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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Agenda For (and Summary of) Cultural Studies
Review: Couldry's book is a "state of the field" type work, though it's clear that he has a certain political agenda in mind for cultural studies. In summarizing the status of the field, he maintains that cultural studies must follow a pro-(radically)democratic agenda, which is not quite necessarily true. One does not, in the final analysis, have to disagree with existing power structures in order to describe them or how they function. Still, he makes his bias explicit, even if he does not explain what alternatives exist to his position.Couldry pulls together a lot of diverse ideas about research and the status of culture and the individual, in order to come up with a picture of cultural studies that's maintainable. He gives the field a purpose, and he articulates it very clearly. This is not to be underestimated. His book can be used to justify an academic endeavor which at times has been attacked as not quite having as much value, as, say, physics. Couldry's explicitly political version of cultural studies is an attempt to make the field relevant, because it draws so heavily on democracy as an ideal, and when you put it that way, it's, well, important. Some style problems are evident in this book. First, he keeps telling us that he'll describe something in Chapter Six, over and over, to the point of distraction. Second, he keeps complaining about "not having enough space here" to describe something in detail. The book is only about 145 pages long, and he obviously could have added more space if he needed it. But overall, it was clearly written, and a nice attempt to dig through the mire of obfuscatory language that normally surrounds this discipline. Finally, a point worth mentioning. Cultural studies has finally pulled its head out of the sand of postmodernism, while taking some of its most important lessons forward. Fine. But in doing so, and coming up with a much more realistic version of how cultural and people actually work, cultural studies has REINVENTED things once known and taken for granted. Specifically, Couldry points to "agenda setting", "gatekeeping," and "conditions of reception", all things that Communication Studies has known about since, oh, say, the 1940s. But he doesn't call those things by their proper names, or acknowledge that they have been around for a while. Instead, he comes at them through "textuality" and "intertextuality" and reader-response theories, as if they have just been recently found out. Some acknowledgement of the historical origin of these
theories should have been present.
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