How much do media and communications shape what we think and believe?

How much do media and communications shape what we think and believe?

In this groundbreaking book, Happer presents a new model for understanding how media and communications interact with politics, culture, and everyday experience to construct people’s ideas, opinion and thought. It locates these processes in a time of constant political crises, when new technologies are changing how we access information and questions of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are being radically reworked.  Drawing on a series of empirical studies conducted over a decade, Happer identifies a growing  ‘disconnect’ between an increasingly centralised media and political class and the public they serve –  ripe for exploitation by rightwing political actors but ultimately under the management of Big Tech who control the digital space.  Broadening the analytical lens to include these expanded circuits of communication, it explores how new mechanisms for controlling thought and opinion limit the potential for social change – and how that might be resisted.

Catherine Happer is Director of the Glasgow University Media Group and Senior Lecturer in Sociology.  She is the co- author of Trump’s Media War (Palgrave Macmillan) and Communicating Climate Change and Energy Security: New Methods in Understanding Audiences (Routledge).  She previously worked as a TV producer at the BBC.