James Lull (born December 23, 1944) is an American social scientist and author known for ethnographic research on the interaction between communications technology and culture. In addition to his academic career, Lull worked for many years as a media professional. His most recent scholarly work focuses on the decisive role of communication in human evolution.
Early life and education
Lull was born in Owatonna, Minnesota. He began working at age fifteen as a radio announcer in his home town. He joined the US Army after graduating from high school and trained to become an information and broadcast specialist at the Armed Forces Information School, Fort Slocum, New York, in 1963.
Lull was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, for nearly two years. During off duty hours he worked as an announcer for WCLS, WDAK, and WRBL radio in Columbus, Georgia. He was sent to Vietnam in 1965 as a combat journalist with the Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division. In 1966 Lull transferred to Armed Forces Radio Vietnam in Saigon where he became a staff announcer during the “Good Morning, Vietnam” era.
After being honorably discharged from the military Lull took degrees in History from El Camino College (Torrance, CA) and Radio-TV-Film from San Jose State University, California. As an undergraduate student he also worked full-time as staff announcer and later program director of KSJO-FM, San Jose. Lull received an MS degree with Honors in Telecommunication and Film from the University of Oregon. His graduate work continued at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the tutelage of the rhetorical scholar, Edwin Black. An article based on Lull’s doctoral dissertation, “Mass Media and Family Communication: An Ethnography of Audience Behavior,” won the Golden Monograph Award from the National Communication Association.
Career
In 1976 Lull became Assistant Professor of Speech at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he taught for seven years. During that time he began a program of ethnographic research in China that led to the publication of China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance. Lull maintained a second career in media at KTYD-FM, Santa Barbara, where he was employed as program director and staff announcer until 1983. He returned to his undergraduate alma mater, San Jose State University, to direct the Radio-TV-Film Program in 1982, and later transferred into the university’s Communication Studies Department, where in 2015 he is Emeritus Professor. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of San Francisco, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester at Sea Program.
Lull has been awarded two Fulbright Senior Scholar grants (Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; University of Colima, Mexico) and a Leverhulme Trust grant (Goldsmiths College, University of London). He holds honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega University, Peru. Lull has taught courses at universities in the People's Republic of China, Brazil, Venezuela, Finland, Denmark, England, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Sweden.
A fluent Spanish speaker, Professor Lull has spent much of his academic career working in Mexico and South America.
Books
Lull’s first book, Popular Music and Communication (1987), helped establish popular music as a form of human communication within the academic field of communication studies. A revised second edition of the edited volume was published in 1992. His second book, World Families Watch Television (1988), is a collection of ethnographic studies that discuss how television influences the family, and how families use television within diverse cultural contexts.
His third book, Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research on Television’s Audiences (1990), presents a collection of Lull’s essays on qualitative media audience research. The volume includes the article, “The Social Uses of Television,” which addresses how people actively engage television as a personal, social, and cultural resource. One year later, he published China Turned On:Television, Reform, and Resistance an audience-based empirical analysis of the role of television in China’s modernization.