E-Book Overview
Remaking Media is a unique and timely reading of the contemporary struggle to democratize communication. With a focus on activism directed towards challenging and changing media content, practices and structures, the book explores the burning question: What is the political significance and potential of democratic media activism in the western world today? Taking an innovative approach, Robert Hackett and William Carroll pay attention to an emerging social movement that appears at the cutting edge of cultural and political contention, and ground their work in three scholarly traditions that provide interpretive resources for the study of democratic media activism: political theories of democracy critical media scholarship the sociology of social movements. Remaking Media examines the democratization of the media and the efforts to transform the machinery of representation. Such an examination will prove invaluable not only to media and communication studies students, but also to students of political science.
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Remaking Media
What is the political significance and potential of democratic media activism in the Western world today? Remaking Media rides on a wave of political and scholarly attention to oppositional communication, triggered by the rise in the 1990s of the Zapatistas, internet activism and IndyMedia. This attention has mostly focused on alternative media and the ‘media strategies’ of social movements – i.e., ‘democratization through the media’. This book concerns democratization of the media themselves, efforts to transform the ‘machinery of representation’, as a distinctive field that is pivotal to other social struggles. Remaking Media takes as its premise the existence of a massive ‘democratic deficit’ in the field of public communication. This deficit propels diverse struggles to reform and revitalize public communication in the North Atlantic heartland of globalization. It focuses on activism directed towards challenging and changing media content, practices and structures, as well as state policies on media. Hackett and Carroll’s approach is innovative in its attention to an emerging social movement that appears at the cutting edge of cultural and political contention. The book is grounded in three scholarly traditions that provide interpretive resources for a study of democratic media activism: political theories of democracy, critical media scholarship and the sociology of social movements. By synthesizing insights from these sources they provide a unique and timely reading of the contemporary struggle to democratize communication. Robert A. Hackett is Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. William K. Carroll is Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria in Canada.
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