Theorizing Communication: A History

Rating:
Summary: Horrible.
Review: Schiller is promulgating his own take on communication theory (missing ingredient, he claims, a focus on labour) and is debunking the "popular" alternatives - Foucault, Althusser, Baudrillard, to different degrees and at various levels of intensity/vituperativeness. But, boy, he really blows it - both because (1) he's a one-trick pony and horribly literally minded and (2) he just can't write. It's horrible having to wade through his smugness and narcissism - the clever-clever tone, the tortuous syntax, the certainty. This is simply a very badly expressed piece of work and Schiller so impossible to warm to as a writer that if there is any credit to his argument, I simply couldn't bring myself to find it. Pass this over.