Читать книгу Love and Communication - Paddy Scannell - Страница 5

This is the final volume in a trilogy that I planned years ago, as I worked out the books I wanted to write. And I should say (it seemed obvious then, and I did not need to mention it) that I meant academic books about the field I worked in: communication or media studies. The first, Media and Communication (Scannell 2020 [2007]) was a textbook pitched at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, in which I laid out the academic development of the field itself in the last century, in North America, the United Kingdom and (partially) Europe. I followed it with Television and the Meaning of “Live” (2014), written for colleagues as an historically informed theoretical account of live television. Subsequently, as time and I were getting on a bit, I retired from academic life and began to think about the final book I proposed, back in 2007, in the preface to the first book. Each stands on its own legs, and is independent of the others. But if you were to read them all (I’m not saying you should), you would see there is a continuum to them. Love and Communication was the title I came up with for this final volume long before I ever got round to writing it. I knew that I wanted to write about this at least twenty years ago, but when I eventually started work on it, both the world and I had changed, and I found myself writing something rather different from what I first intended. There is a time for everything, as Ecclesiastes and others – Karl Ove Knausgaard (2004) for instance, point out – and I instinctively felt that love and communication were matters best left until my academic career was over.