Media and the Government of Populations

This book deals with the social, cultural and especially political significance of media by shifting from the usual focus on the public sphere and publics and paying attention to populations. It describes key moments where populations of different sorts have been subject to formative and diverse projects of governing, in which communication has been key. It brings together governmentality studies with the study of media practices and communication technologies.  Chapters consider print culture and the new political technology of individuals; digital economies as places where populations are formed, known and managed as productive resources; workplaces, schools, clinics and homes as sites of governmental objectives; and how to appropriately link communication technologies and practices with politics. Through these chapters Philip Dearman, Cathy Greenfield and Peter Williams demonstrate the value of considering communication in terms of the government of populations.  

Philip Dearman is Lecturer in Communication Studies at RMIT University, Australia. 
Cathy Greenfield is Associate Professor of Communication at RMIT University, Australia.

Peter Williams was an Associate of RMIT University, Australia where for many years he taught the RMIT Honours level course ‘Communication Revolutions and Cultural Forms’.

“This is a wide-ranging and stimulating account of the ways in which media technologies are implicated in the government of populations. It is both a social history of communications from the perspective of individual users and a technological history of government and governance. It comprises a rich combination of critical theory and case studies – drawn from both historical and contemporary contexts – that is unusual and highly rewarding.” (Des Freedman, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)

“In a tour de force of the effects of communication technology upon both government and subject formation, Dearman, Greenfield and Williams point to the way communication technologies produce meaning. “Meaning,” we are told, “is not a gift of nature” but a labour of people” and in detailing how this labour of people came to produce and rely upon categories like ‘the people,’ the population and the individual, they take communication studies into new areas, registering the embeddedness of this process in the rhetorics of community, in economic concepts, and in financial rationality. Pointing to the disciplinary regimes that produced ‘mobile privatization,’ they highlight the way an intensification of this tendency evolves into the formation of categories like ‘the creative,’ the social network market and, indeed, life itself.” (Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)

“In this work of considerable accomplishment Dearman, Greenfield and Williams rework the way we think and teach the relation among media, communication technologies, populations, power and politics.  Media and the Government of Populations: Communication, Technology, Power joins historical and contemporary media communication practices with the ways media’s audiences have been and continue to be formed, shaped, regulated and ultimately governed as populations. In doing so the authors provide a compelling account of how people’s media and communication practices are closely entwined with larger and pervasive forms of power and government. With a dual focus on how politics and power rely on communication media to operate, and on how communication media in their turn rely on politics and power Dearman, Greenfield and Williams show how the mobilization of technologies of communication continue to change the ways people are governed and how they participate in their own government.” (Tom O’Regan, University of Queensland, Australia)