The international history of communication and media studies has yet to be written. To this point, most histories have been national, with the bulk of attention devoted to North America and western Europe. These emphases are not unwarranted, for the field established itself first on either side of the North Atlantic, was disseminated outward from
Communication and media studies matured into an integrated discipline in the years following 1968. Research and education became centralized in independent schools of communication, while at the same time drawing from related disciplines to improve methodology and explore new paradigms. By the early 1960s, communication studies began to move out of departments of sociology, psychology
In Latin America communication studies started during the late 1960s, and were characterized by two very different conceptions. On the one hand, there was the functional paradigm, from the United States (where many Latin American professors had been trained), which related the study of communication to the diffusion of innovations, and which was part of
Media communication, mass communication, political communication, and other aspects of social communication represent a dynamic academic field in contemporary central and Eastern Europe and Russia. In particular, communication on the societal level, which was the subject of the most visible and remarkable changes during the 1990s (reintroduction of “free” media and deep structural change of
Strategic communication is the study of how organizations or communicative entities communicate deliberately to reach set goals. Although the term “strategic communication” has been in use for years, scholars are only now fully engaged in defining the field and its theoretical influences. Traditionally communication in its organizational context has been studied through various disciplines academically
As users we will come to rely on our handset as a single device to manage not just communications but much of our lives. It will truly become a “remote control for life,” with massively enhanced capabilities, advanced methods of user interaction and in-built tools . . . The substantial change that end users are
The study of visual communication comprises such wide-reaching and voluminous literatures as art history, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, semiotics, cinema studies, television and mass media studies, the history and theory of photography, the history and theory of graphic design and typography, the study of word–image relationships in literary, aesthetic, and rhetorical theory, the
Communication is considered to be political if it relates to the exchange of messages among political actors. For example, most of what politicians do is political communication. Likewise, citizens communicate politics when they discuss political issues with friends or family members, phone in to political radio talks shows, or participate in political chats on the
Looking at political communication phenomena in a systems framework is a common approach in this field of study. The term “system,” in its general meaning, denotes a multitude of component parts, depending on each other, and functioning as a whole. The nature of the political communication system is thought of as a structure of producing
The definition of “international communication” is constantly in flux. Whether we have in view sociologist Émile Durkheim’s suggestion in his classic work Elementary forms of religious life (1917) that relations between different Aboriginal tribes constituted international communication, or historians’ and political scientists’ studies of diplomacy among modern nation-states, or the rush of contemporary theorizing on