In Memory of Roger Silverstone
Professor Roger Silverstone
(15 June 1945 – 16 July 2006)
Convenor, Department of Media and Communications, LSE
I am Professor of Media and Communications and Convenor of the Department of Media and Communications. I was appointed to the LSE in 1998. I am also responsible for the Department's Doctoral programme.
Before I joined the LSE I was Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Graduate Research Centre in Culture and Communication at the University of Sussex and before that Reader in Sociology and Director of the Centre for Research into Innovation Culture and Technology at Brunel University.
My recent publications include Television and Everyday Life (Routledge, 1994) (translated into Spanish, Italian, Rumanian and Greek); and Why Study the Media? (1999) (translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, German, Korean, Chinese (simplified) and Greek (in press)). I published Media Technology and Everyday Life (Ashgate) in 2005 and I have just finished a new book: Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, which will be published by Polity Press in September 2006. I am also currently working on The Oxford Handbook on Information and Communication Technologies, with my colleagues Robin Mansell, Chrisanthe Avgerou, and Danny Quah.
Biography
My academic career began in geography and then, following six years in the "real" world as a publisher and then as a television researcher and director, I moved into sociology and began doctoral research in the Sociology Department of the London School of Economics. My PhD, The Television Message as Social Object was awarded in 1980 by the University of London. It was published in 1981 as The Message of Television: Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Culture (Heinemann).
My first lectureship was at Bedford College, University of London. In 1976 I joined the faculty at Brunel University, as Lecturer in Sociology, where I stayed until 1991. During my time at Brunel I established the BA in Communication and Information Studies, and was the founding Director of the Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology (CRICT), established in 1987 as a result of a major ESRC grant within their Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT). I left Brunel for Sussex as their first Professor of Media Studies in 1991. At Sussex I was Chair of the Media Studies Subject Group, took responsibility for the establishment the MA in Media Studies and became the founding Director of the Graduate Research Centre in Culture and Communication (CulCom). During that time I set up and edited the book series, Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication with the publishers, Routledge.
My present appointment, as the first Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, began in 1998. I am currently the Convenor of the Department of Media and Communications, and Director of the Doctoral programme. I have sat on the School's Council. In 2001-2 I was also (for my pains) Convenor of the Department of Sociology.
I have recently retired from my role as an editor of the journal, New Media and Society (having been one of four founding editors), whose first issue appeared in April 1999, and which contained a provocative theme section in answer to the question: "What's new about new media?". I recently co-edited, with my colleague at the LSE, Chris Hughes, a special issue on the Internet in China (Vol. 4 (2) Summer 2002) and also a special issue on New Media After 9/11.
I have been a Fellow of the European Communication Council, a small group of academics organised from the Free University of Berlin, and collectively responsible for a sequence of book length publications (in German and in English) on the information society in Europe. The latest, E-merging Media: Kommunikation und Medienwirtschaft der Zukunft was published by Springer in 2004; an English version was published by Springer in 2005.
I have been Visiting Professor in the Institut Français de Presse, Université Paris II; at IULM (Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione), Milan, and at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California. I am also a Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London.
Research interests
My research and teaching interests have been and still are, unfortunately, wide-ranging extending from the study of narrative to that of new media users and the relationship between media, technology and social change. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight I have tried to address some of the key dimensions of media scholarship and research, focusing sequentially on textual analysis, production and consumption over the last twenty or so years. Textual analysis was the focus in my doctoral work on television narratives. This was published as: The Message of Television: Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Culture (Heinemann, 1981). My work on production centred on an ethnography of documentary film production. This addressed questions of the representation and public understanding of science and was published as: Framing Science: The Making of a Television Documentary (British Film Institute, 1985). This interest in the representation and narrativisation of science extended to the museum as a medium of science communication (research that I undertook with Sharon MacDonald). Meanwhile research on the domestication of communication and information technologies and on media consumption and everyday life appeared both in Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (Routledge, 1992) which I edited with Eric Hirsch, and in my own Television and Everyday Life (Routledge, 1994. I have recently contributed a reflective chapter on this work to a new book on domestication, Domestication of Media and Technology edited by Thomas Berker, Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie and Katie Ward (Open University Press, 2006)
During the 1990's I edited a book on suburbia: Visions of Suburbia (Routledge, 1997) (very Sussex) but arising from my interest in what I had called rather cavalierly, the suburbanisation of the public sphere, in Television and Everyday Life. At Sussex work continued, with Leslie Haddon as collaborator, on a range of discrete studies of the domestication of media and technology, and these were perhaps best summarised in our joint chapter in the book I edited with Robin Mansell: Communication by Design: The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies (Oxford University Press, 1996).
