referencebooks (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} referencebooks) wrote,@ 2005-09-27 16:28:00 |
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| Entry tags: | communication |
The Handbook of New Media
The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs
Edited by Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone.
Published by Sage Publications, 2002.
This is a clothbound book measuring 7" by 10" and running to 564 pages including the index, plus a detailed table of contents and contributors' biographies.
The book is meant to be an overview of the broad areas of social research having to do with new media, or information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is a "transdisciplinary" work, including essays by scholars from various social science disciplines (with a preponderance of communication studies faculty) on new media and its interrelationships with economic, political, behavioral, cultural and technological phenomena. It's not an encyclopedia but a survey of research.
It is divided into six parts, each with several chapters and a separate introduction. The parts are:
- The Changing Social Landscape
- Technology Design and Development
- New Media and Organizing
- Systems, Industries and Markets
- Policy and Regulation
- Culture and New Media
Opening the book at random, I near the beginning of the chapter in part 3 called "New Media and Organizing at the Group Level," looking at sections with the headings, "GCSS: Technologies that Mediate or Augment Within-Group Communication," "GISS: Supplementing Information Available to the Group," "GXSS: Supporting External Communication," "GPSS: Modifying the Group's Task Performance." This chapter "examines the role of new media at the group level of analysis." I can understand enough of it to see that it probably provides insights and certainly relates to issues I have encountered in working in online environments with groups in which I participate, but I find myself wishing I were more conversant in the field of communication studies. The prose is a somewhat technical and requires just a bit of background in the discipline. It's not a gap that would be nearly as difficult to overcome as with, say, an engineering handbook, but it does present at least a minor barrier for someone casually interested in the ways in which online communication affects the way people work together.
Despite being somewhat technical, this seems to be a very valuable reference work in a new and important field.
