Book Club

For this week’s installment, we’ll be discussing The Interplay of Influence by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell.

To be honest, this is a text book. It looks like a text book and reads like a text book. And at this point, a lot of the information is not new. The main message put forth by Jamieson and Campbell is that in the past, the media used to have an immense impact on our thinking and persuasion. However, with new technologies, even though the media still persuades us heavily, we have a great deal of control and even influence them. In particular, Jamieson and Campbell focus on how news, advertising and politics in the modern society are some of the biggest factors, if not main, that shape out actions and behavior.

The book covers a wide range of issues, policies, and ideas. The issue discussed that I found the most interesting was that of the influencers on the media. By this I mean those forces that play a pivotal part in directly manipulating media productions. Among these include: pressure from advertisers (refusing to sponsor stories they see as unfavorable or don’t agree with), competition (politicians using political weight to pit channels against each other for their own gain), and the Internet.

My biggest argument with Jamieson and Campbell is in their discussion of the Internet’s affects on politics, which is especially strange since the latest update on the book was in 2006. In my opinion, they tend to minimize the effects of the Internet on political coverage and as a media manipulator (it is the shortest chapter in the book). In the 2006 election, the internet and the blogosphere (which Jamieson and Campbell don’t spend nearly enough time talking about) had an immense impact on political races, in addition to news coverage and what stories became news.

For the most part, it was an interesting read. I guess a lot had changed in the past two elections in our society. We now have many more interests competing for our attention and trying to influence us, which Jamieson and Campbell discuss. However, and maybe this is due to when they actually wrote this past update in comparison to when it was published, but I don’t think they do a good job conveying the immense impact of the online communities and blogosphere to political campaigns and media sources.