1st Edition
Comparing Communication Systems The Internets of China, Europe, and the United States
Emphasizing the perspective of ordinary users, this book compares the uses of the internet in three centers of the global economy and world politics: China, Europe, and the United States. It examines the internet as the current centerpiece of communication systems encompassing interpersonal communication, mass communication, and social networking.
The internet is unique as a medium in that it hosts both "old" media and "new" media. As such, it also integrates the prototypes of one-to-one (interpersonal) and one-to-many (broadcast) along with many-to-many (social media) and many-to-one (surveillance) communication. This book considers how all these media and communicative practices are embedded in social structures, cultural traditions, and historical legacies of place. Comparing conditions in China, Europe, and the United States, the chapters provide an overview of the distinctive regulatory regimes framing the internet and its local uses, the place of the internet in everyday life in each setting, and how the internet serves as a resource for political, economic, and cultural actions and interactions.
Linking comparative analysis of media and social systems with ethnographic studies of internet usage on the ground, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars working in global media, intercultural communication, and internet studies.
1 From media systems to communication systems
Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Rasmus Helles
2 The communicative state of states
Verena Brändle, Rasmus Helles, and Klaus Bruhn Jensen
3 The internet and other media of communication
Jacob Ørmen, Sascha Hölig, Signe Sophus Lai, Jesper Pagh, Fiona Huijie Zeng Skovhøj, Uwe Hasebrink, Julia Behre, Rasmus Helles, and Klaus Bruhn Jensen
4 Being social
Baohua Zhou, Nicoletta Vittadini, Piermarco Aroldi, Francesca Pasquali, Jesper Pagh, Fiona Huijie Zeng Skovhøj, Signe Sophus Lai, Chris Chao Su, Jun Liu, and Klaus Bruhn Jensen
5 How to do things with media
Adrian Leguina, Jacob Ørmen, Fiona Huijie Zeng Skovhøj, Signe Sophus Lai, Jesper Pagh, John Downey, Rasmus Helles, and Klaus Bruhn Jensen
6 What media still do to people
Rasmus Helles, Stine Lomborg, and Signe Sophus Lai
7 Communication systems as scientific and normative agendas
Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Rasmus Helles
8 Methodological appendix
Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Rasmus Helles
Biography
Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Professor, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Publications include A Theory of Communication and Justice (Routledge, 2021), and Media Convergence: The Three Degrees of Network, Mass, and Interpersonal Communication, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2022).
Rasmus Helles, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His work has appeared in New Media & Society, Surveillance & Society, the International Journal of Communication, and the European Journal of Communication.
"The Peoples’ Internet project embodies all that is admirable about excellent research. Presenting data from seven countries across three continents, its scale is matched by its theoretical heft, methodological innovation, and analytical rigour. The rich insights we can plumb from this ambitious study will fortify our understanding of how communication is evolving in an intensely connected yet deeply fractious world. The authors deftly explore the contestation between structure and agency, the tussle between commercial imperatives and social good, and the challenge of alienation within community."
- Sun Sun Lim, Professor, Singapore University of Technology and Design
"Jensen and Helles do the brave work of imagining the internet as a global information infrastructure that serves us all in ways that we understand and want. The internet envelops us and frames our engagements with reality, it provides us with forms of action and interaction, and it can exacerbate or help overcome our cognitive biases. Jensen and Helles are critical but not fatalistic in their theorizing—an internet that helps us produce, maintain, repair and transform reality is still possible."
- Philip N. Howard, Professor, Oxford Internet Institute
"This is an exceptional book. Placing communicative practice at the center, it weaves the material, the institutional, and the cultural to provide an empirically based comparison of communication systems. Its methodological sophistication, international scope, and theoretical richness make it a unique and remarkable contribution to the study of contemporary communication."
- Fernando Bermejo, Faculty Associate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University
"What does the internet do to us – the people – and how do we use it across different regions of the world? How does it affect our social life, our identity, and our ability to engage in society? These are some of the important questions that this book explores. Based on diverse empirical data from Europe, the US, and China, the book provides important new insights into people’s everyday communication as well as the local regulation that shapes such practices across different regional contexts. Congratulations to the Peoples’ Internet project for helping us understand how the internet’s material, social, and economic infrastructures interact with communicative practices on the ground."
- Rikke Frank Jørgensen, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for Human Rights
