Communication Research Into the Digital Society: Fundamental Insights from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research

Communication Research into the Digital Society: Fundamental Insights from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, edited by Theo Araujo and Peter Neijens, represents a timely, carefully crafted and ambitiously executed volume that seeks to both synthesise 25 years of work at ASCoR (the Amsterdam School of Communication Research) and locate communicat ion science within the proliferating dynamics of a datafied society. The bifurcated structure of the book – historical-institutional reflection on the one hand and emprically founded thematic chapters on the other – brings these saints together in a single narrative that conjoins scholarly traditions, methodological pluralism and current challenges including algorithmic curation, personalization, and AI-enabled persuasion. The editorial choice is an emphasis on promoting ASCoR’s mission of empirically anchored, socially responsive and theoretically generative research — a focus that gives the volume coherence across a variety of topics from political communication to youth media and entertainment, corporate communication, persuasive communication as well as cross-cutting developments in human–machine communication, computational methods, person-specific media effects and systems-theoretical perspectives. The result is a book that provides both a look back at how the field has developed into a more professionalized discipline and an advisory statement identifying key areas for future communication science research in the digital era.