My research is undergoing something of a sea-change currently. There are two principal, but related, dimensions to this work in progress. The first is an empirical study funded by the European Commission within its 5th Framework programme, and within the European Media Technology and Everyday Life Network (which I coordinated from the LSE) on Media and Minorities in Europe. This is a unique and preliminary attempt to map the scale and character of diasporic media production and consumption in Europe. The project runs until 2003 and I am working with Dr. Myria Georgiou: see here for more information. Myria Georgiou and I have edited a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, on the basis of this work. Publication is expected in the Spring of 2005, (Vol 31 (3) May 2005).
The second direction is encompassed within the title of a forthcoming book, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, which will be published by Polity Press in September 2006. Building on some ideas originally proposed in Why Study the Media? I am pursuing a range of questions that could broadly be considered to lie in the domain of media, or representational, ethics. I am concerned with the morality of mediation, and in particular in the processes, always moral, by which mediation takes place and in which perceptions, understandings and values in relation to the experienced world, emerge at the interface between media and everyday life.
Research projects and recent reports
I have recently completed my commitment as Coordinator of the European Media Technology and Everyday Life Network (EMTEL), a group of 7 research laboratories around Europe, each of which is involved in the training of young researchers and conducting research into an aspect of the emerging European information society from the perspective of everyday life.
The LSE project is on minority media in Europe, and reports and publications based on this research are currently in preparation are available at http://www.emtel2.org/.
A European Conference based around the research of this network but involving up to 100 researchers in the field was held at the LSE in April 2003. I have also just completed a small project with Zoe Sujon (and Giles Lane) on Urban Tapestries. The report on this research will shortly be available as a Media@lse Electronic Working paper. This was published in 2005.
Teaching
I teach on core courses in the MSc Programme in Media and Communications, and have until recently convened and taught a graduate course: Media Technology and Everyday Life (MC409). I convene and teach the Doctoral Research Seminar in Media, Culture and Communication, (MC500). I also supervise a number of doctoral student dissertations whose topics range widely: currently from work on radio in Afghanistan, mini-series in Brazil, the emergence of on-line networks, diasporic media, the relationship between media and policy making, and memory and the internet.
I have also had a leading role in the creation of POLIS, a project on the present and future of journalism in which the LSE is collaborating with the university of the Arts/ London College of Communications.
Selected Academic Publications
Books
(1981) The Message of Television: Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Culture, Heinemann Educational Books: London (reprinted 1992)
(1985) Framing Science: the Making of a BBC Documentary, British Film Institute: London
(1992) Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge (joint editor and contributor, with Eric Hirsch) (reprinted 1994) (Translation: Spanish, Bosch Casa Editorial, Barcelona (1996))
(1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge (reprinted 1994) (Translations: Spanish, Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires/Madrid (1996); Rumanian, Editura Polirom, Bucharest (1999); Italian, Il Mulino, Bologna (1999))
(1996) Communication by Design: The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press (joint editor and contributor with Robin Mansell) (reprinted 1997)
(1997) Visions of Suburbia, London: Routledge (editor and contributor)
(1997) International Media Research: A Critical Review, London: Routledge (joint editor with Philip Schlesinger and John Corner) (reprinted in 1998)
(1999) Why Study the Media? London: Sage (Translations: Italian, Il Mulino, Bolgna (2002); Spanish, Amorrortu, Barcelona and Madrid, 2004); Portuguese, Edicoes Loyola, Sao Paolo, (2002); Chinese, Weber, Taipei, (2003); Japanese, Serica, Tokyo, (2003); Hebrew, Ressling, Tel Aviv; German translation, Suhrkamp; Chinese Simplified, University of Peking Press, Beijing; Korean, Communication Books, Seoul; Greek, Livanis, Athens (in press)
(1999) Die Internet-ökonomie: strategien für die digitale Wirtschaft, Berlin: Springer-Verlag (joint author with Axel Zerdick, Arnold Picot, Klaus Schrape et al.)
