The media star has become a powerful, almost unparalleled, cultural sign, even as the star system has undergone radical transformation since the era of the Hollywood studio system. Today's film industry continues to market and promote its products through actors in ways that seek to capture the often elusive quality that a star can embody. Using contemporary stars such as Robert De Niro, Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Dennis Hopper, this anthology of essays applies a variety of theoretical tools in its attempt to understand how we interpret stars, and how we can begin to understand their cultural significance.

Likewise, the study explores how the star system has become an increasingly complex phenomenon within society at large, extending its impact beyond the cinema into music, sports, and fashion. Many of the essays collected here consider this shift and examine how personae including the director (Sam Peckinpah), the royalty (Princess Diana) and even the digital star (Lara Croft) have captured the cultural imagination and have come to attain qualities as star-like as those of the silver screen.

During the 1980s, organizational theorists and managers alike rediscovered the role that values play in organizational life and became concerned about the apparent lack of values that underlie unethical organizational behavior. This volume examines the complex interrelationships among values, ethics, and organizational decision making. It focuses on communication, because it is through discourse that people develop their own moral codes, organizations develop and inculcate core values and ethical precepts, and incongruities within and between value sets are negotiated. Each essay also deals with modes of making decisions.

Over the last two centuries, collectors from around the world have historicized, politicized, and digitized media in the pursuit of knowledge and education. This collected volume explores collections of educational media and their bearing on the ways in which people learn in both the present and future, how and why material objects have been used worldwide to store and maintain knowledge for politically expedient reasons, and how our understanding of digital collections can be adequately understood only in relation to, and as an extension and adaptation of, the historically contingent material collections from which they emerged.

This book thoroughly investigates the underlying theoretical basis of membrane computing models, and reveals their latest applications. In addition, to date there have been no illustrative case studies or complex real-life applications that capitalize on the full potential of the sophisticated membrane systems computational apparatus; gaps that this book remedies. By studying various complex applications - including engineering optimization, power systems fault diagnosis, mobile robot controller design, and complex biological systems involving data modeling and process interactions - the book also extends the capabilities of membrane systems models with features such as formal verification techniques, evolutionary approaches, and fuzzy reasoning methods. As such, the book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date guide for all researchers, PhDs and undergraduate students in the fields of computer science, engineering and the bio-sciences who are interested in the applications of natural computing models.

This book analyzes various digital transformation processes in journalism and news media. By investigating how these processes stimulate innovation, the authors identify new business and communication models, as well as digital strategies for a new environment of global information flows. The book will help journalists and practitioners working in news media to identify best practices and discover new types of information flows in a rapidly changing news media landscape.

Packaging Terrorism investigates how American media have identified and covered international terrorism and violence since September 11, 2001.* Compares US coverage with that of British and Arab media* Discusses the priorities, assumptions, political debates, deadline pressures and bottom-line considerations that will continue to influence coverage in the future* Suggests how terrorism could be better covered by the media going forwards

This volume focuses on the ethics of internet and social networking research exploring the challenges faced by researchers making use of social media and big data in their research. The internet, the world wide web and social media - indeed all forms of online communications - are attractive fields of research across a range of disciplines. They offer opportunities for methodological initiatives and innovations in research and easily accessed, massive amounts of primary and secondary data sources. This collection examines the new challenges posed by data generated online, explores how researchers are addressing those ethical challenges, and provides rich case studies of ethical decision making in the digital age.

Despite the central role of punditry in our contemporary media environment, research has been slow to examine punditry on cable news. Deregulation, the advent of cable television, and the rise of a twenty-four hour news cycle have dramatically transformed the structure and content of news, paving the way for political pundits to come to the forefront. Cable news networks, in particular, have played a critical role in challenging the neutrality of traditional media through the development of opinion programs that made highly politicized and entertaining content central to their primetime coverage. Over the past three decades, these opinionated programs have become increasingly popular as a programming strategy for cable news producers seeking to develop novel programming to target niche audiences. The pundits who pontificate on these programs have come to dominate our national political dialogue, and play a significant role in setting the public agenda and influencing public opinion in the United States. Punditry and pundits lie at the heart of programming and network changes that have evolved over the past thirty years. Primetime Pundits: How Cable News Covers Social Issues explores the ascent of punditry and offers new models for understanding how social issues are covered-not just by pundits, but also in the larger changing media landscape.

