Suchergebnisse

Battleground models Wisconsin's contentious political communication ecology: the way that politics, social life, and communication intersect and create conditions of polarization and democratic decline. Drawing from 10 years of interviews, news and social media content, and state-wide surveys, we combine qualitative and computational analysis with time-series and multi-level modeling to study this hybrid communication system - an approach that yields unique insights about nationalization, social structure, conventional discourses, and the lifeworld. We explore these concepts through case studies of immigration, healthcare, and economic development, concluding that despite nationalization, distinct state-level effects vary by issue as partisan actors exert their discursive power.

This article provides a firsthand account of research conducted for the Federal Communications Commission in connection with its inquiry into communities' critical information needs and how well they were being met by local news and information sources. I detail the industry and political pressures brought to bear in opposition to that inquiry and the extent to which opposition to this kind of research undermines the development of prosocial local information ecologies. Finally, I discuss what can be done to develop research in this vein and shore up local information needs.

The paradigmatic focus on global and individual networks in communication has suppressed the Chicago tradition of understanding the city as a network of places. But the social ecology of the city continues to structure all aspects of urban communication networks including personal, institutional, and civic life. This article critically examines four major theorists of networked urban communication—Castells, Wellman, Fischer, and Sampson—and argues that the field of urban communication should return to a revitalized ecological tradition, while taking full account of the networked transformation of social life and social structure.

A Review essay on the following books: Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Engagement; and The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy.

This article asks whether the concept of community is of continuing relevance in a postindustrial society that is rapidly advancing to a networked form of social organization. The author argues that community is necessary for democratic life to function, and asks what new forms of integration might emerge to create the boundaries necessary for community reproduction. Turning to Habermas's theory of communicative action, the author shows the relevance of the two-level concept of society, system, and lifeworld for addressing this question, and proposes the concept of the communicatively integrated community as a framework for understanding the central role of communication in producing community. Finally, the article offers a mid-range analytic theory of community communication ecology as a frame for connecting this larger theory to the specific analysis of communication and community.