About ‘More Resources’

Here you can find external resources related to, or expanding on, the material presented in this chapter. Currently included are links to websites, links to online video clips, and suggested readings that you can find in your school or local library. If you would like access to the password-protected video library that accompanies the text, your professor can give you the username, password, and URL needed (and if your professor is not sure how to access the video library, he or she can contact an Oxford University Press sales representative for details).

Website links

Adbusters

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Société Radio-Canada (CBC/SRC)

Independent Media Center (IMC)

Marshall McLuhan

National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Multimedia links

CBC DocZone episode about the unexpected consequences of people sharing personal lives on Facebook and other social media:

http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/episodes/facebook-follies

TVO episode of The Agenda about the role of Media in the Middle East:

http://tvo.org/video/205273/rami-khouri-media-middle-east

TEDx talk on the digital divide:

Readings: Media and Mass Communication

Goss, B.M.  (2013). Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

This book uses the 1988 propaganda model of news media made famous by Herman and Chomsky to offer a fresh analysis, and represents a major contribution to the political economy of news. Goss uses a series of case studies, surveys of media ownership, and news worker routines to examine recent news discourses.

Jackson, J.D., Neilson, G.M., & Hsu, Y. (2011). Mediated Society: A Critical Sociology of Media. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press.

In this book, the authors explore media as a social construction rather than as a technological one. They examine the ways that media frame our everyday experiences and local, regional, national, and international events.

Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P.F. (1964 [1955]). Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

In this classic and influential work the authors put forth the idea that media messages are mediated by informal “opinion leaders” who interpret messages and spread them as they have understood them in their informal networks.

Levinson, P. (1999). Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London, New York: Routledge.

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian forerunner on the subject of media in the twentieth century. He did not live to see the rise and spread of the Internet and its deep impact on societies around the world. Yet in this work, the author shows that many of McLuhan’s ideas about earlier forms of media are still highly applicable in the digital age.

McLuhan, M. (1994/1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (re-issue)

In this thirtieth anniversary re-issue, a new introduction by Lewis Lapham helps bring McLuhan’s prophetic work into the twenty-first century.  In this book McLuhan introduces the reader to terms that are today part of our modern lexicon: “the global village” and “the medium is the message.” McLuhan offers insights on the need to adapt from the mechanical age to the electronic age. Lapham re-evaluates McLuhan’s work 30 years after the fact and analyses it through the lens of various technological, social, and political changes that have occurred since the book’s initial publication.