Book Reviews
As many academic books as I read, I might as well share the benefits of my experience. This will start out as a single page, and if it becomes too unwieldy I'll start making subpages or categories. For now, though, they're disorganized and linked below. I hope they serve to enlighten those in search of academic resources about rhetoric, interface, politics, and the intersections and interstices therewith.
Books by Author & Title
Edelman - Symbolic Uses of Politics:|:Davis - Web of Politics:|:Gamson - Talking Politics
The Symbolic Uses of Politics, by Murray Edelman
Author: Murray Edelman
Title: The Symbolic Uses of Politics
Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1964, 1985
Length: 220 pages
ISBN: 978-0-252-01202-0
This slim volume has been one of the most important books in the field of political science and political communication for over forty years. It is accessible to undergraduates, yet extremely valuable to the experienced scholar, displaying a critical gaze of political practices and ideas that seems to stand the test of time. The tenth printing, in 1985, included a new afterword by Edelman that re-examined the critical themes of the book and revealed again their relevance for the contemporary American. The language is clear, concise, and unequivocal, unique in itself among the jargonistic social sciences, almost unheard of in contemporary scholarship.
The book addresses symbolic forms that are crucial in understanding our political institutions, symbolic forms that are commonly associated with primitive tribes, that are surprisingly accurate when addressing a so-called modern society. As Edelman tells us, "To study the working of ritual and myth in this area is to examine persisting political institutions, in contrast to the passing parade of news. For rite and myth are persistent, in precisely the same sense and for the same reasons that elections, discussions of politics, patriotic holiday ceremonies, legislative postures, judicial dramas of combat, and administrative busyness are persistent" (p. 16).
Rating: 5 stars - definitely a necessary addition to the library of any political science or communication scholar.
-- cb 1 Jun. 2008
The Web of Politics, by Richard Davis
Author: Richard Davis
Title: The Web of Politics: The Internet's Impact on the American Political System
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999
Length: 224 pages
ISBN: 0-19-511485-X
The most admirable trait of Davis's book, one of the first scholarly treatments of the effects of the Internet on American politics (I loathe the popular use of "impact" when the meaning is "effect"), is its skepticism during a period in which everyone was enthusiastically engaging in ecstatic technoevangelism about the "freedom" that was an "inherent trait" in the Internet. Tech stocks were soaring, just about to crash, when Davis took a good look at how the electronic sphere was truly developing, and in answer to cyberlibertarian beliefs, stated emphatically that the web was not causing a democratic, populist political revolution, that the predicted transition to an Athenian-style, every man for himself antithesis - of - Jeffersonian - Republicanism would never happen, at least not through the auspices of the political arm of the Internet. While he was writing, despite popular perceptions to the contrary, the web favored stagnant content: there was no interactivity on web sites, people received information with little chance to respond. People seeking news were likely to type "oldmediaoutlet'sname.com" into the URL, thus reinforcing the power of old media.
Unfortunately, the benefits of this book in 2008 are largely as a historical document. Most of the interactivity that was predicted wasn't apparent until after the 2000 election, when the political blogosphere got up and running. Indeed, only recently did it reach a large enough number of people to be considered an effective opinion device, and even more recently, an outlet for true deliberation. Davis makes safe assumptions that technology would continue to develop in the direction it had, that is, proprietary, noninteractive content that visitors would receive without a chance to rebut. His sampling of electronic documents includes outdated (now almost a non-factor) outlets such as USENET. In all, I really couldn't, in good conscience, recommend this to anyone other than graduate students or faculty interested in historic observations of the political internet, which is nearly unrecognizable in comparison to the stagnant content of the 1996 websites at the heart of Davis's sampling.
Final verdict? 3/5 - worth a read but not a necessary addition to the collection.
cb - 1 Feb. 2008
Talking Politics, by William Gamson
Author: William Gamson
Title: Talking Politics
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1992
Length: 272 pages
ISBN: 0-521-43679-6
Despite its relative age, this book is an essential addition to anyone interested in studying political communication, rhetoric, or sociology. Gamson examines the relationship between the media, the citizens, politicians, and the possibilities of collective action. The central theses of Talking Politics are that people are neither as passive, nor as stupid, as social science portraits portray them, and furthermore, that people negotiate media messages in complex, varying ways that depend upon not only situational context but also cultural and interpersonal interaction. Political conversation, states Gamson, is informed and shaped by an implicit "frame" or organizational idea, and his book's focus draws upon these frames in order to examine the particular kinds of political consciousness that support mobilization for collective action, or "collective action frames." He names three components for a collective action frame and examines them in the order in which they must appear in order for the frame to coalesce.
First, there must be a sense of injustice, or moral indignation, and that in order to establish a sense of injustice, activists must instill a sense that the injustice is personal: see, for example, the rapid rise in contributions to food banks following the Pulitzer-Prize winning photograph of a vulture waiting to feed on a collapsed, starving girl. It is interesting — and very American — that in order to form a "collective," the appeal must be individualized. Secondly, there must be a sense of agency, or some sense of collective efficacy that denies the possibility that things cannot change. Finally, the collective must establish a common sense of group identity, a definition of the "we" who oppose "them" — in short, there must be an adversarial component, or else the sense of injustice will evaporate. The injustice component is the catalyst that facilitates the adoption of the other elements, promoting agency and identity.
All of the above appears within the first chapter. The rest of the book is equally as informative, providing analyses of approaches that work to maintain or suppress a collective action frame, adversary, and follow relevant counterthemes that increase the size of the possible group. He also provides an interesting analysis of how various movements succeeded, where their difficulties lay, and lessons that we can take from them.
Rating: 5/5 - Highly recommended to anyone involved in political communication or activism. The American media could take some interesting notions from this book, as could potential grassroots activists.
cb - 1 Feb. 2008
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