Communication Matters

Communication Matters

by Jeremy Packer, Stephen B. Crofts Wiley
Released June 2013
Publisher(s): Routledge
ISBN: 9781136589591

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Book description

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.

Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences.

This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric.

The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti,　Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. List of Figures
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. PART I. Orientations media/materiality
    1. Introduction: The materiality of communication
    2. 1. Media, materiality, and the human: A conversation with N. Katherine Hayles
    3. 2. Becoming mollusk: A conversation with John Durham Peters about media, materiality, and matters of history
  8. PART II. Communication time/space
    1. 3. Ubiquitous sensibility
    2. 4. It changes space and time!: Introducing power-chronography1
    3. 5. Zeroing in: Overhead imagery, infrastructure ruins, and datalands in Afghanistan and Iraq
    4. 6. Rhetoric, materiality, and US Western Front commemoration
    5. 7. Materiality and urban communication: The rhetoric of communicative spaces
    6. 8. The birth of the “neoliberal” city and its media
  9. PART III. Communication assemblages/networks
    1. 9. Beyond transmission, modes, and media
    2. 10. Attention and assemblage in the clickable world
    3. 11. The documentality of Mme Briet’s antelope
    4. 12. Subjects, networks, assemblages: A materialist approach to the production of social space
    5. 13. Vitalism, animality, and the material grounds of rhetoric
    6. 14. 8 Mile: Networked decision making
    7. 15. Lessons from the YMCA: The material rhetoric of criticism, rhetorical interpretation, and pastoral power
  10. PART IV. Communication mobility/immobility
    1. 16. Materializing US–Caribbean borders: Airports as technologies of communication, coordination, and control
    2. 17. Publicized privacy: Social networking and the compulsive search for limits
    3. 18. Virtual mobility: The sign/body of pure information
    4. 19. Location-aware technologies: Control and privacy in hybrid spaces
    5. 20. Flow and mobile media: Broadcast fixity to digital fluidity
  11. Index

Product information

  • Title: Communication Matters
  • Author(s): Jeremy Packer, Stephen B. Crofts Wiley
  • Release date: June 2013
  • Publisher(s): Routledge
  • ISBN: 9781136589591