Abstract
Serendipitous intellectual discovery was once largely reserved for a search through the often musty stacks of a library. For myself, the caverns of the old Gothic section of Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington come to mind. I would always—and still do—make it a point once I find the book I am looking for to look both to the left and right, which often will reveal books and writers I didn’t know I was looking for. However, one of the very great joys of this de-spatialized arena of our digital age are the serendipitous discoveries that arrive on the computer screen. One such moment of serendipity came recently while editing the reviews for this edition—Larry Gross’s poignant lament for the diminishing book review sections of our scholarly communications journals that appeared in a 2012 ICA newsletter (http://icanewsletter.com/2012/09/04/conversations-shame-on-us/). In his essay, Gross recalls a time when “communication scholars at all career stages saw book reviewing as one of the things they did as members of the community.” His essay is a good analysis of his argument outlining the tailspin of book reviewing over the past few years, and I recommend reading it to understand the importance of this one small subset of our academic endeavors.
Still, while I have not explored the metrics of book reviewing from the past to present in this journal, I have been encouraged by the number of reviews Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ) reviewers are spending their precious time working on. This quarter’s selection of reviews is one example of that. We have reviews that discuss media and gender, the ethics of media, globalization, media and religion, social media, television and its effects on society, livecasting, the political economy of the media, digital’s effect on old media, digital’s effect on power hierarchies and public opinion, media and politics, and media history.
Indeed, this section of our journal—as with so many other book review sections—is another arena of serendipitous intellectual discovery. Enjoy.