Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2022 Ethnography Division Best Book Award, National Communication Association Honorable Mention, 2023 Journalism Studies Division Book Award, International Communication Association.
• Winner of Winner, 2022 Ethnography Division Best Book Award, National Communication Association.

Overview

Information overload is something that humans have dealt with for millennia. During different historical eras, massive increases in what was available to know has motivated the creation of systems for sorting, indexing, and compiling information as well as concerns that the abundance of information might cause cultural anxiety or even drive people to madness. The digital age has renewed concerns about information overload and the detrimental effects it has on our ability to sort through the stream of online data, decide what is most important, or even to train our attention on it long enough to make sense of it. In Abundance, Pablo J. Boczkowski builds upon what we know about the historical and contemporary scholarship to develop a novel framework on the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before, focusing on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and survey research conducted in Argentina, Abundance examines the role of cultural and structural factors that mediate between the availability of information and the actual consequences for individuals, media, politics, and society. Providing the first book-length account of information abundance in the Global South, Boczkowski concludes that the experience of information abundance is tied to an overall unsettling of society, a reconstitution of how we understand and perform our relationships with others, and a twin depreciation of facts and appreciation of fictions.

Full Product Details

9780197565759

Table of Contents

Reviews

What is information abundance? Not just cognitive overload but also a cultural transformation. New, yes, but not without historical continuities. This is a beautifully written book-critically aware of media's power to exploit but, also, cautiously optimistic about humanity's capacity to act. * Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science * Pablo Boczkowski, long an influential scholar of the U.S. media, has never forgotten the Argentina where he grew up. This important new book is a love letter to a country still in his heart and a plea for northern hemisphere scholars to keep the global south in view. Through rich interviews and a national survey, Boczkowski gives us the voices of Argentines from all walks of life and we hear in their own words of their pleasures with and criticisms of the media, their active engagement and sometimes intentional avoidance of media abundance. And in an age where commentary is transfixed by new media, he shows that television remains (as it largely does in the United States, too) the dominating source of most people's news and entertainment. Abundance is comprehensive but also distilled, the work of a fine mind-it's a landmark study. * Michael Schudson, Columbia University * If we've become fish, swimming in a sea of media, this book is a guide to life on the reef. It maps the currents of technological change, spots new species of media use, and reveals the ways that we and our media are co-evolving. A fascinating and important piece of work. * Fred Turner, Stanford University, and author of The Democratic Surround: Media and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties * Boczkowski has written a must-read book for anyone interested in the reconstitution of sociality in the digital age. He offers a textured, granular analysis of how Argentines wrestle with information abundance. From the many lessons one should take away from this splendid book, the most important one is that sociality is not lost, but rather profoundly reshaped. Social impact is not embedded or solely determined by digital technologies, but rather, it results from the way technologies are intertwined with social and cultural traditions. Taking a ritualistic view of communication, Boczkowski warns us about assuming universal effects of information technology grounded in studies conducted in the Global North, and encourages us to open the analytical lens to a diversity of social experiences amid information abundance. * Silvio Waisbord, George Washington University * This is a wonderful book. Through beautifully rich interviews, Boczkowski brings to life the ways in which technology, and the unfathomable amount of information made available through these devices, is shaping our world. While the focus of the research is on Argentina, I found myself nodding along throughout, so relevant are the descriptions and insights. It feels like a delicious palate cleanser after years of scholarship focused entirely on US experiences. * Claire Wardle, First Draft *

Author Information

Pablo J. Boczkowski is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media, and Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Leadership for Creative Enterprises program, both at Northwestern. He is also Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, a joint initiative between Northwestern and Universidad de San Andrés, in Buenos Aires. He is the author or co-author of four books, four edited volumes, and over fifty journal articles.

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