Media Research Takes Top Award

Ph.D. student Kate Maddalena and Jeremy Packer, associate professor of communication, have won the 2014 James W. Carey Media Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research.

Maddalena and Packer are authors of a paper, “The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network,” to be published later this year in the journal Theory, Culture & Society.

The Carey Award, established in 2004, is presented annually from among nominated or submitted books or journal articles published in the previous year. The award honors the late James W. Carey (1934-2006), a pioneer in applying cultural approaches to the study of mass media.

To be considered for the award, the work must be of highest quality and employ Carey’s theories to focus on communication and public life, journalism or popular culture. The winning entry this year was chosen from an exceptionally strong field of works submitted by a long list of outstanding scholars, the judges said.

The article considered the use of flag telegraphy by the U.S. Signal Corps during the Civil War as it functioned as a proto-technical medium that preceded wire telegraphy as a military communications technology. Not only was flag telegraphy a historical step towards contemporary technical media, it was also an early iteration of the digitization of communication.