Jefferson Pooley
Biographic Data
| ID | 973321 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jefferson Pooley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jefferson |
| FAMILY NAME | Pooley |
| SIGNATURE | POOLEY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Muhlenberg College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3674-1930 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
A forum for books
We are honored to assume the editorial reins of the recently established Journal of Communication Forum, with special gratitude to the section’s first editors, Nikki Usher and Charlton McIlwain. Under Usher and McIlwain’s stewardship, the journal published five Forum installments, featuring thoughtful and formally inventive review essays on race, disability, Latinx sound studies, and privacy, among other topics. Introducing the inaugural Forum, M…
A Note on Langer
The aim of this article is to analyze the historical course of Indigenous communication studies in Argentina within the broader context of Latin America. To this end, it explores the concepts, institutions and biographies of the actors involved in the process of emergence and incipient institutionalization of an analytical field of its own from the early 2000s to the present day. It seeks to characterize the analytical dimensions and to highlight…
História dos estudos de comunicação nas Américas
A Editoria Científica de MATRIZes decidiu incluir na seção Dossiê deste número o texto intitulado The History of Communication Studies across the Americas: An Introduction, dos colegas americanos David W. Park, Jefferson Pooley e Peter Simonson e da espanhola Esperanza Herrero, em sua tradução para o português (A história dos estudos de comunicação nas Américas: Uma introdução), no contexto de uma colaboração internacional explicitada no próprio …
The History of Communication Studies across the Americas
This special section investigates the history of communication and media studies across national and linguistic contexts in the Americas. It maps transnational entanglements that have shaped communication inquiry in the multiple forms it has taken in South and North America and the Caribbean. At the same time, the section’s articles attend to political, institutional, and cultural dynamics that shaped the field in different national and local con…
Large Language Publishing
The AI hype cycle has come for scholarly publishing. This essay argues that the industry’s feverishーif mostly aspirationalーembrace of artificial intelligence should be read as the latest installment of an ongoing campaign. Led by Elsevier, commercial publishers have, for about a decade, layered a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations. That business is to mine and process scholars’ works and behavior into prediction products…
The Plasticity of Social Knowledge
This article describes how the Austrian-American sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his Bureau of Social Research applied a consistent bundle of findings—about the interplay of mass media and personal influence—to sharply different contexts. From the late 1930s through to the early 1950s, Lazarsfeld stressed a stable set of socialpsychological conditions that complicate media persuasion, which, however, could still be effective if paired with fac…
The history of communication studies across the Americas
Este ensaio reflete sobre o potencial de estudos que tratem com sensibilidade as histórias da pesquisa em mídia e comunicação nas Américas. Iniciando a escrita a partir dos contextos dos estudos de comunicação dos EUA, refletimos sobre algumas das bases da hegemonia norte-americana na história e historiografia desse campo. Destacamos a importância do trabalho que, por um lado, descentraliza e coloca em perspectiva os EUA e, por outro, mapeia os f…
Writing onto the Clouds
This short essay suggests that John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999) re-capitulates its arguments through form. In its written medium, with its hermeneutic mode, and by its promiscuous prose, the book exemplifies its own moral case for dissemination over (in Peters’ chilling phrase) ‘interpersonal mimesis’. The essay positions the book’s first chapter, on Jesus and Socrates, as an unannounced nesting, in which Peters uses the parable m…
Exclusiones/Exclusions
En esta introducción para la sección especial sobre "Exclusiones en la historia de los estudios de los medios de comunicación", comenzamos llamando la atención sobre el papel constitutivo que la exclusión ha desempeñado en la historiografía de los estudios de los medios de comunicación.Las exclusiones relacionadas con el género, la raza, la lengua, el colonialismo, la ubicación geopolítica y los privilegios sancionados institucionalmente desempeñ…
Exclusions/Exclusiones
In this introduction for the special section on "Exclusions in the History of Media Studies," we begin by calling attention to the constituting role that exclusion has played in the historiography of media studies.Exclusions linked to gender, race, language, colonialism, geopolitical location, and institutionally sanctioned privilege play substantial roles in shaping formal and informal accounts of our fields' pasts.The project of reversal and re…
