
New Books in Communications
Interviews with Scholars of Media and Communications about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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Peter Krapp, "Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation" (MIT Press, 2024)
We're pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Krapp, the author of Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (MIT Press, 2024), to the New Books Network. In Computing Legacies, Peter Krapp explores a media history of simulation to excavate three salient aspects of digital culture. Firstly, he profiles simulation as cult

Eunji Kim, "The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many still view the United States as the land of opportunity. The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton U

Amanda D. Lotz, "After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-First Century" (NYU Press, 2025)
With significant evolutions in digital technologies and media distribution in the past two decades, the business of storytelling through screens has shifted dramatically. In the past, blockbuster movies and TV shows like Friends aimed first for domestic mass audiences, although the biggest hits circulated globally. Now

Zev J. Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025)
While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs—are long extinct, Chinese characters, invented over three thousand years ago, are today used by well over a billion people to write Chinese and Japanese. In medieval East Asia, the written Classical Chinese languag

Alan Chong, "The International Politics of Communication: Representing Community in a Globalizing World" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
In an era of globalization, international communication constantly takes place across borders, defying sovereign control as it influences opinion. While diplomacy between states is the visible face of international relations, this “informal diplomacy” is usually less visible but no less powerful. Information politics c

Matthew Daniel Eddy, "Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long e