Teorías de la comunicación y metodología

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media – one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

The first close study of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of socialization, a central but infrequently discussed component of his defense of deliberative democracy, The Idolatry of the Actual charts its increasingly uneasy relationship with the later development of Habermas’s social theory. In particular, David A. Borman argues that Habermas’s account of the development of the subject and of the conditions under which autonomy can be realized is fundamentally at odds with the increasingly liberal tenor of his social theory. This leads Borman to return to the set of concerns that guided Habermas’s social theory in the early 1971s, paying particular attention to questions of crisis and the means by which public reactions are shaped—questions perhaps more relevant today than they have been at any time since the 1930s. Using Habermas’s early work as a framework, Borman constructs an original critical-theoretical argument that draws on research in the sociology of schooling to understand how attitudes toward work, reward, achievement, class, gender, and race are shaped in economically functional ways, and draws on philosophical and empirical scholarship to demonstrate the challenges of multicultural integration and the impact of both on the potential for progressive social transformation.

Discourse Theory and Critical Media Politics offers a systematic examination of the relationship between post-Marxist discourse theory and critical media politics. The volume interrogates discourse theory – as read via the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – through an engagement with major approaches to critical media politics, including autonomist Marxism, Bourdieuian field theory, cultural studies, Habermasian public sphere theory, and semiotic theory. Contributors draw from a range of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds to critically explore key theoretical issues in media politics, including the relationship between media practices and political practices, discourse and materiality, discourse and institutions, discourse and affect, the media and mediality, media and radical democracy, and the politics of new social movements. The book concludes with a chapter by leading international media studies scholar Peter Dahlgren, which in light of the book's contributions assesses the value of discourse theory to a critical media politics.

Television Studies provides an overview of the origins, central ideas, and intellectual traditions of television studies. The book charts the establishment of the field, and examines its various approaches and objects of study.

What have been the primary areas of inquiry in television studies? Why and how did these areas develop? How have scholars studied them? How are they developing? What have been television studies’ key works? The book answers these questions, by tracing the history of the field right up to present and emerging scholarship.

For all those wondering how to study television, or even why to study television, Television Studies will provide a clear and engaging overview of key topics. The book works as a stand-alone introduction and by placing key works in a broader context it can also provide an excellent basis for an entire course.

Digital artifacts from iPads to databases pervade our lives, and the design decisions that shape them affect how we think, act, communicate, and understand the world. But the pace of change has been so rapid that technical innovation is outstripping design. Interactors are often mystified and frustrated by their enticing but confusing new devices; meanwhile, product design teams struggle to articulate shared and enduring design goals. With Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray provides a unified vocabulary and a common methodology for the design of digital objects and environments. It will be an essential guide for both students and practitioners in this evolving field. Murray explains that innovative interaction designers should think of all objects made with bits–whether games or Web pages, robots or the latest killer apps–as belonging to a single new medium: the digital medium. Designers can speed the process of useful and lasting innovation by focusing on the collective cultural task of inventing this new medium. Exploring strategies for maximizing the expressive power of digital artifacts, Murray identifies and examines four representational affordances of digital environments that provide the core palette for designers across applications: computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity. Each chapter includes a set of Design Explorations–creative exercises for students and thought experiments for practitioners–that allow readers to apply the ideas in the chapter to particular design problems. Inventing the Medium also provides more than 210 illustrations of specific design strategies drawn from multiple genres and platforms and a glossary of design concepts.

Pone en primera línea de la actualidad el debate acerca de la identidad de los estudios sobre los medios de comunicación como disciplina académica.

Semiótica y Teoría de la Comunicación es una obra que toma posición frente al problema del relativismo teórico y conceptual que impera en los estudios de la comunicación, pues a cinco décadas de la famosa discusión entre Bernard Berelson (1959), para quien el campo de la comunicación moría y Wilbur Schramm y sus colegas (1959), para quienes el campo de la comunicación recién estaba naciendo, lo cierto es que ya hanaparecido una gran cantidad de trabajos que permiten avanzar en la discusión y caminar hacia uno u otro lado.

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Disponible en línea

Disponible en línea

"Docencia y Comunicación en Latinoamérica" es una nueva publicación de Grupo DIRCOM (su tercer libro) que reúne la palabra de diferentes expertos en materia de formación en comunicación. provenientes de facultades de comunicación.

El libro se transforma en una propuesta multicultural por ser la compilación de textos escritos por distintos autores docentes Latinoamericanos que, a partir de sus propias experiencias, presentan sus tesis sobre la situación actual de la educación comunicacional en nuestro continente. Bajo esta perspectiva Francisco Paco Cardona, compilador del libro, explica que “Latinoamérica es una región con brillos y contrastes en educación, sin embargo aquí encontrará una aportación sobre el rumbo de la comunicación en nuestros países uniéndonos como hermanos latinoamericanos dirigidos al crecimiento personal y profesional”. […]