John Durham Peters

INSTITUTIONAL SOURCES OF INTELLECTUAL POVERTY IN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

Why has the field of communication failed to define itself, its intellectual focus, and its mission in a coherent way? This essay explores reasons for this failure, focusing especially on the institutional use of the fields central terms and concepts. Incoherence has been the price of institutional success. What defines communications unique identity as a field is also what maintains its conceptual confusions. The field is compared to a nation-state. The essay places the fields emergence in the context of the history of the social sciences in order to help illuminate its current crises and to explore how we might find new ways of conceiving the fields intellectual task.

John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication

Communication is a product of a particular historical epoch and set of social conditions. The concept emerges in classic liberalism and presupposes a society in which individuals are thought of as free from external constraints of society, others, history, and language, and are seen as holders of private property in both material goods and consciousness. John Lockes linguistic and political theories illustrate the birth of communication and the conditions and commitments that accompany that term in contemporary theory and society.

Information: Notes Toward a Critical History

have their histories and their longings, which leave their hieroglyphic marks everywhere. The echoes of past ectasies, and despairs, resound in human talk, though they are usually muffled and we usually oblivious. Such a conception of language is often resisted because it seems to conjure the specter of animism, something that modems, being more comfortable in the sunlight than the moonlight, have worked so dilligently to banish. It seems to make language into a netherworld populated by the ghosts of departed ancestors; it seems to make us into beings possessed by demons or angels instead of ourselves. It violates our sense of being the masters of language and of language as a tool, a symbolic system for transmitting information. It is the information that matters,

The gaps of which communication is made 1

Mass communication, as typically defined, is an oxymoron: communication without interaction. The distance between dissemination and reception has usually been understood as making mass communication inferior to face‐to‐face interaction and as resulting from twentieth‐century technology. Instead, I argue that the gap between transmission and reception is fundamental to almost all forms of communication, such that mass communication may be the more basic form. The effort to theorize communication and mass communication has been a topic of discussion from the beginnings of western philosophy (Plato), from the beginnings of the twentieth centurys most influential media system (U. S. broadcasting), and in the philosophy of interpretation (Ricoeurs hermeneutics). Some sort of conceptual contrast between open dissemination (mass) and individualized interaction (interpersonal) is inevitable, I conclude, not because scholars need to specialize but because human beings are finite. The human condition shapes the c...

Satan and Savior: Mass Communication in Progressive Thought

This essay probes the contradictory philosophical reception of mass communication in the social thought of progressives such as Cooley, Dewey, Park, and Royce. Mass communication served as a focus for larger anxieties about social order, social evolution, the future of American democracy, and the integrity of the public sphere. The theoretical grapplings of these thinkers with the symbolic mediation of society, however inadequate they are, show us that the relation between society and its self‐representations is a problem for modern society generally, not only for the putatively “postmodern”; climate of the late twentieth century.

The Control of Information

THE CONTROL REVOLUTION: TECHNOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY by James R. Beniger Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 493 pp.,

Autism and new media: Disability between technology and society

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Speaking Into the iPhone: An Interview With John Durham Peters, or, Ghostly Cessation for the Digital Age:

This article explores the elective affinities between autism and new media. Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) provides a uniquely apt case for considering the conceptual link between mental disability and media technology. Tracing the history of the disorder through its various media connections and connotations, we propose a narrative of the transition from impaired sociability in person to fluent social media by network. New media introduce new affordances for people with ASD: The Internet provides habitat free of the burdens of face-to-face encounters, high-tech industry fares well with the purported special abilities of those with Asperger’s syndrome, and digital technology offers a rich metaphorical depository for the condition as a whole. Running throughout is a gender bias that brings communication and technology into the fray of biology versus culture. Autism invites us to rethink our assumptions about communication in the digital age, accounting for both the pains and possibilities it entails.

The Part Played by Gentiles in the Flow of Mass Communications: On the Ethnic Utopia of Personal Influence

Conducted by media scholar, Carolyn L. Kane, this interview was recorded on Saturday morning of April 25, 2009, in an empty classroom at MIT, during the MIT6 Media in Transition conference, using Ms. Kane’s iPhone. The morning before, John Durham Peters gave his lecture, “What Ever Happened to Loneliness?” The interview also occurs in honor of the 10th anniversary of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, a text that bridges European, Canadian, and American communications scholarship within an intellectual framework of lost loves and uncanny ghosts. This 2009 interview extends the discussion to more recent issues of loneliness in light of social networking technologies, critical methods, and coping strategies for the information age, the ghosts of digital media, and the present, past, and future of media studies and archiving in the United States.

Proliferation and Obsolescence of the Historical Record in the Digital Era

Personal Influence is not only a landmark study within the sociological literature on networks, influence, and decision making. It is also an allegory of Jewish-ethnic identity in mid-twentieth-century America and a side-ways commentary on modern Jewish involvement in communications. The book participates in a utopian imagination of society in which Jews and Gentiles alike would be centrally involved in the flow of communications. It turns from Gentile-style status toward Jewish-style connectivity as the basis of social power; defends socially grounded conceptions of mental life against Gentile individualism; insists in its notion of the two-step flow on the rabbinic principle that a text without a commentary is meaningless; and performs some amazing intellectual-moral-historical footwork with the most inconspicuous of all its central terms, “people.” In all these things, it can be read as a “Jewish” text in some sense.