James Carey

My colleague Christine Tracy just e-mailed to say that James Carey has died. Very sad... Carey was a *terrific* writer and thinker, and one of the first 'academic' sources that I found meaningful and cool when I went back to grad school. My first quarter (Fall 1989) I took the mandatory "Theories of Mass Communication" class with Ted Glasser (a tremendous teacher, btw). Carey's Communication and Culture was one of the books required for the class. I remember going to Ted at one point early in the quarter with a classmate, complaining that the book was "hard and super academic" (or something like that); Ted said that he was surprised because he thought it was super accessible. A good example of discourse in action, because now I agree with Ted. But I digress.

When I was in grad school, Carey was known as an "American cultural studies" guy. His work brought together ideas from pragmatism, European cultural studies, phenomenology... lots of places. His were some of the first theories that made 'sense' to me - his analysis of communication as a ritual (versus a 'transmission') model, for instance, still circulates through my own thinking about literacy and ed. His work helped me understand that communication went WAY beyond "media" to that Wittgenstein-ian notion of constructing reality through language (and communication)... and did so in terms that were accessible (as Ted Glasser promised!) and super intriguing. I still have C and C on a readily-accessible bookshelf...