Social Media & the Self
Idols of Promotion
By analyzing the “mass idols” (Lowenthal, 1944) of contemporary media culture, this study contributes to our understanding of popular communication, branding, and social media self-presentation. Leo Lowenthal, in his well-known analysis of popular magazine biographies, identified a marked shift in mass-mediated exemplars of success: from self-made industrialists and politicians (idols of production) to screen stars and athletes (idols of consumpt…
The #nofilter Self
This study traces appeals to authenticity, over time, in the promotional material of leading social-networking sites (SNSs). Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the public-facing websites of major SNS platforms-beginning with Friendster in 2002-were sampled at six-month intervals, with promotional language and visuals examined for authenticity claims. The authors tracked these appeals, with attention to changes in promotional copy, thro…
Facebook for Academics
Given widespread labor market precarity, contemporary workers-especially those in the media and creative industries-are increasingly called upon to brand themselves. Academics, we contend, are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices, particularly as universities become progressively more market-driven. Academia.edu , a paper-sharing social network that has been informally dubbed 'Facebook for academics,' has grown…
L azarsfeld, P aul F .
Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976), often counted among the field's “founders,” made significant contributions to media and communication theory. Some of this work, including the two‐step flow model of mass communication reception, continues to resonate in studies of audience reception. But the full richness of his theorizing about the active, socially embedded audience has been neglected, even by scholars touting viewers' creative media readings in the…
Sociology of Knowledge
The sociology of knowledge is the subfield of sociology devoted to the interplay between social conditions and ideas. The subfield has traced the many ways that social factors, such as military funding, public controversy, generational experience, and personal rivalry, have helped to shape the ideas that scholars and intellectuals produce. The entry describes the early development of the sociology of knowledge, with reference to Max Scheler, Karl…
Communication Theory and the Disciplines
Communication theory, like the communication discipline itself, has a long history but a short past. This entry traces the range of contributions to communication theory, some influential and others neglected, from the disciplines beyond communication studies. The treatment is divided into three disciplinary categories: (1) the social sciences; (2) cognate fields (like film studies) whose domains overlap with communication; and (3) the humanities…
The field, fermented
This commentary argues that communication research’s main problem is reputational. The field’s marginal status—a product of its peculiar institutional history, with roots in vocational training—means that our work is not read by scholars from other disciplines. My claim is that the vocational model exacts a steep reputational price. The gap in prestige between the mainline disciplines and communication means that our scholarship is simply not rea…
The Four Cultures
The commentary traces four distinct but overlapping cultures in US media studies: (1) speech and rhetoric, (2) a media research field centered on the mass communication trades, (3) one detached from those trades, and (4) film studies. I point to each culture's institutional history, typical academic unit, and unique self-understanding. The main claim is that the four-part division has always had an arbitrary character, but is especially incoheren…
Mnemonic Multiples
This article uses the Bureau of Applied Social Research's mid-century book-length panel studies-The People's Choice (1944), Voting (1954), and Personal Influence (1955)-to identify and illustrate a neglected phenomenon in the remembered history of social science: mnemonic multiples. The article describes the way that the Bureau books, originally published into a post-World War II interdisciplinary social science milieu, have since come to be reme…
Media and Communications
This chapter contains sections titled: Communication and Social Theory: Legacy and Definitions Contemporary Issues References
The Public and Its Possibilities
The Price of Success
Harry Alpert (19121977), the US sociologist, is best-known for his directorship of the National Science Foundation’s social science programme in the 1950s. This study extends our understanding of Alpert in two main ways: first, by examining the earlier development of his views and career. Beginning with his 1939 biography of Emile Durkheim, we explore the early development of Alpert’s views about foundational questions concerning the scientific…
Marginal to the Revolution
