Echoes of Gabriel Tarde: What We Know Better or Different 100 Years Later

by Elihu Katz, Christopher Ali, Joohan Kim

Overview

Originally published in 1898, Gabriel Tarde’s essay “Opinion and Conversation” can be read as a series of propositions about the interaction of press, conversation, opinion and action, anticipating today’s “deliberative democracy.” Exploring these themes in a hyper-text “dialogue” with Tarde, Elihu Katz, Christopher Ali, and Joohan Kim ask what we know better or different 100 years later in this book. The aim is not only to reawaken attention to Tarde’s text, but to assess the progress of communications research in its light. The e-book’s format makes it possible to access the essay as a series of propositions, foreshadowing contemporary concerns with issues such as agenda setting, public opinion formation, the diffusion of innovation, the two-step flow of communication, the role of the press in nation-building, new media technologies, the normative role of media in a democracy, media events, and the like. The e-book includes an analytic Introduction, a biographical postscript and the first full English translation of Tarde’s essay. Long overlooked, “Opinion and Conversation” deserves to be canonized as foundational for theories that link mass and interpersonal communication, especially in the age of social media. Authors are Elihu Katz, Distinguished Trustee Professor of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Christopher Ali, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Virginia, and Joohan Kim, Professor of Communication at Yonsei University in South Korea. Louise Salmon of the Sorbonne (Paris 1) contributed the biographical note.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625174215
Publisher:	USC Annenberg Press
Publication date:	05/16/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elihu Katz is Distinguished Trustee Professor of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Communication, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first book, Personal Influence (with Paul Lazarsfeld), explored the linkages between mass media and networks of interpersonal communication. In the 50th anniversary edition of this book, Katz traces its lineage to French social psychologist Gabriel Tarde. With Jerusalem as home base, Katz has divided his time with the University of Chicago and the Annenberg Schools at USC and Penn. He established the Communications Institute at the Hebrew University, was founding director of Israel’s public TV channel, and scientific director of the Guttman Institute of Applied Social Research. Katz was awarded UNESCO’s McLuhan Prize and Burda’s “In Medias Res,” and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Ghent, Montreal, Paris, Haifa, Rome, Bucharest, Quebec and Northwestern. Christopher Ali (PhD Uniiversity of Pennsylvania, 2013) is an Asst. Professor in Media Studies, University of Virginia, and has published in scholarly journals including Media, Culture & Society and International Journal of Communication. His research interests lie at the intersection of communication policy and regulation, critical theory, comparative media systems studies, and localism. Joohan Kim is an award-winning communications professor and researcher at Yonsei University. His research focuses on the work of conversation in public opinion formation, the effects of positive emotion in communication processes, the methods of enhancing communication competence and non-cognitive capacities, and measuring communication effects through neuroscientific methods. He is author of the best-selling books Resilience and Writing Thesis through Structural Equation Modeling in Korea. He has also published in such journals as Journal of Communication and Communication Theory.