(2000) E-conomics: Strategies for the Digital Marketplace, Berlin: Springer-Verlag (joint author with Axel Zerdick, Arnold Picot, Klaus Schrape et al.) (English translation of Die Internet-ökonomie)
(2004): E-merging Media: Kommunikation und Medienwirtschaft der Zukunft, European Communication Council Report, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, (joint editor, and contributor, with Axel Zerdick; Arnold Picot; Jean-Claude Burgelmann) (English translation : (2005) E-Merging Media: Communication and the Media Economy of the Future)
(2005) Media Technology and Everyday Life in Europe, Ashgate: Aldershot (editor and contributor)
(2006) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis, Cambridge: Polity Press
Articles and chapters
(1976) 'Ernst Cassirer and Claude Lévi-Strauss: Two Approaches to the Study of Myth', Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 41, 25-37
(1976) 'An Approach to the Structural Analysis of the Television Message', Screen, 17 (2), 9-40
(1983) 'The Right to Speak: On a Poetic for Television Documentary', Media, Culture and Society, 5 (2), 37-154
(1984) 'A Structure for a Modern Myth: Television and the Transsexual', Semiotica, Vol. 49 (1/2), 95-138
(1984) 'Narrative Strategies in Television Science: a Case Study', Media, Culture and Society, 6 (4), 377-410
(1986) 'Putting the Natural into Natural Science', Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 10 (1), 89-92
(1987) 'The Agonistic Narratives of Television Science', in John Corner (ed.) Documentary and the Mass Media, London, Edward Arnold, 81-106
(1987) 'Narrative Strategies in Television Science: a Case Study' in James Curran et al. (eds), Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, London, Methuen, 1987, 291-330
(1988) 'Television, Myth and Culture', in James Carey (ed.) Media, Myths and Narratives: Television and the Press, Newbury Park, Sage, 20-47
(1988) 'Museums and the Media: A Theoretical and Methodological Exploration', The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 7 (3), 231-241
(1989) 'Science and the Media: the Case of Television', in S.J. Doorman (ed.) Images of Science: Scientific Practice and the Public, Aldershot, Gower/European Science Foundation, 187-211
(1989) 'Let Us Then Return to the Murmuring of Everyday Practices: A Note on Michel de Certeau, Television and Everyday Life', Theory, Culture and Society, 6 (1), 77-94
(1989) 'Heritage as Media: Some Implications for Research', in David Uzzell (ed.) Heritage Interpretation: Volume 2: The Visitor Experience, London, Belhaven Press, 138-148
(1989) 'Television: Text or Discourse', Science as Culture, 6, 104-123
(1990) 'Television and Everyday Life: Towards an Anthropology of the Television Audience', in Marjorie Ferguson (ed.) Public Communication: the New Imperatives, Newbury Park and London, Sage, 173-189
(1990) 'Domestic Communication: Technologies and Meanings', Media, Culture and Society, 12 (1), 31-56 (with David Morley)
(1990) 'Rewriting the Museum's Fictions: Taxonomies, Stories and Readers', Cultural Studies, 4 (2), 176-191 (with Sharon Macdonald)
(1990) 'De la sociologia de la television a la sociologia de la pantella: bases para una reflexion global', Telos (Madrid), 22, 82-87
(1990) 'Families and their Technologies: Two Ethnographic Portraits', in Tim Putnam and Charles Newton (eds.) Household Choices, London, Futures Publications, 74-83 (with David Morley)
(1991) 'Communicating Science to the Public', Science, Technology and Human Values, 16 (1), 106-110
(1991) 'Television, Rhetoric and the Return of the Unconscious in Secondary Oral Culture' in Bruce Gronbeck et al. (eds.) Media, Consciousness and Culture: Studies of Ong's Contributions to Rhetoric, Communication and Culture, Newbury Park and London, Sage, 147-159
(1991) 'Communication and Context: Anthropological and Ethnographic Perspectives on the Media Audience', in Nicholas Jankowski and Klaus-Bruhn Jensen (eds.) A Handbook of Qualitative Methodology and Media Research, London, Routledge, 149-162, (with David Morley)
(1991) 'Television, mythe, culture', Reseaux, 44/45, 201-222
(a translation of: 'Television, Myth and Culture', in James Carey (ed.) Media, Myths and Narratives: Television and the Press, Newbury Park, Sage, 20-47
(1991) 'From Audiences to Consumers: The Household and the Consumption of Communication and Information Technology', European Journal of Communication, 6 (2), 135-154.