American economics largely ignored the behavioral sciences movement in the decade after World War II. The social scientists who adopted the "behavioral sciences" moniker were self-consciously nomothetic, fond of mathematics and statistical analysis, and eager to stand close to the natural sciences. The same was true of leading postwar economists, and yet they alone opted out, with only a few exceptions. We explore this divide as it emerged in the…
Peter Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate
P eter Baehr's Caesarism, Charisma and Fate is a deeply intelligent work, but it is also a lost opportunity.The book promises to challenge Robert Merton's distinction between the "history" and "systematics" of sociological theory: genuine historical research, as distinct from those theories and findings that have ongoing analytic purchase.Baehr, in refusing Merton's proposal for a division of labour, insists that history qua history might directl…
The #nofilter Self
This study traces appeals to authenticity, over time, in the promotional material of leading social-networking sites (SNSs). Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the public-facing websites of major SNS platforms-beginning with Friendster in 2002-were sampled at six-month intervals, with promotional language and visuals examined for authenticity claims. The authors tracked these appeals, with attention to changes in promotional copy, thro…
Marginal to the Revolution
American economics largely ignored the behavioral sciences movement in the decade after World War II. The social scientists who adopted the "behavioral sciences" moniker were self-consciously nomothetic, fond of mathematics and statistical analysis, and eager to stand close to the natural sciences. The same was true of leading postwar economists, and yet they alone opted out, with only a few exceptions. We explore this divide as it emerged in the…
Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field
Personal Influence's fifteen-page account of the development of mass communication research has had more influence on the field's historical self-understanding than anything published before or since. According to Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld's well-written, two-stage narrative, a loose and undisciplined body of prewar thought had concluded naively that media are powerful—a myth punctured by the rigorous studies of Lazarsfeld and others, which …
Facebook for Academics
Given widespread labor market precarity, contemporary workers-especially those in the media and creative industries-are increasingly called upon to brand themselves. Academics, we contend, are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices, particularly as universities become progressively more market-driven. Academia.edu , a paper-sharing social network that has been informally dubbed 'Facebook for academics,' has grown…
The Price of Success
Harry Alpert (19121977), the US sociologist, is best-known for his directorship of the National Science Foundation’s social science programme in the 1950s. This study extends our understanding of Alpert in two main ways: first, by examining the earlier development of his views and career. Beginning with his 1939 biography of Emile Durkheim, we explore the early development of Alpert’s views about foundational questions concerning the scientific…
Exclusions/Exclusiones
In this introduction for the special section on "Exclusions in the History of Media Studies," we begin by calling attention to the constituting role that exclusion has played in the historiography of media studies.Exclusions linked to gender, race, language, colonialism, geopolitical location, and institutionally sanctioned privilege play substantial roles in shaping formal and informal accounts of our fields' pasts.The project of reversal and re…
The field, fermented
This commentary argues that communication research’s main problem is reputational. The field’s marginal status—a product of its peculiar institutional history, with roots in vocational training—means that our work is not read by scholars from other disciplines. My claim is that the vocational model exacts a steep reputational price. The gap in prestige between the mainline disciplines and communication means that our scholarship is simply not rea…
The Four Cultures
The commentary traces four distinct but overlapping cultures in US media studies: (1) speech and rhetoric, (2) a media research field centered on the mass communication trades, (3) one detached from those trades, and (4) film studies. I point to each culture's institutional history, typical academic unit, and unique self-understanding. The main claim is that the four-part division has always had an arbitrary character, but is especially incoheren…
Mnemonic Multiples
This article uses the Bureau of Applied Social Research's mid-century book-length panel studies-The People's Choice (1944), Voting (1954), and Personal Influence (1955)-to identify and illustrate a neglected phenomenon in the remembered history of social science: mnemonic multiples. The article describes the way that the Bureau books, originally published into a post-World War II interdisciplinary social science milieu, have since come to be reme…
