Content area
Full Text
Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. By Peter Simonson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010; pp xi + 261. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.
When most of us think of the term "mass communication," we probably have in mind something nearly synonymous with media, journalism, or public relations. Peter Simonson's Refiguring Mass Communication is an attempt to problematize that understanding by analyzing the ways in which communication has brought communities together over the past two millennia. In other words, rather than focus on forms of mass communication in which more or less centralized sources broadcast to the public, Simonson argues for a consideration of the mass in mass communication. As he explains, the term "mass" has had many nuanced senses throughout history, all of which unite around the concept of communication as the process through which social bodies come together as communities. Simonson combines rhetorical analysis with a cultural studies approach to theorizing mass communication through the eyes of Paul of Tarsus, Walt Whitman, Charles Horton Cooley, David Sarnoff, and Robert K. Merton. The result is a thoughtful addition to studies of the history of communication.
Simonson's book is rendered in a narrative style that makes it accessible to a general audience, and its use of rhetorical methods promises to be enriching to experts in communication studies and a good example to graduate students. Perhaps the most useful contribution of Simonson's book is his conceptualization of context: "Medium of invention (or inventional medium) is a heuristic concept I use to identify enabling contexts and communicative forms through which rhetorical invention occurs" (26). These media of invention include the bodies and material realities of the men he discusses, their social relations, and the cultural discourses...