Thus far, the communications revolution has been largely limited to the merely technological feat of converging telecommunications with personal computing. But does it hold a truly higher promise--to transform communication as a human act of sharing meaning about values, attitudes, and experiences? Or will it simply allow capitalism to pursue ever-greater economic efficiencies among the wealthy nations of the world, while ignoring the persistent and growing gap between rich and poor? The contributors to this volume consider these central questions, among others, from a wide variety of perspectives. The contributors argue that to create sustainable futures, ways must be found to make communication inclusive, participatory, and mindful of future generations. It must also emerge authentically from humanity's diverse cultures, be more concerned with the quality of information shared than with the sheer volume of email in the world, and be transformed from its technocratic bias in order to move toward a truly global "conversation of civilization." This book will be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields concerned with issues of communications, culture, and globalization.

Thus far, the communications revolution has been largely limited to the merely technological feat of converging telecommunications with personal computing. But does it hold a truly higher promise--to transform communication as a human act of sharing meaning about values, attitudes, and experiences? Or will it simply allow capitalism to pursue ever-greater economic efficiencies among the wealthy nations of the world, while ignoring the persistent and growing gap between rich and poor? The contributors to this volume consider these central questions, among others, from a wide variety of perspectives.

The contributors argue that to create sustainable futures, ways must be found to make communication inclusive, participatory, and mindful of future generations. It must also emerge authentically from humanity's diverse cultures, be more concerned with the quality of information shared than with the sheer volume of email in the world, and be transformed from its technocratic bias in order to move toward a truly global conversation of civilization. This book will be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields concerned with issues of communications, culture, and globalization.

This book draws together 13 distinctive and original explorations of how dominant cultural mainstreams and margins are formed and resisted, how they stabilize and shift, and how they permeate and define each other. The chapters speak to central problems of cultural politics that represent critical challenges for theory, research, and action in the social world. The authors develop and advance new approaches for interdisciplinary inquiry into contemporary cultural issues. Drawing on and extending scholarship in communication, political science, sociology, women's studies, critical cultural studies, anthropology, and American studies, they analyze what happens when marginal groups meet mainstream forces. The chapters will enliven academic debates over what constitutes a cultural mainstream or margin. This volume explores theories, problems, and contemporary struggles over identity and representation, ideology and hegemony, and discourse and action. The essays focus on critical questions covering postcolonial theory, primitivism, feminism, sexuality, the body, art, multiculturalism, the environmental crisis, the mass media, and social movements. The authors examine diverse issues, ranging from the writing of women prisoners to how media policy is embedded in cultural history, to the political implications of cultural representations in cross-cultural contexts. Altogether, the diversity and depth of the text will help us develop new and complementary ways of thinking about critical questions in the politics of culture.