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The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, edited by David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 390pp. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 9780820488295.
In The History of Media and Communication Research, David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley have accompUshed that rare feat: an edited coUection that adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. Moreover, they have brought a good deal of coherence to what even scholars and practitioners will admit is a dizzyingly incoherent field, equal parts sociology, social psychology, political science, journalism, rhetoric, and cultural studies. The goal of the volume is to give communication and media studies a history - or rather, to give it a rigorous, honest one rather than a Whiggish past that mainly serves disciplinary and professional needs in the present. Lamenting the existing history of communication research as "anemic and notably unreflective" (p. 1), the editors are out to chart (and guide) an emerging subfield.
What is striking about this effort is that there are few agreed-upon strands of communications history apart from canonical, if contested, lists of "founders" (Kurt Lewin, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Carl Hovland, and the like) or key studies (the Payne Fund studies of moviegoing, wartime morale, and propaganda work, and above aU, Lazarsfeld and Etihu Katz's Personal Influence and its finding of "limited effects"). Equally striking is the immaturity of the field at large. The editors' call for basic archival work, for attention to political-economic context and institutions, and for awareness of the paraUel historiography of the other...