Elihu Katz is Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and Professor Emeritus, Departments of Sociology and Communication, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, John Durham Peters is Professor of Communication Studies, University of Iowa, Tamar Liebes is Professor of Communication, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Avril Orloff is a writer/researcher in Toronto.

• Contributors. Introduction: Shoulders to Stand On.Section I: The Columbia School.Introduction.Critical Research at Columbia: Lazarsfeld and Merton's “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action” Peter Simonson and Gabriel Weimann.Herzog’s “On Borrowed Experience:” Its Place in the Debate Over the Active Audience Tamar Liebes.Section II: The Frankfurt School.Introduction.The Subtlety of Horkheimer and Adorno: Reading “The Culture Industry” John Durham Peters.Benjamin Contextualized: On “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Paddy Scannell.Redeeming Consumption: On Lowenthal’s “The Triumph of the Mass Idols” Eva Illouz.Section III: The Chicago School.Introduction.Community and Pluralism in Wirth’s “Consensus and Mass Communication” Eric Rothenbuhler.The Audience Is a Crowd, the Crowd Is a Public: Latter-Day Thoughts on Lang and Lang’s “MacArthur Day in Chicago” Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan.Towards the Virtual Encounter: Horton and Wohl’s “Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction” Don Handelman.Section IV: The Toronto School.Introduction.Harold Adams Innis and his Bias of Communication Menahem Blondheim.Canonic Anti-text: Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media Joshua Meyrowitz.Section V: British Cultural Studies.Introduction.Retroactive Enrichment: Raymond Williams's Culture and Society John Durham Peters.Canonization Achieved? Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” Michael Gurevitch and Paddy Scannell.Afterthoughts on Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” in the Age of Cultural Studies Yosefa Loshitzky.Index

"This is an outstanding work. The original concept of the book is brilliant and the essays make good on it. I think the book will make waves in communication research and in the history of communication theory, both in the quality of the individual essays and in the reconsideration of the virtues and vices of there being such a thing as a canon in a discipline at all." Professor Michael Schudson, University of California, San Diego