Baym: Personal Connections in the Digital Age

‘Lively and thought-provoking throughout, this book challenges the myth that ‘cyberspace’ dramatically transforms personal connections by revealing, instead, the complex and subtle ways in which people manage social interaction online and offline in response to the affordances of the various modes of communication available.’

Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics

The internet and the mobile phones have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of our selves and our relationships. This timely book provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships, offering a data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life.

Briggs and Burke: A Social History of the Media 3^rd Edition

‘Media history may be the single most important chapter of human history.  If we want to understand wars, revolutions, religions, and intellectual movements, then we must ultimately confront the question ‘Who communicated what to whom – and how?’ For both students and specialists, Briggs and Burke have produced the most comprehensive and concise synthesis of what we know about this subject.’

Jonathan Rose, Drew University

Written by two leading social and cultural historians, A Social History of the Media provides a masterful overview of communication media and the social and cultural contexts within which they emerged and evolved. This third edition has been thoroughly revised to bring the text up to date with the very latest developments in the field.

Hoskins and O’ Loughlin: War and Media

‘In today's new environment of an apparent never-ending war on terror, governments put together their media strategy with as much care as they construct their military one. This important book helps us understand the fragile relationship between war and media and examine it with a fresh and informed eye.’

Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty, a history of war correspondents and propaganda.

The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpredictable relationships in a 'new media ecology' that has ushered in new asymmetries in the waging of war and terror. To help us understand these new relationships, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin here provide a timely, comprehensive and highly readable survey of the field of war and media.

Livingstone: Children and the Internet

‘Sonia Livingstone is equally at home with statistical and ethnographic insights as she digs deep into the paradoxes and contradictions surrounding young people's online lives. She punctures myths and tips over sacred cows here, but in the process, she's modeling a process of healthy skepticism about the claims being made on all sides about what it means to grow up digital. Throughout, Children and the Internet offers us a guide to how we might seize the potentials and avoid the risks of this new and uncharted cultural terrain.’

Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This major new book by a leading researcher addresses pressing questions around children’s internet use. It deliberately avoids a techno-celebratory approach and, instead, interprets children’s everyday practices of internet use in relation to the complex and changing historical and cultural conditions of childhood in late modernity. Uniquely, Children and the Internet reveals the complex dynamic between online opportunities and online risks, exploring this in relation to much debated issues such as digital in/exclusion, learning and literacy, peer networking and privacy, civic participation, and risk and harm.

Smith: Presidential Campaign Communication

Presidential Campaign Communication is designed to help readers understand and appreciate more fully the ways that the people of the United States use the process of human communication to select their Presidents.

The book highlights three major areas:

• Presidential Campaigns as Communication
• Stages of the Campaign for the White House
• Modes of Presidential Campaign Communication

Written with verve and clarity, and illustrated with varied examples including the 2008 campaigns, Presidential Campaign Communication is required reading for all students of politics and media.

Kramer: Organizational Socialization

‘All organizations and organizational members experience change. Although socialization and assimilation processes are a central part of the organizational communication and management disciplines, no one has provided a comprehensive summary of the area, until now. Kramer’s book gives a very thorough summary and review of organizational socialization, explicating the various theories, models, and empirical studies on the subject. This book is not only useful for students, but is a ‘must have’ for organizational scholars in communication, management, and industrial psychology.’

Patty Sias, Washington State University

The experiences of joining and leaving organizations permeate most people’s lives in the 21st century. This book provides a framework for increasing our understanding of those experiences using a mixture of specific examples, scholarly findings, and theoretical concepts and models.

Chapman: Issues in Contemporary Documentary

‘Jane Chapman’s book offers students a clear introduction to some of the main questions and debates surrounding current documentary practice. Not only is the whole book developed around selected examples, it is informed throughout by the ethical, creative, and technological challenges of actually making films and programmes. Its strongly ‘insider’ viewpoint usefully complements the ‘outsider’ framings of most film and television studies.’

John Corner, University of Liverpool

This book presents a fascinating new overview of a rich film-making tradition and the particular challenges that it faces in the current age. Jane Chapman leads the reader through a broad and varied set of issues, ranging from the problems associated with defining documentary to the particular ethical dilemmas faced by film-makers in the digital age.

Matheson and Allan: Digital War Reporting

‘This is an incisive and often gripping study of how digital media transform coverage of conflict.  For those who study the evolving relationship between war and journalism, Digital War Reporting is essential reading.’

Philip Seib, University of Southern California

Digital War Reporting examines war reporting in a digital age. It shows how new technologies open up innovative ways for journalists to convey the horrors of warfare while, at the same time, creating opportunities for propaganda, censorship and control.

Wikström: The Music Industry

The Music Industry is a lucid and astute overview of what has happened to popular music since the mp3 met the Internet at the birth of Napster. It is the first scholarly book to make real sense of the present state of the music industry. By looking at the contemporary landscape of popular music from multiple perspectives, including the fan perspective, Patrik Wikström provides clear explanations for the consequences new digital media have had for music, musicians, and the recording industry.

This is the first major study of the music industry in the new millennium. Patrik Wikström provides an international overview of the music industry and its future prospects in the world of global entertainment. He illuminates the workings of the music industry, and captures the dynamics at work in the production of musical culture between the transnational media conglomerates, the independent music companies and the public.

Longhurst: Popular Music and Society 2nd Edition

‘A thoughtful and systematic introduction, full of up-to-date information, this book speaks simultaneously to students of socio-musical analysis and to all of us for whom music matters.’

Tia DeNora, University of Exeter

Topics covered include:

• The contemporary organisation of the music industry;
• The effects of technological change on production;
• The history and politics of popular music;
• Gender, sexuality and ethnicity;
• Subcultures;
• Fans and music celebrities.

Gill: Gender and the Media

‘Brilliant – a must-read for all media educators.’

Newsletter of the Media Education Association

The book looks in depth at five areas of media - talk shows, magazines, news, advertising, and contemporary screen and paperback romances - to examine how representations of women and men are changing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to feminist, queer and anti-racist critique.

McCombs: Setting the Agenda

‘Beautifully written and clearly organized, it is the definitive work on media agenda-setting by the founders of this branch of empirical research.’

David Weaver, Indiana University

In addition to describing this media influence on what we think about and how we think about it, Setting the Agenda also discusses the sources of these media agendas, the psychological explanation for their impact on the public agenda, and the subsequent consequences for attitudes, opinions and behaviour.

Chapman: Comparative Media History

‘Readers will appreciate the careful incorporation of research results particularly impressive in discussions of post-1980 trends, including the impact of the Internet and globalization. The book seems best marked, however, by brilliant articulation of trends, with particular attention to their origins and trajectories, and of themes that draw readers’ thought to specific contexts of change. Beyond filling significant needs in journalism and international media history, which would make it valuable enough, the book promises to reshape thinking and become a touchstone for future research in media history. Indeed, rarely has a book come across my desk that seemed so likely to so profoundly affect scholarship in a field.’

Hazel Dicken-Garcia, University of Minnesota