Seniority-based hierarchy (jouge kankei) is omnipresent in Japanese group dynamics. How one comports, depends on one's status and position vis-a-vis others. To-date, no study shows what constitutes this hierarchy, where and when individuals growing up in Japan first come into contact with it, as well as how they learn to function in it. This book fills in the lacunae. Considering jouge kankei as a social institution and adopting a discourse analytic approach, this volume examines the ways in which institutional jouge kankei as an enduring feature of Japanese social life are created and reproduced. The monograph analyses how seniority-based relations are enacted, legitimised, transmitted, and reified by social actors through language use and paralinguistic discursive practices, such as the use of space, objects, signs, and symbols. It also looks at how established rules could be challenged. The empirical data on which findings are based are gathered through 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork from 2015 to 2018 in Japanese schools, with certain types of data (school club etiquette books and uniforms) being presented and analysed for the first time. This volume also shows continuity and change of jouge kankei from school to work.

This book presents covert, semi-covert and overt techniques for communication over printed media by modifying images, texts or barcodes within the document. Basic and advanced techniques are discussed aimed to modulate information into images, texts and barcodes. Conveying information over printed media can be useful for content authentication, author copyright, information and piracy product deterrent, side information for marketing, among other applications. Practical issues are discussed and experiments are provided to evaluate competitive approaches for hard-copy communication. This book is a useful resource for researchers, practitioners and graduate students in the field of hard-copy communication by providing the fundamentals, basic and advanced techniques as examples of approaches to address the hard-copy media distortions and particularities.

Winner of the 2022 Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize. Critical realism, as a toolkit of practical ideas, helps researchers to extend and clarify their analyses. It resolves problems arising from splits between different research approaches, builds on the strengths of different methods and overcomes their individual limitations. This original text draws on international examples of health and illness research across the life course, from small studies to large trials, to show how versatile critical realism can be in validating research and connecting it to policy and practice. To meet growing demand from students and researchers, this book is based on the course at UCL, first taught by Roy Bhaskar, the founder of critical realism.

This is a discussion of the relationships between mass media and society. Topics examined include: talk radio and community; the growth of the corporate newspaper; media violence and audience behaviour; and race, ethnicity and the mass media.

The presence and ubiquity of the internet continues to transform the way in which we identify ourselves and others both online and offline. The development of virtual communities permits users to create an online identity to interact with and influence one another in ways that vary greatly from face-to-face interaction. Identity and Leadership in Virtual Communities: Establishing Credibility and Influence explores the notion of establishing an identity online, managing it like a brand, and using it with particular members of a community. Bringing together a range of voices exemplifying how participants in online communities influence one another, this book serves as an essential reference for academicians, researchers, students, and professionals, including bloggers, software designers, and entrepreneurs seeking to build and manage their engagement online.

We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? Connecting German theories of cultural techniques to Anglo-American approaches that address similar issues, List Cultures makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn.

With this unique collection of primary source documents from colonial newspapers, students will be able to debate the issues of colonial America. Pro and con opinion pieces, letters, essays and news reports that were printed in colonial newspapers will help the reader to understand the differing viewpoints of colonial Americans on the key issues from 1690 to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Nearly 300 documents, organized chronologically by event, will help readers step back in time to debate the issues faced by 18th-century Americans. The work covers 31 events from abolition, religion, and women's rights to the Stamp Act crisis and the Boston Tea Party. For every major event or issue of the colonial period, newspapers printed the opinions of the day, in many cases attempting to influence public opinion. Issues such as medical discoveries, education, and censorship are covered in this collection along with important events such as the French and Indian War, the trial of John Peter Zenger, and the Boston Massacre. Each chapter introduces the event or issue and includes news articles, letters, essays, even poetry representing both sides of the argument as they affected Americans. Each document is preceded by an explanatory introduction. This is the only collection of primary source documents from colonial newspapers on the events of the era and will be a valuable tool for research and classroom discussion.

