Join communication school director Larry Gross for the annual Walt Fisher Lecture, honoring emeritus professor and former communication school director Walt Fisher. This lecture will be given by Eric W. Rothenbuhler, professor of communication at Texas A&M University. His topic: “Industry systems, ritual communication, and media worlds, or how the top-40 came to be a real thing.” From Rothenbuhler: “Ritual communication and media industries are conventionally seen as very different topics of study. Similarly the ritual perspective on communication, with its interest in the social construction of reality, is seen in stark contrast with concern for the material and economic bases of communication systems. Materials from my current research on the development of Top-40 and radio formatting in the 1950s, though, illustrate not only how business strategy and industry structure begat cultural form, but how the new cultural form reshaped the industry and produced its own audience. Indeed, the success of that form can best be understood as ritualized communication, producing the world it portrayed. This leads to the proposal of an integrated perspective on media worlds as self-referencing, self-organizing systems we live inside.”

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