Communications In Transition

Hamid Mowlana, for decades, has been one of the foremost trackers and analyzers of global communications--their volume, character, and impact. No one is more qualified to explain these increasingly important and central issues to a wide public. --Herbert S. Schiller, New York University The rapid changes in the way we communicate across the globe continue to alter the many facets of society. Both interdisciplinary and intercultural in its approach, Global Communication in Transition examines the human dimensions and technological imperatives of international communications. Author Hamid Mowlana provides a comprehensive analysis beginning with the rise of modern political systems and the interactions of various cultures, through the expansion of social organizations and the growing global infrastructure. This unique perspective on global communication is organized around a number of basic concepts such as history, power, community, legitimacy, and language. By analyzing the political, economic, and cultural implications of communication today, within the broader concepts of such issues as community, Mowlana provides a new paradigm for the study of international communication. This auspicious text covers the history, theories, processes, and issues of international communication. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students in political science and international relations as well as communication will benefit greatly from the insightful scholarship offered in Global Communication in Transition.

This book addresses the role of communication in cultural change efforts within organizations, especially during periods of transition, mergers, technological innovations and globalization.

An introduction to the field of mass communication, covering all the major media, from books, magazines and newspapers, to radio, film, TV, cable and the new technologies. Illustrated with examples and anecdotes, the book explores international communication and career opportunities in the media.

This book explores the communication processes of the Transition Movement, a community-led global social movement, as it was adapted in a local context. First it analyzes how the movement’s grand narratives of responding to “climate change” and creating greater “resiliency” were communicated into local community-based stories, responses, and actions in the Transition Town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Second, it seeks to understand the multilayered communication processes that facilitate these actions toward sustainable social change. Transition Amherst developed and/or supported projects that addressed reducing dependency on peak-oil, creating community-based-local economies, supporting sustainable food production and consumption, and participating in more efficient transportation, among others. The popularity of the model coincides with an increase in the interest in and use of the term “sustainability” by media, academics and policymakers around the world, and an increase in the global use of digital technology as a resource for information gathering and sharing. Thus this book situates itself at the intersections of a global environmental and economic crisis, the popularization of the term “sustainability,” and an increasingly digitized and networked global society in order to better understand how social change is contextualized and facilitated in a local community via a global network. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the theories of Transition are applied over an extended period of time in practice, on the ground in a Transition town.

The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors' introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and "the virtual window." The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.

This book provides a two-level analytical framework and empirical study to analyze the reason and process of China’s transition that is from a follower to driver in the field of global climate governance, and is especially valuable the dialogues and cooperation between the government, media and civil society. Nowadays, China shows strong leadership to push the process of global climate governance. It’s the first and fastest time in the past 40-year history of China’s Opening-up that China wins the international respect and trust in one of the issues of global governance. What experiences can be summarized? What dynamic situations and new possibilities emerged after Trump, the U.S. president announced to withdraw from the Paris Agreement? How to move forward based on the existing success? This timely book offers new lens for international readers to understand China’s effort domestically and internationally in the field of climate change and illustrate the outlook of the climate governance in the frame of win-win co-governance model.