Mediation and the Communication Matrix (Digital Formations) - Softcover

C. Kaha Waite

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820461776 ISBN 13: 9780820461779

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2003

Synopsis

The media alters one’s experience of the world and, in turn, alters one’s relationship to others. This is true of both the book and the screen, but with profoundly different consequences. The omnipresent screen of the early twenty-first century serves as a portal that reconfigures private and public experience in ways that are fundamentally different from print culture. Not only does the screen reveal the complexities of people and places beyond our reach, it alters our phenomenological awareness of space, sound, and motion. The individual experiences the altered duration of the screen, and the larger community displays the consequences of that altered duration. This book discusses how the screen in its myriad forms has contributed to an emerging view of the self in American culture that is unique to our time.

About this title

About the Author:

The Author: C. Kaha Waite is currently Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Communication at Hamilton College. She earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in communication and philosophy from the University of Illinois. Her scholarship focuses on the essential features of communication technologies, as those technologies contribute to emergent social forms.

Review:

«C. Kaha Waite has written an elegant work that finally puts some flesh on Marshall McLuhan’s belief that media work their effects by restructuring the human sensorium and altering modes of being in the world. However, her guides in this undertaking, Walter Ong and Maurice Merleau Ponty, connect her to our deepest understanding of perception and experience. A wonderful book that extends our knowledge of media and communication.» (James W. Carey, Professor, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University)
«‘Mediation and the Communication Matrix’ is a milestone in communication and media studies, as well as screen studies. C. Kaha Waite integrates media ecology scholarship with phenomenological method as she examines the role that communication modes play in aesthetics, perception, consciousness, and the sense of self. This is a book that will delight scholars and students alike.» (Lance Strate, President, Media Ecology Association and Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University)
«This is a path-breaking book – powerful and innovative. It draws a line around Merleau-Ponty, Ong, and McLuhan, and boldly anticipates the next frontier for communication scholars. Digital technologies and electronic media redefine the social fabric as well as the concepts of self, person, consciousness, and the post-global universe. C. Kaha Waite gives us the language and the theoretical tools to imagine ourselves into this new future. We owe her a great debt.» (Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
«This is one of those very serious books that is a delight to read. C. Kaha Waite focuses her analytical mind on the screen of individual ‘self’. I appreciated the manner in which Waite relieves human communication theory of the Popperian burden of falsifiability by privileging the mythic in discussing the self, media, the screen, and society. The writing is careful, deliberate, thoughtful, inventive, and provocative. Waite is zealous in her phenomenologically driven analysis of the communication matrix. While explicating her understanding of media ecology, the author provides a very close consideration of the noetic consequences of print/writing. I recommend this book to all students of human communication.» (Frank E. X. Dance, John Evans Professor of Human Communication Studies, University of Denver)

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0820461776
• ISBN 13: 9780820461779
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 179