Paddy Scannell worked for many years at the University of Westminster (London) where he and his colleagues established, in 1975, the first undergraduate degree program in Media Studies in the UK. He is a founding editor of Media, Culture and Society which began publication in 1979 and is now issued six times yearly. He is the author of A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1939 which he wrote with David Cardiff, editor of Broadcast Talk and author of Radio, Television and Modern Life. He is currently working on a trilogy. The first volume, Media and Communication, was published in June 2007. Professor Scannell is now working on the second volume, Television and the Meaning of 'Live.' The third volume, Love and Communication, is in preparation. His research interests include broadcasting history and historiography, the analysis of talk, the phenomenology of communication and culture and communication in Africa.
A major study on the discourses of broadcasting, Broadcast Talk demonstrates the relevance of talk and its relationship to the understanding of the communicative process in radio and television. This volume addresses central questions of who decides what programs are produced, how these programs influence audiences, and how those audiences make sense of the programs. The focus here is on radio and television because both media are fundamentally similar. The term "talk," rather than "speech" or "spoken language," is preferred because it indicates more exactly the character of communication transmitted in these media. Talk may be more or less formal, determined by the context and intended audience--a political speech or the news versus a talk show. The approach taken by Scannell and the contributors is largely influenced by discourse and conversational analysis, pragmatics and critical linguistics, the sociology of Goffman and Garfinkel, and Habermas' concept of the public sphere. Certain to stimulate interest in a new way of analyzing the institutions of broadcasting as systems of communication, Broadcast Talk has appeal for students and scholars in communication studies, cultural studies, discourse studies, and linguistics.
