Joshua Meyrowitz

Joshua Meyrowitz is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA, where he has won numerous honors, including the Lindberg Award for Outstanding Scholar-Teacher in the College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Meyrowitz’s teaching and research interests include mass media, media history, corporate vs. non-corporate media, critical analysis of news, war news and war propaganda, medium theory, media production variables, qualitative research methods, and pan-disciplinary communication theory.

He is the author of the award-winning No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford University Press) and over 100 articles on media and society that have appeared in scholarly journals and anthologies, as well as in general-interest magazines and newspapers.

REVIEWS

“No Sense of Place, it’s now clear, was a prophetic work. The book’s focus on the importance of spatiotemporal boundaries to our social lives, and the consequences of tearing down those boundaries, as social media has, explains a great deal about our current situation.” ―Nicholas Carr, author of 2025’s Superbloom

“One of the handful of most important books published in the late twentieth century, not just in the field of communication and media studies, but in the social sciences overall…. No other work has so effectively bridged the macro-theory of media history writ large with the micro-social study of interpersonal relations and the way they have been influenced by the wider technological sphere…. No Sense of Place seems even more relevant to understanding our current web-defined digital internet world…. Meyrowitz saw a future that is now the present.” – Paul Heyer, Communication Studies, Laurier University

“His arguments about place-shifting media, which seemed radical at the time, now help us to understand the social consequences of newer electronic and digital media…. His genius was that he wrote about general ‘characteristics of media’ and ‘patterns of information flow’ and created a logical, deductive, ‘if‐then’ framework that affords us new insight. His framework is applicable to all communication technologies and remains remarkably fresh. Indeed, in his final chapter ‘Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going,’ Meyrowitz outlines trends and describes forms of media that were barely perceptible or not yet in existence when he was writing.” – Rich Ling, Copenhagen, Denmark, IT University of Copenhagen

“Highly insightful and deeply original… astonishingly prescient in identifying the themes and debates that would shape the next few decades of thinking. What is the public sphere, how is the relation between public and private being reconfigured by the electronic media, how can traditions of knowledge management – that protected children and excluded women – be sustained in the information age and what will follow from their demise?… Meyrowitz’s scholarship is impeccable, his writing elegant and engaging, and his range truly astonishing, capturing the key themes of our age with unerring accuracy and insight.” – Sonia Livingstone OBE, London School of Economics and Political Science

TALK

The Art of Ideation. Altering perception by creating what’s invisible, silent, and untouchable.

Starting with his experiences as a pre-school child, Joshua will describe in conversation with Gina Valenti the challenges of prodding people to think in new ways about communication technologies by shaping intangible conceptual frameworks that offer new understanding of the present, predictions for the future, and alternative perspectives of the past.

WEBSITES

Writings: https://unh.academia.edu/JoshuaMeyrowitz

Interviews/Presentations: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAd_SRWujWlTdBfd0XOjmtP9ouWBl0dzK

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-meyrowitz-21666b111/