ABSTRACT
Since I have already provided summaries at the end of each chapter, and as connections between the materials in different chapters have been made at various points throughout, this afterword does not try to offer a full-blown conclusion to the book as a whole. Rather, my intention here is briefly to foreground a further distinctive feature of the book, beyond those features outlined to begin with in the introduction (its specific thematic structure, its attempt to bridge an established divide between the study of mass and interpersonal communications, its insistence on understanding media in their broad social and cultural contexts, and so on). An important part of the book’s claim to originality, as a work of review and synthesis, is its bringing together of ways of thinking about media and communications, and about social life more generally, that are conventionally regarded as being separate from one another, or even as mutually exclusive theoretical tendencies in the humanities and social sciences.
