Global Communication [With Infotrac]

By Yahya R. Kamalipour

Develop an understanding of significant economic, cultural, legal, social, and political issues in the exciting field of global communication with Diggs-Brown's GLOBAL COMMUNICATION presents. From... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0534561276
• ISBN13: 9780534561277
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Cengage Learning
• Length: 288 Pages

Customer Reviews

Superb topical reader

Scholars and teachers in the dynamic field of international communications will find much to recommend in this collection of 13 chapters by academicians from around the world edited by Yahya Kamalipour. What distinguishes this collection of writings from a growing number on the market about transnational communication is not only the readability of the chapters that address important developments in thinking in the discipline, but the lack of Western media bashing that seems the current flavor of the month in the field. Global Communication side-steps the conveniently normative trap that snares many writers in a zero-sum game: when global (read Western, particularly American) media come into contact with local media cultures, the local cultures lose every time. This book develops a different, refreshing and perhaps more realistic theme: local media not only can complete and co-exist, it can dominate their local markets to the benefit of their local audiences. Not that there are no pleas for a more level media landscape. There are sufficient numbers of chapters that lean in that direction. The difference is the addition of a realistic voice that does not pine for the good old days of public-that is governmental-control of international broadcasting. This book, on the main, handles the subject more objectively than many of the polemics now causing our bookshelves to sag. The savvy reader of international communications tomes will recognize the names of many of the authors, but the infusion of ideas from new-or at least unfamiliar-voices gives this collection its freshness. What readers should find particularly interesting is the book's merging of traditional textbook fare with several contextual chapters not normally found in college texts. For example, John D.H. Downing provides a perfunctory though concise review of the normative theories of the press and other theoretical constructs concerning global media. But then the author slips into the role of a political economist to argue, commendably, that political and economic power must be considered parts of the global media equation.Kuldip R. Rampal reviews global news and information flows in a succinct review of international news services and organizations on these, an important and often short-shrifted area in most international communications books. Rampal gives a good overview of the major news agencies well known to Western readers, but suggests, cautiously, that the Internet might mitigate against authoritarian governmental control of news organizations in 54 percent of the world's 191 countries. While many texts gloss over the increasingly complex area of global communications law, John L. Huffman and Denise M. Trauth's chapter tackles the prickly issues head on, including those countries-mainly authoritarian--where international media codes and standards rub up against contrary, deeply held, cultural, moral, ideological, and religious beliefs. The authors, writing in a language most colle