Preface: The Open Reader

Social Media & the Self is intended to serve students enrolled in media and communication courses

Social Media & the Self is intended to serve students enrolled in media and communication courses. It’s at least notable that the discipline’s first textbooks weren’t, in fact, textbooks at all. Wilbur Schramm, the English-trained scholar who helped establish communication research in the U.S., cobbled together fifteen papers into the field’s first reader, Communications in Modern Society (1948). The next year Schramm published a sprawling successor collection, Mass Communications, with nearly 40 chapters: “There has not appeared, however, and probably will not for some time appear, any integrated introduction to mass communications... This volume has been designed to meet part of the need for such an introduction.” Since then, and across updated editions and countless new entrants, the reader has played an outsized role in the upstart bundle of fields that study media—a concession, perhaps, to these fields’ polyglot spread. Regardless, the course-reader format has advantages over its textbook rival: The multiplicity of voices, yes, but also the substitution of genuine scholarship for the textbook’s forced dilutions.