Communication Studies

A thorough exposition of quantum computing and the underlying concepts of quantum physics, with explanations of the relevant mathematics and numerous examples.

The combination of two of the twentieth century’s most influential and revolutionary scientific theories, information theory and quantum mechanics, gave rise to a radically new view of computing and information. Quantum information processing explores the implications of using quantum mechanics instead of classical mechanics to model information and its processing. Quantum computing is not about changing the physical substrate on which computation is done from classical to quantum but about changing the notion of computation itself, at the most basic level. The fundamental unit of computation is no longer the bit but the quantum bit or qubit.

This comprehensive introduction to the field offers a thorough exposition of quantum computing and the underlying concepts of quantum physics, explaining all the relevant mathematics and offering numerous examples. With its careful development of concepts and thorough explanations, the book makes quantum computing accessible to students and professionals in mathematics, computer science, and engineering. A reader with no prior knowledge of quantum physics (but with sufficient knowledge of linear algebra) will be able to gain a fluent understanding by working through the book.

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With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion―a constant preoccupation since childhood―thereby completing Le Grand Récit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life.

Themes from Serres’s earlier writings―energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem of evil―are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter’s denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into.

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Daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the residents of an English village, tracking their use of the different social media platforms. Following his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media. Instead, the key to understanding how people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how ‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too hot, but ‘just right’.

He explores the consequences of social media for groups ranging from schoolchildren through to the patients of a hospice, and he compares these connections to more traditional forms of association such as the church and the neighbourhood. Above all, Miller finds an extraordinary clash between new social media that bridges the private and the public domains, and an English sensibility that is all about keeping these two domains separate.

Praise for Social Media in an English Village

‘The book has definitely lived up to my expectations and changed the way I think about social media. … a truly illuminating and recommendable [reading] experience.’
New Horizons in English Studies

‘This fine study is located in anthropology, and there
will therefore be some jarring interpretations for scholars in internet,
media, communication and cultural studies. This disciplinary dissonance
is productive and potent. The concept of “polymedia” proposed
throughout the book will hold a currency far beyond this monograph and
series. This concept describes how a network of social media platforms
is used to build a communication system. Further, the key and
under-recognised change in social media in the past five years – the
intensification of visuality in social media through Instagram and
Snapchat – is handled well. Miller also captures the social function of
mobile phone cameras: “Taking a photograph has become rather like
holding a drink – a key mode by which everyone acknowledges how much fun
they are having.” …Delicately textured case studies entwine around
this local study, such as the use of social media for people with
terminal illnesses and resident in hospices. Patients can continue
conversations with family and friends, particularly with the use of a
webcam to offer (digital) face to (digital) face support. Miller’s rich
research unearths how the local use of digital media reveals
opportunities, strategies and challenges for guarding and freeing the
spaces between public and private communication.’
Times Higher Education

‘This thought-provoking publication will appeal to both the curious layperson and media scholars, no doubt igniting introspection about our own use of social media.’
LSE Review of Books

‘Based on rich ethnographic data, the book offers vivid examples of the ground-breaking discoveries made in digital anthropology in the past two decades. Miller – a recognised pioneer in this field of study – is profoundly concerned not only with the change that social media have brought to people’s lives but also the change that people make through and with social media. By situating social media in the practices and socialities of people in a particular locality, this highly readable book achieves both empirical and theoretical depth and offers a valuable piece of social science literature for students and scholars interested in social media as ways of attaining ever new possibilities of human experience and social life.’
Social Anthropology

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The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which technology and heavy industry transformed urban life.The metropolis had long been considered a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday life of the contemporary city. Writers and artists from Felix Nadar and Charles Baudelaire to Charles Dickens and Alice Meynell, Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo, George Gissing and Emile Zola, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into their portrayals of the anatomy of modern society. Illustrated with photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined urban spaces, Subterranean Cities documents the emergence of a novel space in the subterranean obsessions and anxieties within nineteenth-century urban culture. Chapters on the subways, sewers, and cemeteries of Paris and London provide a detailed analysis of these competing centers of urban modernity. A concluding chapter considers the enduring influence of these spaces on urban culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.

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The Advertising Handbook provides a critical introduction to advertising and marketing practices today. Contributions from leading international scholars and practitioners offer extended coverage of the contemporary shifts and pressures reshaping the marketing communications (or advertising and marketing) industries and their relationship to the consumer. Profiles and case studies illustrate innovation and diversification among advertising, marketing and public relations companies. Discussion questions aid learning and encourage debate about the activities and influence of advertising today.

This Fourth Edition explores the growing significance of:

• the influence of ‘Big Data’ and automation in digital advertising;

• tracking and profiling users across digital communications for targeted and personalised marketing communications;

• the rise of media and advertising integration through sponsored content, product placement, native advertising and other forms of branded content;

• the dynamic shifts in ad spending and media–advertising relationships across legacy media, online and social media; and

• the complex profile of consumer behaviour that produces new challenges for brands and branding.

Fully revised and updated, this new edition of The Advertising Handbook is a comprehensive and accessible guide to contemporary advertising and marketing theory and practice, designed to meet the requirements, interests and terms of reference of the most recent generation of media and advertising students.

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