Edward Shils’ Turn Against Karl Mannheim
Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field
Personal Influence's fifteen-page account of the development of mass communication research has had more influence on the field's historical self-understanding than anything published before or since. According to Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld's well-written, two-stage narrative, a loose and undisciplined body of prewar thought had concluded naively that media are powerful—a myth punctured by the rigorous studies of Lazarsfeld and others, which …
Edward Shils’ Turn Against Karl Mannheim
Further Notes on Why American Sociology Abandoned Mass Communication Research 1
Communication research seems to be flourishing, as evident in the number of universities offering degrees in communication, number of students enrolled, number of journals, and so on. The field is interdisciplinary and embraces various combinations of former schools of journalism, schools of speech (Midwest for “rhetoric”), and programs in sociology and political science. The field is linked to law, to schools of business and health, to cinema st…
Peter Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate
P eter Baehr's Caesarism, Charisma and Fate is a deeply intelligent work, but it is also a lost opportunity.The book promises to challenge Robert Merton's distinction between the "history" and "systematics" of sociological theory: genuine historical research, as distinct from those theories and findings that have ongoing analytic purchase.Baehr, in refusing Merton's proposal for a division of labour, insists that history qua history might directl…
The Media and Social Theory
The Price of Success
Harry Alpert (19121977), the US sociologist, is best-known for his directorship of the National Science Foundation’s social science programme in the 1950s. This study extends our understanding of Alpert in two main ways: first, by examining the earlier development of his views and career. Beginning with his 1939 biography of Emile Durkheim, we explore the early development of Alpert’s views about foundational questions concerning the scientific…
Marginal to the Revolution
American economics largely ignored the behavioral sciences movement in the decade after World War II. The social scientists who adopted the "behavioral sciences" moniker were self-consciously nomothetic, fond of mathematics and statistical analysis, and eager to stand close to the natural sciences. The same was true of leading postwar economists, and yet they alone opted out, with only a few exceptions. We explore this divide as it emerged in the…
Media and Communications
This chapter contains sections titled: Communication and Social Theory: Legacy and Definitions Contemporary Issues References
The Public and Its Possibilities
Mnemonic Multiples
This article uses the Bureau of Applied Social Research's mid-century book-length panel studies-The People's Choice (1944), Voting (1954), and Personal Influence (1955)-to identify and illustrate a neglected phenomenon in the remembered history of social science: mnemonic multiples. The article describes the way that the Bureau books, originally published into a post-World War II interdisciplinary social science milieu, have since come to be reme…
L azarsfeld, P aul F .
Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976), often counted among the field's “founders,” made significant contributions to media and communication theory. Some of this work, including the two‐step flow model of mass communication reception, continues to resonate in studies of audience reception. But the full richness of his theorizing about the active, socially embedded audience has been neglected, even by scholars touting viewers' creative media readings in the…
Sociology of Knowledge
The sociology of knowledge is the subfield of sociology devoted to the interplay between social conditions and ideas. The subfield has traced the many ways that social factors, such as military funding, public controversy, generational experience, and personal rivalry, have helped to shape the ideas that scholars and intellectuals produce. The entry describes the early development of the sociology of knowledge, with reference to Max Scheler, Karl…
Communication Theory and the Disciplines
Communication theory, like the communication discipline itself, has a long history but a short past. This entry traces the range of contributions to communication theory, some influential and others neglected, from the disciplines beyond communication studies. The treatment is divided into three disciplinary categories: (1) the social sciences; (2) cognate fields (like film studies) whose domains overlap with communication; and (3) the humanities…
The field, fermented
This commentary argues that communication research’s main problem is reputational. The field’s marginal status—a product of its peculiar institutional history, with roots in vocational training—means that our work is not read by scholars from other disciplines. My claim is that the vocational model exacts a steep reputational price. The gap in prestige between the mainline disciplines and communication means that our scholarship is simply not rea…
