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The Communication Review
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The Communication Review
Call for Papers
Special issue on Networks, Communities, and the Public Sphere
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After thirty years of slow propagation from military research centers in the United States, computer networking has become a broad-based social movement. This movement is best known through the popular discourse of "network communities" on the Internet and other global network services. But it also includes significant efforts to develop "community networks" to facilitate community organizing, local business alliances, and access to government information. The dualism of these two phrases -- network communities and community networks -- is one indication of the complex interweaving between the social dynamics and the technical structures of computer networking. The new technologies provide an infrastructure for a wide variety of organizing activities, and they are widely held to portend substantial changes in the character of democracy. Differential access to networking technology, moreover, has been widely predicted to hold serious consequences for both economic and political equality in an emerging information society.
Interdisciplinary research on networks and communities can contribute to an evaluation of these claims. How do network communities operate in practice? What social processes condition an individual or group's ability to benefit from computer networks? How are the social movements around computer networking organized? How do the dynamics of community life influence the shape of networking movements, and how do the emerging networks interact with the communities around them? How are emerging media changing the classical issues of political participation such as freedom of speech and the press, political knowledge, and the nature of social movements? How are law and policy responding to these changes? And what challenges, if any, do these new developments pose to the very concepts of community and polis?
This special issue of The Communication Review will examine these
questions. Articles are welcome from all disciplines relating to human
communication research, including anthropology, law, political science,
rhetoric, and sociology. These articles should be around 10,000 words
in length and should bring a developed theoretical discussion to bear
on particular empirical materials. The deadline for submission of
manuscripts is March 1st 1996 but potential contributors are encouraged
to correspond with the special issue editor, Phil Agre
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The Communication Review:
With the goal of exploring new, disciplined approaches to communication studies, The Communication Review seeks a synthesis of concerns traditional to the field of communication and human studies scholarship. The journal's heuristic division of the field into three analytical perspectives provides a natural structure for creating new knowledge across conventional disciplinary boundaries:
* Communication as a Social Force -- focusing on the historical evolution and contemporary transformation of mass communications, telecommunications, and information systems, emphasizing their political-economic, technological, and institutional dynamics.* Communication and Culture -- proving the questions of producing meaning and interpretation by way of analyzing culture through literature, the visual and dramatic arts, folklore, and anthropology.* Communication and Mind -- examining the individual socially constituted through language and other media in their cultural and economic contexts.
The editors view these as different perspectives on a unitary system of communicative activity. The journal recognizes that while scholars in diverse fields once took "mediational" institutions, forms, and practices for granted, now communication presents fundamental problems that require analysis.
Further details about the journal are available on the WorldWide Web at http://communication.ucsd.edu/commreview/commreview.html
or by sending an electronic mail message of the following form:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send tcr
For subscription information and a free copy of the first issue contact:
Christopher Davis International Publishers Distributor Gordon & Breach Publishers, Inc. 820 Town Center Drive Langhorne, PA 19047 Phone: (215) 750-2642 x129 Fax: (215) 750-7343
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