ABOUT....
Paschal Preston ‘Reshaping communications:
technology, information and social change’
London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications (2001)
[pp.320; ISBN 0-8039-8563-0 (paperback) £18.99;
ISBN 0-8039-8562-2 (hardback) £50 ]
Comments from Reviews & Readers:-
‘This is a stimulating, well argued book on an important contemporary
subject and based, as is rare in this field, on up-to date empirical data.’
-- Nicholas Garnham, University of Westminster.
‘Paschal Preston ... has produced a noteworthy book
which will have considerable influence on those concerned with information and
communication matters. It is extraordinarily wide ranging, encompassing just
about every matter of significance in this sprawling field, while presenting a
forceful, even polemical, thesis. It has the enormous virtue of being
empirically grounded, yet simultaneously capable of soaring with the best of
the theorists (in a vastly over-theorized arena).
... ... A great strength of this book is its capacity to offer a coherent
and integrated vision of our “information age”. It is a major
achievement to juxtapose the post-industrial analysis and the post-modern, to
identify similar presuppositions, yet manage to integrate their concerns with
his own neo-Schumperetian approach. ... .This is a rich book that will
necessarily engage the mind of thinkers on social change. ....
-- Frank Webster, review in
‘Information, Communication & Society’ journal. (2001)
4:4 634-41.
Dr. Preston:
I just wanted to write you a quick congratulatory note on your book
‘Reshaping Communications’. .... I am completing a thesis on the
political economy implications of search engines. .... I am close to completion ...
I must say that your book is probably the best single one I have read
in terms of understanding the important issues
.... I feel you bring them together and present them very well in a readable
manner. .... I would highly recommend your book to someone wanting a very good
comprehensive understanding of emerging communication issues. I also would
adopt it if teaching a class in the area. .....
-- Don Best, Dept. of Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan
[e-mail: 12 June 2003].
Brief Description (from Book Cover) :
If one writer in the early 1970s could note that ‘to admire technology is all out of fashion’ the situation has changed radically since then. Today, the new information and communication technologies are admired, indeed feted, and their effects highly vaunted. They are restructuring our economy, we are told, as well as radically changing the social and cultural fabric of our industrial world.
Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives and original empirical research, Paschal Preston critically interrogates many of the prevailing ideas concerning new communication technologies, the new economy and an emerging “information society”. He advances an alternative and more grounded account of the complex interplay between the new technology and contemporary changes in the social and communications environment.
Other Books by Paschal Preston :
‘Making the News : Journalism and News Cultures in Europe’ (2009) Routledge. More information
‘Strategies for Inclusion and Gender in the Information Society : Private and Voluntary Sector Initiatives’ (2004) Co-Editor, with Carol MacKeogh. Trondheim, Norway: NTNU Press. More information
‘The Carrier Wave : New Information Technology & the Geography
of Innovation’ (1988)
with Peter Hall. London: Unwin Hyman.
More information
‘Democracy and Communication in the New Europe : Change and Continuity
in East and West’ (1995)
with Farrel Corcoran (eds).
Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press Inc.
More information