Analyzing Media: Communication Technologies as Symbolic and Cognitive Systems

In addition to tracing the history of literacy, the authors examine technocultural dramas through several analytical perspectives, including structural, Burkean symbolic, cognitive, and sociological. Because the text includes so many perspectives, it suffers from over-categorization; the authors apply each perspective to each culture in brief summaries, leaving little space for serious consideration of each perspective's possibilities. [...]the book counters this possibility throughout the earlier chapters by classifying modes of communication into functional categories within isolated cultural systems. The last chapter makes several pertinent and timely assertions, such as stressing the importance of both structural and semantic readings in media analysis and promoting more speculation about the future of multimedia and interactive technologies.