(1991) 'Listening to a Long Conversation: An Ethnographic Approach to the Study of Information and Communication Technologies in the Home', Cultural Studies, 5 (2) 204-227 (with Eric Hirsch and David Morley)
(1991) Beneath the Bottom Line: Households and Information and Communication Technologies in an Age of the Consumer, PICT Policy Research Paper, 17, Swindon, ESRC
(1992) 'Science on Display: The Representation of Scientific Controversy in Museum Exhibitions', Public Understanding of Science, 1 (1), 69-87 (with Sharon Macdonald).
(1992) 'The Medium is the Museum: on Objects and Logics in Times and Spaces', in John Durant (ed.) Museums and the Public Understanding of Science, London , Science Museum, 34-42
(1992) 'Information and communication technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household', in Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch (eds.) Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London, Routledge, 15-31 (a revised and edited version of the paper above) (with Eric Hirsch and David Morley)
(1993) 'Domesticating the Revolution: Information and Communication Technologies and Everyday Life', ASLIB Proceedings, 45 (9) 227-233
(1993) 'Time, Information and Communication Technologies and the Household', Time and Society, 2 (3) 283-311
(1993) 'Television, Ontological Security and the Transitional Object', Media, Culture and Society, 15 (4) 573-598
(1994) 'Domesticating the Revolution: Information and Communication Technologies and Everyday Life', in Robin Mansell (ed.) Information, Control and Technical Change, London, ASLIB, 221-233
(1994) 'Telework and the Changing Relationship of Home and Work', in Robin Mansell (ed.) Information, Control and Technical Change, London , ASLIB (with Leslie Haddon) 234-247
(1994) Future Imperfect: Media, Information and the Millennium, ESRC/PICT Policy Paper 27, Swindon
(1994) 'The Power of the Ordinary: On Cultural Studies and the Sociology of Culture', A Review Essay, Sociology, 28 (4) 991-1001
(1995) 'Telework and the Changing Relation of Home and Work', in Nick Heap et al. (eds.) Information Technology and Society: A Reader, London, Sage (with Leslie Haddon) (reprinted)
(1995) 'Media, Communication, Information and the 'Revolution' of Everyday Life' in Stephen J. Emmott (ed.) Information Superhighways: Multimedia Users and Futures, London, Academic Press, 61-78
(1995) Television and Everyday Life: Professorial Lecture, University of Sussex, May 1995
(1995) 'Convergence is a Dangerous Word', Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 1(1), 11-14
(1996) 'Design and the Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life', in Robin Mansell (ed.) Communication by Design: The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 44-74 (with Leslie Haddon)
(1996) 'The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies', in Robin Mansell (ed.) Communication by Design: The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 213-228 (with Robin Mansell)
(1996) 'Future Imperfect: Information and Communication Technologies in Everyday Life' in William H Dutton (ed.) Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 217-231 (a revised version of the 1994 PICT Policy Paper, 1994) (translated into Japanese in William H Dutton. Information and Communication Technologies, Vol 3, 13-30)
(1996) 'From Audiences to Consumers: The Household and the Consumption of Information and Communication Technologies' in J. Hay et al. (eds.) The Audience and its Landscape. Boulder, Westview Press. 281-296
(1996) 'Le Télétravail et l'évolution des relations entre le domicile et le travail,' Réseaux, Vol. 79 (Septembre - Octobre 1996), 57-72 (with Leslie Haddon)
(1997) 'New Media in European Households,' in European Communication Council Report 1997, Exploring the Limits: Europe's Changing Communication Environment, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 113-134
(1997) 'Television and Everyday Life', in The Bulletin of the Institute of Socio-Information and Communication Studies, The University of Tokyo, 54, 2-19
(1998) 'Space', in "Flowers and Tears; the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales', Screen, 39 (1), 81-84
(1998) 'Les espaces de la performance: musées, sciences et rhétorique de l'objet' Hermès, 22, 175-188
