Garnham attended
Winchester College from 1950 to 1955 where the major influence on his thinking was British socialist historian
R. H. Tawney. His main interests were
British history, architecture and cinema, the last of which has remained a lifelong passion and research focus. Garnham served in the
Royal Navy from 1956 to 1958. He was in one of the last drafts to the service under compulsory conscription. He studied briefly at the
Sorbonne in Paris in 1958, before moving to study
English literature at
Trinity College, Cambridge that same year.[1]
Career
From 1962 until 1970 he was a director and film editor at the
BBC. He left to enter academia at the
Polytechnic of Central London to teach film making and film theory. Garnham was central in establishing first Media Studies degree at the University, a Bachelor of Arts course in 1975. He also became part of the university's newly established Communication Studies Department. He was Governor of the
British Film Institute (BFI) from 1973 to 1977. He was founding editor of, and has remained a senior editor of, the journal Media, Culture and Society since it was first published in 1979.
Works
The New Priesthood: British Television Today (1970) with
Joan Bakewell
Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of Information (1990) editor
Fred Inglis
Emancipation, The Media, And Modernity: Arguments about the Media and Social Theory (2000)
The Information Society is also a Class Society – The Impact of the New Information Technologies on Cultural Production and Consumption, Information Technology: Impact on the Way of Life (L. Bannion et al., eds). Dublin: Tycooly International (1981)
The Economics of Television, (1987) with R. Collins and G. Locksley
The Media and the Public Sphere (Ed. Calhoun) (1992)
The Role of the Public Sphere in the Information Society, in Regulating the Global Information Society (C.T. Marsden, ed.), London: Routledge. (2000)
Information Society as Theory or Ideology: A Critical Perspective on Technology, Education and Employment in the Information Age Digital Academe (W. Dutton and B. Loader, eds), pp. 253–67. London: Routledge. (2002)
References
^'Cambridge Tripos Examination Results', The Times, 22 June 1961, p. 18.
Ellis Cashmore and Chris Rojek (1999), Dictionary of Cultural Theorists, pp. 179–181
Cook, D. (1996). The culture industry revisited. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Gandy, O. H. (1999). Community pluralism and the 'tipping point': Editorial responses to race and related structural change. In D. Demers & K. Viswanath (Eds.), Mass Media, Social Control and Social Change (pp. 159–181). Ames, Iowa.: Iowa State University Press.
Garnham, N. (2005). A personal intellectual memoir. Media, Culture & Society, 27(4), 469–493.
Durham, M. G., & Kellner, D. M. (eds) (2001). Media and cultural studies (pp 197–229). Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.