The "New York Times" bestseller and one of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2005. In the tradition of "This Boy's Life" and "The Liar's Club," a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar. J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar--including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler--took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak--and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.

Semiotics, or the study of signs, plays an increasingly important role within marketing as a guide to psychological and social aspects of communication. Jean-Marie Floch provides an introduction to the potential offered by a semiotic approach to a variety of marketing and communication problems or situations. Key semiotic concepts and principles are gradually introduced using real life studies.

Just like the previous workshop at VLDB 1999 in Edinburgh, the purpose of this workshop is to promote telecom data management as one of the core research areas in database research and to establish a strong connection between the telecom and database research communities. As I wrote in the preface of those proceedings, data management in telecommuni- tions is an interesting area of research given the fact that both service management and service provisioning are very data intensive, and pose extreme requirements on data management technology. Given the feedback on the previous workshop we decided to keep the same program set-up for this workshop: an invited speaker, a collection of research papers, and a panel discussion. We received 18 good quality papers from which we selected 12 to construct a very interesting program. The program has been divided into four sections. The first section focuses on CDR data warehouse and data mining technology. Data warehousing and data mining around customer usage data remains an important area of interest for telecommunication operators. The growing competition, especially in the mobile market, means that operators have to put more effort into customer retention and satisfaction. The second section focuses on performance issues around databases in telecommunication. Since telecommunication databases are characterized by their extreme requirements, for example in terms of volumes of data to be processed or response times, high volume data management and embedded and real-time data management are key aspects of the telecommunication data management problems in today s operational environments."

Communications markets have made much progress towards competition and deregulation in recent years. However, it is increasingly clear, in the age of the Internet and the digital revolution, that much more needs to be done, and that new approaches, both at the Federal Communications Commission and in Congress, will be required to complete the task. In this volume, the Progress and Freedom Foundation presents nine papers by communications policy experts and government policymakers that show how to finish the job of deregulating communications markets and reforming the FCC. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a landmark piece of legislation for an industry moving from a monopoly orientation towards competition, but additional steps are needed to complete the process of implementing the pro-competitive, deregulatory vision of the act. Bringing together a group of the caliber represented in this book makes possible the best recommendations about the exact nature of those necessary changes. In this volume, the most difficult and politically-charged hot-button issues involving local and long distance competition, universal service, spectrum allocation, program content regulation, and the public interest doctrine are confronted head-on. As importantly, the authors recommend specific reform proposals to be considered by the Federal Communications Commission and Congress. The ideas contained in the experts' essays were presented and debated at a conference hosted by The Progress & Freedom Foundation, which was held in Washington, DC, on December 8, 2000. The Progress & Freedom Foundation studies the impact of the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. It conducts research in fields such as electronic commerce, telecommunications and the impact of the Internet on government, society and economic growth. It also studies issues such as the need to reform government regulation, especially in technology-intensive fields such as medical innovation, energy and environmental regulation.

Nick Couldry is one of the world's leading analysts of media power and voice, and has been publishing widely for 25 years. This volume, published 20 years after The Place of Media Power, brings together a rich collection of essays from his earliest to his latest writings, some of them hard to access, plus two previously unpublished chapters. The book's 15 chapters cover a variety of themes from voice to space, from Big Data to democracy, and from art to reality television. Taken together, they give a unique insight into the range of Couldry's interests and passions. Throughout, Couldry's commitment to connecting media research to wider debates in philosophy and social theory is clear. A substantial Afterword reflects on the common themes that run throughout his work and this volume, and the particular challenges of grasping media's contribution to social order in an age of datafication. A preface by leading US media scholar Jonathan Gray sets these essays in context. The result is an exciting and clearly-written text that will interest students and researchers of media, culture and social theory across the world.

The collection is framed by two substantial new chapters: an introduction outlining Turner's current account of the transitions in media and media studies and a concluding essay discussing the shape of a critical agenda for the media and cultural studies of the future. The essays collected here chart Turner's ongoing concern with the changing relation between the media and the democratic state. Together, essays both reflect and comment upon the process of change within media studies as well as within the industries themselves.

