trauma felt by people receiving bad news—ultimately shaping American legal precedents that would apply to future communication technologies. In each chapter, Malin beautifully describes this complex push and pull between culture, embodied and preformed affect, policy, infrastructures, and markets. He resists the impulse to diagnose simple causation in favor of complex contextualization. His work is sophisticated, nuanced, and deeply historical. Building on established concepts, such as Leo Marx’s rhetoric of the technological sublime and Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, Malin develops his own concepts, such as “media physicalism” (p. 20, Marx, 1964; Veblen, 1899). This term describes the ways that thinkers in the early twentieth century began to “locate emotion in media technologies themselves as well as in a decidedly technologized version of the human body” (p. 21). This dominant

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vision of technology became well integrated into research about its effects, as what were imaged as threats to human emotions became wielded as tools to study them. However, those tools were already laden with cultural values and, ultimately, were used to reinforce problematic race, class, and gender-based assumptions about technology users. Media physicalism persists today. In this way, Malin illustrates the larger, contemporary stakes of his research. Views of emotion have worked historically and continue to both reinforce and mask inequities by shaping the media industries that produce technologies and by guiding scientific (and pseudoscientific) research upon which policies are often based. If this book has a weakness, it is that Malin revels in history, lingering too long in details that do not always drive his arguments or narratives forward. This revelry occurs, perhaps, at the expense of engaging affect theory in a more rigorous way. However, given that he is bridging a long and perilous crevice in the literature with an unconventional archive, this is excused. And more often than not, his examples were so interesting and so well written that I was happy to revel with him. Indeed one of the great joys in reading Feeling Mediated is its clear, breezy writing that is unencumbered by jargon. It is a page-turner, a rarity in academic books, especially those that take up emotion as a focus. In approachable tone, well-researched content, and cultural complexity, Malin’s work reminds me of several writers: James Carey, Jeffrey Sconce, and Fred Turner (see Carey, 1992;


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Book Reviews

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America. New York: Oxford University Sconce, 2000; Turner, 2006, 2013). ScholPress. ars in media and communication and technology history, cultural and Amer- Sconce, J. (2000). Haunted media: Electronic presence from telegraphy to television. ican Studies are likely to find this book Durham, NC: Duke University Press. most interesting. Scholars in affect studTurner, F. (2006). From counterculture to ies will also find it interesting, but should cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole know the book prioritizes uncovering Earth Network, and the rise of digital lost (or assumed) historical and cultural utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of material to enrich histories of technology Chicago Press. rather than prioritizing engagement with Turner, F. (2013). The democratic surround: the affect theory currently en vogue in Multimedia and American liberalism from other disciplines. World War II to the psychedelic sixties. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Stephanie Ricker Schulte Veblen, T. (1899). The theory of the leisure class: An economic study in the evolution University of Arkansas of institutions. New York: Macmillan.

References Carey, J. (1992). Communication as culture. New York: Routledge. Marx, L. (1964). The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in

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