The Four Cultures
The commentary traces four distinct but overlapping cultures in US media studies: (1) speech and rhetoric, (2) a media research field centered on the mass communication trades, (3) one detached from those trades, and (4) film studies. I point to each culture's institutional history, typical academic unit, and unique self-understanding. The main claim is that the four-part division has always had an arbitrary character, but is especially incoheren…
The #nofilter Self
This study traces appeals to authenticity, over time, in the promotional material of leading social-networking sites (SNSs). Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the public-facing websites of major SNS platforms-beginning with Friendster in 2002-were sampled at six-month intervals, with promotional language and visuals examined for authenticity claims. The authors tracked these appeals, with attention to changes in promotional copy, thro…
Facebook for Academics
Given widespread labor market precarity, contemporary workers-especially those in the media and creative industries-are increasingly called upon to brand themselves. Academics, we contend, are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices, particularly as universities become progressively more market-driven. Academia.edu , a paper-sharing social network that has been informally dubbed 'Facebook for academics,' has grown…
Idols of Promotion
By analyzing the “mass idols” (Lowenthal, 1944) of contemporary media culture, this study contributes to our understanding of popular communication, branding, and social media self-presentation. Leo Lowenthal, in his well-known analysis of popular magazine biographies, identified a marked shift in mass-mediated exemplars of success: from self-made industrialists and politicians (idols of production) to screen stars and athletes (idols of consumpt…
Social Media & the Self
Writing onto the Clouds
This short essay suggests that John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999) re-capitulates its arguments through form. In its written medium, with its hermeneutic mode, and by its promiscuous prose, the book exemplifies its own moral case for dissemination over (in Peters’ chilling phrase) ‘interpersonal mimesis’. The essay positions the book’s first chapter, on Jesus and Socrates, as an unannounced nesting, in which Peters uses the parable m…
Exclusiones/Exclusions
En esta introducción para la sección especial sobre "Exclusiones en la historia de los estudios de los medios de comunicación", comenzamos llamando la atención sobre el papel constitutivo que la exclusión ha desempeñado en la historiografía de los estudios de los medios de comunicación.Las exclusiones relacionadas con el género, la raza, la lengua, el colonialismo, la ubicación geopolítica y los privilegios sancionados institucionalmente desempeñ…
Exclusions/Exclusiones
In this introduction for the special section on "Exclusions in the History of Media Studies," we begin by calling attention to the constituting role that exclusion has played in the historiography of media studies.Exclusions linked to gender, race, language, colonialism, geopolitical location, and institutionally sanctioned privilege play substantial roles in shaping formal and informal accounts of our fields' pasts.The project of reversal and re…
The Plasticity of Social Knowledge
This article describes how the Austrian-American sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his Bureau of Social Research applied a consistent bundle of findings—about the interplay of mass media and personal influence—to sharply different contexts. From the late 1930s through to the early 1950s, Lazarsfeld stressed a stable set of socialpsychological conditions that complicate media persuasion, which, however, could still be effective if paired with fac…
The history of communication studies across the Americas
Este ensaio reflete sobre o potencial de estudos que tratem com sensibilidade as histórias da pesquisa em mídia e comunicação nas Américas. Iniciando a escrita a partir dos contextos dos estudos de comunicação dos EUA, refletimos sobre algumas das bases da hegemonia norte-americana na história e historiografia desse campo. Destacamos a importância do trabalho que, por um lado, descentraliza e coloca em perspectiva os EUA e, por outro, mapeia os f…
The History of Communication Studies across the Americas
This special section investigates the history of communication and media studies across national and linguistic contexts in the Americas. It maps transnational entanglements that have shaped communication inquiry in the multiple forms it has taken in South and North America and the Caribbean. At the same time, the section’s articles attend to political, institutional, and cultural dynamics that shaped the field in different national and local con…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (16 works) · Media studies (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · History (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Media Studies and Communication (7 works)