Suchergebnisse

Paddy Scannells Buch bietet eine faszinierende, erhellende und sehr gut verständliche Einführung in die Medien- und Kommunikationstheorie. Scannell entwickelt anhand der historischen Entwicklungen in Nordamerika und Europa eine sehr zugängliche, systematische und gleichzeitig differenzierte Analyse der verschiedenen Zugänge der Beschäftigung mit Medien- und Kommunikation. Immer wieder schöpft er aus verschiedenen Disziplinen und fordert so insgesamt die Leserinnen und Leser heraus, sich mit Kommunikation und Medien in ihren Gesamtzusammenhängen auseinander zu setzen. Das international vielfach beachtete Werk des bekannten britischen Wissenschaftlers und Professors für Kommunikationswissenschaft an der University of Michigan liegt nun endlich in deutscher Sprache vor.

Abstract
I have just learnt that Elihu Katz – a dearly loved friend and colleague – has died at the age of 95. This abstract is a valediction forbidding mourning. Media Events, written with Daniel Dayan, was the culminating work of a career spanning six decades – a career launched by Personal Influence, written with his doctoral supervisor, Professor Paul Lazarsfeld, of Columbia University, New York, and published in 1955. In my contribution to this issue, I try to do two things: firstly, to indicate how Media Events opened up a novel way of thinking about television and, at the same time, to think of it as a summa, the distillation of a lifetime's work in the academic field of communication and media studies. I wanted especially to point towards its stimmung – that untranslatable ordinary German word for mood, or disposition: an attitude to life, the world, and television. I start with Katz's earliest academic work – his master's thesis completed at Columbia in the 1940s, felicitously but not accidentally called The Happiness Game. The stimmung of this work is the same as that of Media Events. That vision, as Daniel Dayan has claimed, was not a mirage. What he and Katz saw in La Télévision Céremoniélle (the book's French title when he translated it) was every bit as true as the dominant academic view of the politics of television whose hegemonic sociological take on "the real world" they both attempted to counter.

The article reviews the key question of the effects of television as proposed by Elihu Katz in his introduction and the various responses to it in the contributions to this volume. It argues that the question is a proper concern of sociology, engaged as it is with the politics of the present and immediate, short-term effects. The question of long-term effects, however, is beyond the scope of a social science methodology concerned with the impact of the new. Long-term effects only show up with the passing of time and are the concern of historical studies. As television begins to have a history, it begins to be possible to examine its historical record to try to tease out its long-term impact on the world—so far!

The article reviews the key question of the effects of television as proposed by Elihu Katz in his introduction and the various responses to it in the contributions to this volume. It argues that the question is a proper concern of sociology, engaged as it is with the politics of the present and immediate, short-term effects. The question of long-term effects, however, is beyond the scope of a social science methodology concerned with the impact of the new. Long-term effects only show up with the passing of time and are the concern of historical studies. As television begins to have a history, it begins to be possible to examine its historical record to try to tease out its long-term impact on the world--so far! [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]