(1998) '"Talking about the screen machine": de toekomst van nieuwe media in Europese huishoudens', in Valerie Frissen and Hedwig Te Molder (eds.) Van Forum tot Supermarket?: Consumenten en burgers in de informatiesamenleving, Leuven, Acco, 17-33
(1999) Editorial, 'What's New About New Media?', New Media and Society, 1 (1) 10-12
(1999) 'Rhetoric, Play, Performance: revisiting a study of the making of a BBC documentary', in Jostein Gripsrud (ed.) Television and Common Knowledge, London, Routledge, 71-90
(2000) 'Information and Communication Technologies and Everyday Life: Individual and Social Dimensions' in K. Ducatel, J. Webster and W. Herrman (eds) The Information Society in Europe: Work and Life in an Age of Globalization, Lanham MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 233-258 (with Leslie Haddon)
(2000) 'Los nuevos medios y la comunidad' Intersecciones/Communicación, 1 (Segunda Epoca) 25-49
(2001) 'Finding a Voice: Minorities, Media and the Global Commons', Emergences, 11(1) 13-27
reprinted (2002) in Gitte Stald and Thomas Tufte (eds.) Global Encounters: Media and Cultural Transformation, Luton: University of Luton Press, 107-122
(2002) 'Regulation and the Ethics of Distance: Distance and the Ethics of Regulation', in R. Mansell, R. Samarajiva and A. Mehan (eds.) Networking Knowledge for Information Societies: Institutions & Interventions, DU Science, Delft University Press, pp. 279-285
(2002) 'La Mediatisation de Catastrophe', Dossiers de l'Audiovisuel, 105, Septembre, 60-64
(2002) 'Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life', New Literary History, 33 (4) 761-780
(2003) 'Proper Distance: towards an ethics for cyberspace' in Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison, Terje Rasmussen (eds.) Digital Media Revisited, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 469-491
(2003) Preface to the Routledge Classic Edition of Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Routledge, vii-xiii
(2004) 'Regulation, Media Literacy and Media Civics', Media, Culture and Society, 26 (3) 440-449 (and in press in Axel Zerdick; Arnold Picot, Roger Silverstone, Jean-Claude Burgelman (eds.) E-merging Media: Digitalisation of Media Economics, European Communication Council Report, Berlin: Springer-Verlag)
(2005) ‘Introduction’ in Roger Silverstone (ed.) Media, Technology and Everyday Life in Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1-18
(2005) ‘The Information Society in Europe’: Methods and Methodologies’ in Roger Silverstone (ed.) Media, Technology and Everyday Life in Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 181-193 (with Francois Pichaud and Dorothée Durieux)
(2005) ‘Towards the “Communication Society”’, in Roger Silverstone (ed.) Media, Technology and Everyday Life in Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 213-221 (with Knut Sørensen)
(2005) ‘La creatività nei media e nella communicazione’ in Annamaria Testa (ed.) La creatività a piừ voci, Roma-Bari: Edition Laterza, 136-147
(2005) ‘Mediation and Communication’ in Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Sociology, London: Sage, 188-207
(2005) ‘Minorities and their Media’, special issue of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 31 (3), Editorial Introduction (with Myria Georgiou), 433-442
(2005) ‘Interview with Professor Roger Silverstone’, Communications & Strategies, 59 (3) 101-122 (with David Osimo)
(2006) ‘Media and Communication in a Globalised World” in Clive Barnett, Jennifer Robinson and Gillian Rose (eds.) A Demanding World¸ Milton Keynes: The Open University, 55-102
(2006) ‘Domesticating Domestication: Reflections on the Life of a Concept’, in Thomas Berker, Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie and Katie J Ward (eds.) Domestication of Media and Technology, 229-248
Forthcoming Publications
The Oxford Handbook on Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Joint editor with Robin Mansell, Claudio Ciborra and Danny Quah)
Ephemera
(2003) 'X-Men 2'
Contact details
Catherine Bennett
Departmental Manager, Department of Media and Communications
The London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
UK
Tel: + 44 (0) 207 955 6107
Fax: + 44 (0) 207 955 7248
Email: c.l.bennett@lse.ac.uk
Last updated on 07 April, 2009 ^
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