This book focuses on the finite-time control of attitude stabilization, attitude tracking for individual spacecraft, and finite-time control of attitude synchronization. It discusses formation reconfiguration for multiple spacecraft in complex networks, and provides a new fast nonsingular terminal sliding mode surface (FNTSMS). Further, it presents newly designed controllers and several control laws to enhance the performance of spacecraft systems and meet related demands, such as strong disturbance rejection and high-precision control. As such, the book establishes a fundamental framework for these topics, while also highlighting the importance of integrated analysis. It is a useful resource for all researchers and students who are interested in this field, as well as engineers whose work involves designing flight vehicles.

This book is a concise navigator across the history of cybernetics, its state-of-the-art and prospects. The evolution of cybernetics (from N. Wiener to the present day) and the reasons of its ups and downs are presented. The correlation of cybernetics with the philosophy and methodology of control, as well as with system theory and systems analysis is clearly demonstrated. The book presents a detailed analysis focusing on the modern trends of research in cybernetics. A new development stage of cybernetics (the so-called cybernetics 2.0) is discussed as a science on general regularities of systems organization and control. The author substantiates the topicality of elaborating a new branch of cybernetics, i.e. organization theory which studies an organization as a property, process and system. The book is intended for theoreticians and practitioners, as well as for students, postgraduates and doctoral candidates. In the first place, the target audience includes tutors and lecturers preparing courses on cybernetics, control theory and systems science.

This volume brings critical theory to bear on a familiar feature of our daily lives- the evening news on television- in order to clarify what it means to talk about hegemony. This book's approach makes accesible to a wider audience another way of seeing an otherwise taken-for-granted dimension of daily life and political culture. By empirically and theoretically reading a text taken from the evening news students can inspect, in a language familiar to them, what issues of ideology and legitimation are about.

Based upon two decades of research with patients who have experienced pathology in one hemisphere of the brain, this book deals with brain mechanisms in human communicative behaviour, and with related motor functions from a broadly biological point of view. The work discusses the possible evolutionary origins of human communication, the relation of brain mechanisms in communicative behaviour to analogous nonhuman behaviors, and the neural systems involved in various levels and kinds of communication. Noncommunicative mechanisms which parallel those used in communication are also outlined in detail. Individual differences in brain organization for some functions are also explored.

Much new data is presented along with the theoretical treatment of human communication which emphasizes a behavioral rather than a linguistic approach. The work will interest psycholinguists, cognitive psychologists, neurologists, clinical neuropsychologists, speech pathologists, and advanced students in these fields.

Whiteness is often looked upon and equated with being American, but this book seeks to discover how other American voices and experiences have been and are excluded from the American legacy. It directly addresses the notion of self and human division in a cultural climate that has historically fostered the marginalization of multiple racial identities. This is an interdisciplinary work on understanding and promoting intercultural communication and will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of communication, multicultural studies, social psychology, and sociology.

This essay collection examines ethical concerns related to the traditional areas of political communication, including campaigns, media, discourse, and advertising, as well as new technologies, including the Internet. In total, the collection provides one of the few volumes to examine political ethics from an academic perspective rather than from a moralistic or rule orientation. Bruce Gronbeck provides an assessment of presidential campaigns, arguing that ethical judgments of citizens are based on candidates' actions and motives, character, and competence. Ronald Lee explores the ethics of campaign discourse, and he charts the relationship between presidential candidates' projection of civic virtue and the political arrangements that dictate the course of the campaign itself. Steven Goldzwig and Patricia Sullivan examine what happens to discourse when the divide between the haves and have-nots translates into a local community disconnected from virtual politics. The nature, types, and impact of the growing use of hate speech in contemporary politics is explored by Rita Whillock, while Robert Denton investigates television as an instrument of governing and its impact on the nature of democracy. Gary Woodward looks at the ethics of political journalism, and Lynda Lee Kaid analyzes the ethical issues raised by political advertising in all forms. Clifford Jones looks at the impact of campaign finance rules on campaign communication strategy; Gary Selnow explores the ethics of politics on the Internet; and Robert Denton concludes by examining the relationship between constitutional authority and public morality. An important text for students as well as scholars investigating contemporary American politics.

Through an interdisciplinary conversation with contributors from social anthropology, religious studies, film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Crafting Chinese Memories is a novel book which addresses how works of art shape memories, and offers new ways of conceptualising storytelling, memory-making, art, and materiality. It explores the memories of artists, filmmakers, novelists, storytellers, and persons who come to terms with their own histories even as they reveal the social memories of watershed events in modern China.