Sociology

Jobs’ story gives us a chance to imagine that, if even for a brief moment, if even for one person, integrity and wealth can coincide. It’s a good dream. But achieving that dream on a widespread basis is more complicated than the rebel hero story suggests. Let’s hope that, once the tsunami of tributes subsides, we can tackle the problem, in all its complexity, head on.

Around 1970, Utopian talk about cable television as a dramatic “new technology” swept through the policy arena. Analyzing the talk as a discursive practice demonstrates both the value of discourse analysis and some contradictions of the policy process. The talk treated cable as an autonomous technology and consequently obscured political and economic conditions while exaggerating cable's uniqueness; these characteristics encouraged the reconceptualization of cable in the policy arena in a way that, in combination with several ...

Critical Legal Studies is a new current in contemporary legal theory. This essay explores the implications of CLS for the study of communications policy (6, 22, 24, 45, 46).'The essay begins with some key CLS concepts and their implications for general discussions of freedom of speech and the public interest. It then illustrates those concepts by applying them to the conflict between broadcasters' and citizens' free speech rights as expressed in the contemporary Fairness Doctrine debate. The second half of the essay discusses CLS's ...

When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing.[The web browser] Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.

Having just finished reading Thomas Streeter's (2011a) new book, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet, when the news of Steve Jobs' passing broke I couldn't help but wonder how Streeter's argument about the mythic American narrative of entrepreneurs could help us to understand the outpouring of media eulogies that remembered him as a visionary entrepreneur, a hero, and a genius who changed the world. To better understand the media memory and posthumous celebration of Steve Jobs as ...

Most people know the feeling of getting absorbed on-line. Hit some keys, get a response, hit again, another response, again, again, again—until one loses track of time. The little responses the computer offers—some numbers, an error message—do not resolve things. Rather, they are just enough to invite the user to try again, ever in anticipation of getting it right, of finding what's next.

Amanda Michel had recently graduated from college when she joined the Dean campaign. She turned out to play a central role in the development of Generation Dean, the official youth outreach arm of the Dean campaign and the most successful campaign effort to organize young people since the McGovern campaign more than thirty years previous to it.

Long ago I used a kind of discourse analysis to make the case that the creation of the distinction between" policy" and" politics"–in the US, at least–is one of the key underlying functions of the entire policy process. 1 The word" policy" tends to imply something rational, complex, and properly confined to experts, whereas politics implies something involving broad collective choices and all the conflict and struggle that comes with it.

Television as we know it is in several senses authorless. Many of its most conspicuous formal textual features are determined by the impersonal bureaucratic demands of the industrial system of which television is part. Stories are dramatically structured to be conducive to the insertion of commercials, for exam-ple, and rigidly restricted to half-or hour-long blocks; one can accurately predict whether or not the hero will get the bad guy at the end of a scene by looking at one's watch.

One step in the process of constructing a viable alternative to the neoliberal paradigm in communication policy is developing an understanding of why neoliberalism is so popular. It is important to counter the neoclassical economist's answer—" it's rational" by pointing to the many contradictions, irrationalities, and failures of neoclassically-based policies (eg, Streeter, 1996). But as with most or all successful political movements, the power of neoliberalism does not seem to be purely a matter of scholarly argument.

This overview of discursive approaches to media policy studies explores the theoretical background and implications of the approach, locating the accompanying articles in relation to broader traditions. Situating discourse approaches in terms of the general interpretive turn in social science and a reaction against Laswellian policy “science,” the essay sketches the evolution of discursive approaches to policy from an emphasis on demystification to one of social construction. It concludes by arguing that discursive approaches help reveal points of instability in the current global media policy discourse, and thus suggests some avenues for potential change.