Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

Abstract

* Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. James W Carey. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. 205 pp. James W. Carey collected essays he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s into volume titled Communication as Culture, originally published in 1989. Carey died in May 2006 after long and influential academic career. This re-publication as revised edition comes with bibliography of Carey's lifetime production of 170 or so essays and book reviews, compiled by his son Daniel, and an insightful forward by G. Stuart Adam, journalism scholarship fellow at The Poynter Institute. Shortly after Communication as Culture first appeared twenty years ago, as Adam points out, American Journalism devoted an issue to scholars' commentaries on Carey's essays. In the year he died, book of essays by scholars, titled Thinking with James Carey, examined his life's work. So perhaps there's not much left to review and learn from new reading of the work of prodigious intellect whose ideas have already received thorough engagement by his academic peers. What follows, therefore, is not so much review in the classic sense as the reflection of one who practiced newspaper and magazine journalism for twenty-five years before spending decade in university working at the intersection of public policy, politics, and journalism. As media companies struggle with difficult challenges posed by technological change and severe economic shocks, publishers and editors, as well as journalism critics, teachers, and students, would find no better guide to thoughtful analysis of the future than Carey's case study of the telegraph and how it transformed not simply but society itself. Indeed, Carey's central insight is profound in its simplicity: that communication is both a structure of human action and structuring set of social relations. Thus, he argues, people inhabit the culture they create by and through their communication with one another. This leads to an important lesson for professionals and would-be journalists: They cannot see themselves solely as observers somehow apart from the dynamics they report and analyze, because the act of communicating itself shapes the community in which they live and work. One of the strengths of Carey's work is that it emerged from moral core. He drew comfortably from religious intellectual traditions and applied lessons to today's secular issues. Fundamentally, Carey sought through his thinking and writing to contribute to building good society. A second strength, related to the first, is Carey's devotion to democracy. In this devotion, he comes across as an idealist; he recognizes the factionalism and disagreements of continental democracy, but he tends to celebrate person-to-person conversation that creates common ground for decision making. Though no provincial American, Carey clearly had in mind the shaping of democratic conversation in the United States. Still, it is important that in developing theoretical construct for understanding communication, he seemed to have as goal the building of good, democratic society. Carey's approach to the news in democratic society led him to delve into the intellectual conflict of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. …

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