Robin Mansell is Professor of New Media and the Internet at LSE. Ahead of her discussion and book launch on the 16th October at LSE she talks us through the books on communication, media and inequality that have inspired her as a student and an academic. From recent titles Robin picks out Sherry Turkle’s book ‘Alone Together’ as a wake-up call for anyone who believes the hype surrounding the benefits of the Internet and who tries to neglect the risks of the online world.

I grew up in Vancouver which at the time was seen by many as being quite peripheral to what went on in the wider world. This had consequences. I watched TV stations broadcasting from just over the 49th parallel in the US, my school books taught me a lot about the US and about (British) empire, but precious little about Canada. I am sure this is what peaked my fascination with communication.

In my first year, I read Harold H Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada and his Empire and Communications. Innis told the story of the expansion of trade routes and the crucial role of communication networks in the constitution of empires and in their demise. In my honours undergraduate year I read Marie Jahoda’s Current Concepts in Mental Health and she gave a visiting lecture to my class.  Here was a woman academic, the first I ever had a chance to talk with, and a psychologist. Her interests were hugely policy relevant and she championed a critical analysis of prevailing constructs of mental health. I was smitten by her work, her insistence on empirical research, and what I soon learned were her wider interests in science and technology policy.  When I found myself at the LSE for a Masters degree I was taught by Hilde Himmelweit, reading her Television and the Child. How were the media implicated in children’s lives and in everyone else’s lives, she wanted to know.

During my doctoral training I was introduced to Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and Christopher Freeman’s  Economics of Industrial Innovation. Here were lessons in the non-linearity of innovation, in the crucial role of disruptive technologies like information and communication technologies and, in Freeman’s case, an insistence that an interdisciplinarity examination of changes in society was essential.  One of my supervisors was a political economist, Dallas Smythe, whose work on centre-periphery relations, power and the media, Dependency Road, was just being completed. My other supervisor, William Melody, had done a book on the role of advertising in the US children’s television industry. They all thought that there was something distinctive about changes in communication technologies and the uses to which they were being put.

I recall being surprised by Marshal McLuhan’s ideas about media technologies as ‘extensions of man’ in Understanding Media. I read Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a call to arms for a sociological account of science and innovation, and Michael Polyani’s Knowing and Being, as a reminder that tacit knowing is just as important as the digital encoding of information. I read institutionalists’ work like John R Commons’ Institutional Economics and Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama which made me think that micro-level analysis of individual practices needs to be married up with macro-studies of governance, policy and regulation.

When the chance to take my first job in a university came along, I immediately encountered the work of Roger Silverstone Framing Science: The Making of a BBC Documentary, a sociologist, and Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication, a political economist. They both insisted that power and the media matter for society.

My work is the product of an uneasy struggle between an interest in the micro-practices of designing and using digital networks and what we now call social media (like Facebook, Twitter, and other services), and an interest in the macro-forces shaping the Internet. My work isn’t about the technology; it’s about issues of social equality and inequality and I’ve been hugely influenced by the works I’ve highlighted here.

And some books to recommend from the past few years: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age which drives home the importance of time, space and social imaginaries of what goes on between people; Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking: Fast and Slow, a popular recapitulation of his and Amos Tversky’s work on cognitive bias which seems ever more important in Internet time; and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, a wake-up call for anyone who believes the hype surrounding the benefits of the Internet and who tries to neglect the risks of the online world.

Finally, a couple of my recent reads. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips, and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.

On Tuesday 16th October 2012, Professor Robin Mansell will discuss her new book ‘Imagining the Internet‘ at a free event at the LSE. Readers are warmly invited to attend. More details here.

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Robin Mansell studied Psychology at the University of Manitoba, Social Psychology at the LSE, and Communication Studies at Simon Fraser University in Canada where she completed her PhD in 1984. She worked at the OECD before joining the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit at Sussex University in 1988, becoming Professor of Information and Communication Technology Policy in 1994. She joined LSE in 2001 as Professor of New Media and the Internet, first being appointed in the Sociology Department and the then Interdisciplinary Programme on Media and Communications.  She is now in the Department of Media and Communication, established in 2003, where she works on social, economic and policy consequences of digital media. She served as Head of Department from 2006 to 2009 and as LSE Council member from 2005 to 2010.