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Networking Paradigms: Information Technology and Communication Studies.
Networking Paradigms: Information Technology and Communication Studies.
- Publication Year :
- 1996
-
Abstract
- Communications media have long been acknowledged as the site of intense political struggle over issues of access to, control over, and representations in these media. That communications research is likewise the site of struggle between the various paradigms of the discipline is, however, troubling to the neophyte communication scholar. For well over 10 years, communication scholarship has been engaged in internal struggles over the preeminence of one paradigm over the others. Accompanying this paradigmatic division is the dynamic convergence of traditional and new communications media. Information Technology (IT), an umbrella term for the new communications media, offers communication research a unique opportunity to reinvent itself in the service of understanding the complex relations and social/political dynamics of the information revolution. IT represents a potentially radical shift in the ways in which knowledge is created, reproduced, and disseminated and, as such, it subjects to revolutionary changes the underlying epistemologies of the various communications paradigms. The geodesic network provides the means and the model by which the social scientific, critical/cultural, and law and policy paradigms of communication research can network. The successful integration of the three paradigms of communication research is essential for investigating the increasingly complex questions of media literacy, uses and effects, media access and ownership, public versus private interests, participatory politics, civil society, and the character of discourse within society. (Contains 35 references and 4 notes.) (CR)
Details
- Language :
- English
- Database :
- ERIC
- Publication Type :
- Editorial & Opinion
- Accession number :
- ED406699
- Document Type :
- Opinion Papers<br />Speeches/Meeting Papers