ILTweb: Study Space: Communication: Reference: Literature of Communication (ROM)

Institute for Learning Technologies | Columbia University

Literature of Communication

Current changes in communication and its implications for contemporary culture are diverse and reflect little consensus about the upshot of it all. Views frequently differ according to the underlying communications technology that preoccupies the observer's attention. Critics tend to describe either the window, or what they see through the window. To explain how the window influences what they see through it is a more difficult task, rarely achieved in discussions of the relation of communication media to culture. Here is a selection that indicates the range of relevant topics and samples the spectrum of possible interpretations. We include a variety of works on topics in the history of communication as well, for these can help us develop perspectival distance on our immediate surroundings.

Erik Barnouw. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. Revised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Edward Barrett, ed. Text, ConText, and HyperText: Writing with and for the Computer. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988.

Edward Barrett, ed. The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989.

Paul Barrett. The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago, 1900-1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.

James L. Baughman. The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Frank E. Beaver. On Film: A History of the Motion Picture. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983.

Warren James Belasco. Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945. Cambridge: The MIT University Press, 1979.

James R. Beniger. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Susan Porter Benson. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Michael L. Berger. The Devil Wagon in God's Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America, 1893-1929. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979.

Roger E. Bilstein. Flight in America, 1900-1983: From the Wrights to the Astronauts. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Menahem Blondheim. News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Jay David Bolter. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.

Geoffrey C. Bowker. Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940. Cambridge: The MIT University Press, 1994.

Leo Braudy. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Marta Braun. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey, 1830-1904. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992

R. A. Buchanan. The Power of the Machine: The Impact of Technology from 1700 to the Present. New York: Viking, 1992.

Jeremy Campbell. Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

James W. Carey. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Mary Carruthers. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Roger Chartier. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Lydia G. Cochrane, trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Roger Chartier, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Lydia G. Cochrane, trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

James W. Chesebro and Donald G. Bonsall. Computer-Mediated Communication: Human Relationships in a Computerized World. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1989.

Miriam Usher Chrisman. Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

M. T. Clanchy. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.

David Cressy. Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

David Crowley & Paul Heyer, eds. Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. New York: Longman, 1991.

Daniel J. Czitrom. Media and the American Mind from Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Jon Darius. Beyond Vision: One Hundred Historic Scientific Photographs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Duncan Davies, Diana Bathurst, and Robin Bathurst. The Telling Image: The Changing Balance between Pictures and Words in a Technological Age. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Brenda Dervin, et al., eds. Rethinking Communication. 2 vols. (Volume 1: Paradigm Issues; Volume 2: Paradigm Exemplars). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1989.

Susan J. Douglas. Inventing American Broadcasting: 1899-1922. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. David Gerard, trans. New York: Verso, 1990.

Claude S. Fischer. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Nicholas Garnham. Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of Information. Fred Inglis, ed. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1990.

David Gelernter. Mirror Worlds, Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox . . . How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Harvey J. Graff. The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

O. B. Hardison, Jr. Disappearing through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century. New York: Viking, 1989.

Mark E. Hepworth. Geography of the Information Economy. New York: The Guilford Press, 1990.

Richard Hoggart. The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.

Robert Hughes. The Shock of the New. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Andrew F. Inglis. Behind the Tube: A History of Broadcasting Technology and Business. Boston: Focal Press, 1990.

Harold A. Innis. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Steven G. Jones. CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995.

George P. Landow. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally. Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products, and Images of Well-Being. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Donald M. Lowe. History of Bourgeois Perception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Timothy W. Luke. Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Russell Lynes. The Tastemakers: The Shaping of American Popular Taste. New York: Dover Publications, 1979.

Roland Marchand. Advertising the American Dream: Making the Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Henri-Jean Martin. The History and Power of Writing. Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Carolyn Marvin. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Armand Mattelart and Michle Mattelart. Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions. James A. Cohen and Marina Urquidi, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: NAL/Dutton, 1966.

Mark Crispin Miller. Boxed In: The Culture of TV. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

John Mowitt. Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

G. J. Mulgan. Communication and Control: Networks and the New Economics of Communication. New York: The Guilford Press, 1991.

W. Russell Neuman. The Future of the Mass Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

David E. Nye. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990.

Lewis J. Perelman. School's Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1992.

Ithiel de Sola Pool. Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment of the Telephone. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX Publishing Corp., 1983.

Ithiel de Sola Pool. Technologies of Freedom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Ithiel de Sola Pool. Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age. Eli M. Noam, ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed. The Social Impact of the Telephone. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981.

Anson Rabinbach. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

Parker Rossman. The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University: Information Age Global Higher Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Wolfgagang Schivelbusch. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Angela Davies, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Mark Seltzer. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Michael Taussig. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993.

John B. Thompson. Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

John G. Truxal. The Age of Electronic Messages. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990.

Edward R. Tufte. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CN: Graphics Press, 1990.

Edward R. Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CN: Graphics Press, 1983.

Richard Saul Wurman. Information Anxiety. New York: Doubleday, 1989.