Ed McLuskie, professor emeritus in the Department of Communication, wrote the lead article in a two-volume, 25th anniversary issue of Javnost—The Public, the journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture.
McLuskie’s article, “Fast-Capitalist Veils from Communication Theory for ‘The Public’ and Its ‘Discourse’,” criticizes communication studies as a field driven by mercantile metaphors of transportation and distribution, with its threads of communication theory and conceptions of the public tethered to the evolution of capitalist society.
A well-conventionalized lexicon — “message,” “network,” “audience,” “content,” etc. — shows the field’s orientations as the continued capitalization of a capitalist past, rendering the field called “communication” a useful tool of fast capitalism today.