Title: Hyperreality, Cybernews, and the Power of Journalism
Description: George Lazaroiu’s new book Hyperreality, Cybernews and the Power of Journalism traverses across the rapidly changing technoscape of interactive communication tracking the changes from the old industrial media to the new interactive, social media. George Lazaroiu, the Publishing Editor of a new range of philosophy and other journals for Addleton Academic Publishers and a philosopher of note who has worked on developing a philosophical approach to developments on media and its possibilities for transforming journalism, provides the reader with a dazzling display of erudition, analysis and understanding of the rapidly changing ecology of the relations between news and journalism in cyberspace. He takes us on a journey through the new world of media journalism acquainting us with New Forms of Interactive Communication within the Global Community, The Credibility of Web-based Online News, Developments in New Media, Social Data, Online Reference Managers, and Citation Analysis for Evaluating Scientific Content, Internet-based Structures of Communication, The Embedding of the Internet in Everyday Life, Discourse of Media Critique, Truth, Reality and Mathematical Communication, and Understanding Otherness in Interreligious Communication. He demonstrates that emergent journalism based on new media technologies are changing the structure and ownership of the news industry as well as its forms of delivery, developing different relationships between journalists and their increasingly diversified global publics, now spatially denationalized, interactive, and based on a set of synchronized temporal relationships. Lazaroiu’s analysis draws on the leading scholars and theorists in philosophy, media studies, and journalism to describe the megatrends in publishing, the new journalism and media technology and literacy that together form communities
of interests transcending all the modernist forms of territoriality distinguishing the modern nation state and the production of news based on traditional print and one-way transmission of broadcast media. What does the resulting democratization of media mean for global new media? How do many-to-many platforms transform the production and circulation of the news? How credible are its sources and what effects does it have on the development of global publics? What do these media developments mean for democracy and for politics? What do these media changes mean for academic journals and the university? How does the Internet-based media restructure communication and subjectivity? What are its everyday effects? What new cultural forms are evolving and how are user-generated cultures organized to develop new citizens’ media empowerment, disrupting and contesting the logic of world media systems? More philosophically perhaps, what are the underlying structures of digital representation, to what extent does natural language need to be replaced and supplanted and how do these questions relate to philosophy of mathematics? What are the prospects for interreligious communication in promoting intercultural understanding? Hyperreality, Cybernews, and the Power of Journalism provides a searching analysis that does not dodge the difficult questions. It is a book wide-ranging in its scope and significant in its interests and conclusions. It is a book that should be read not only by those who study the new journalism and media but all who attempt to understand the complex ways in which communication through new social media restructure the world, its meanings and subjectivities.
Professor Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign