James Lull, Culture-on-demand: Communication In A Crisis World

摘要

Culture-on-Demand explores the potential in the contemporary cultural environment to respond to and challenge the cultural tensions and rigid, oppressive and exclusive tendencies of Islamic and other fundamentalisms. James Lull is a self-confessed optimist and this is clearly in evidence throughout the book. He sees increasing individualization and rapidly developing media and communication technologies as providing new possibilities for open and democratic global dialogue that can counter fundamentalism and provide a generally more engaged, tolerant and creative public cultural environment. This is a laudable perspective and one that contains significant recognizable features in the contemporary mediated environment. The book treads a difficult path in critiquing religious ideology and culrural practice in their close alignments with geopolitical entities, and importantly points out that the scholarly critique of religious culture and ideology should not be 'off limits'.