Involving customers in the development and production of new services becomes a powerful force across many creative industries. Customers can directly supply the firm with innovative ideas, provide skilled labour, and act as a powerful force in marketing. Firms across the world, as they seek to innovate and to better respond to market needs, begin to recognize the benefits stemming from customers' involvement in their operations. Co-creation also becomes more prevalent as customers begin to expect it from firms - seeking to influence their favourite services or products, and to have them better tailored to their needs. Nevertheless, empowering the customers and involving them in the internal affairs of a firm is both difficult and risky. Despite co-creation becoming increasingly important to firms, very few accounts of it exist and many firms fail. Therefore, to navigate those straits, and to reap the benefits of co-creation, requires knowledge and more complete understanding of socio-cultural forces underpinning it. By studying a wide array of videogames firms in the USA and Europe, this book provides a unique insight into co-creation. It builds on the existing theories to provide unified framework for understanding co-creation in creative industries and other sectors. It combines insights from the dynamics of customer communities, with firm's perspective on innovation management and organizational transformation. The book offers highly detailed insights into the industry, which is at the forefront of co-creation. Furthermore, it sheds new light on the videogames firms and their operations and is therefore ideally designed for researchers, educators, and students alike in the fields of knowledge management, innovation management, firm strategy, organization studies and creativity management.

This volume brings together academic economists and lawyers to evaluate and compare the regulation of telecommunications markets in Germany and the United States. The unifying theme in all of the pa pers is that the goal of public policy in this area should be to make the broadest and most functional competition possible by means of an ap propriate regulatory framework. Because the European and American telecommunications markets are becoming more intertwined each day, the issues addressed in this volume will be topical to the business, government, and academic communities for some time. For the chairman of the Monopoly Commission, Wernhard Moschel, the opening of the German telecommunications market has been successful in principle. This is clearly recognizable in the case of the competition in long-distance transport. Based on the view that the regulatory authority should make itself obsolete, Professor Moschel advocates an incremental review and gradual reduction of regulation."

The collection is framed by two substantial new chapters: an introduction outlining Turner's current account of the transitions in media and media studies and a concluding essay discussing the shape of a critical agenda for the media and cultural studies of the future. The essays collected here chart Turner's ongoing concern with the changing relation between the media and the democratic state. Together, essays both reflect and comment upon the process of change within media studies as well as within the industries themselves.

At a time of growing interest in economic aspects of media, this edited volume presents a comprehensive and timely set of perspectives on key sectors of media and media infrastructures and related economic questions. Impressive in both scope and depth, this well-informed book guides readers through a compelling set of concepts and issues relevant to an increasingly internationalised contemporary media environment.' - Gillian Doyle, University of Glasgow, UK'This volume offers a comprehensive overview of modern approaches to media economics at a time of remarkable transition to new technologies and new business models.' - Bruce Owen, Stanford University, US Media industries and services present a complex set of challenges to economic analysis: challenges made more difficult by the technological changes that have been transforming the media sector. Research on the economics of media has made major advances in recent years and has contributed greatly to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how media are shaped by economic forces, including those unleashed by new technologies. This Handbook examines the variety of contexts and infrastructures in which content is produced and distributed and how these influence the types of media products and services available, their pricing, their consumption and the public policies related to them. The original contributions provide a state-of-the-art guide to the most recent thinking and research findings on the broad range of media-related topics addressed by economics research. Written by leading scholars, this book should be informative and of practical value for advanced students, policy makers, industry professionals, economists, media economists, and other academics. Contributors: N. Adilov, P.J. Alexander, P. Barwise, B.J. Bates, T. Bjoerkroth, E. Castronova, B. Cunningham, A. Dukes, J.J. Gabszewicz, N. Geidner, L. George, M. Groenlund, S.W. Ji, C. Karlsson, H.J. Kind, I. Knowles, S.Y.Lee, J.D. Levy, A. Manduchi, J. Moen, R.G. Picard, J. Resende, T. Ross, P. Rouchy, N. Sonnac, R. Towse, D. Waterman, S. Wildman, Y.-X. Zhu

Creation Techniques for Software Development and Deployment, Agent-Based Management, Virtual Home Environment, Integrated and Scalable Solutions for Telecommunications Management. This shows that the issues related to communications management, architectures, and service creation are still of great interest, while the virtual home environment is emerging as a new key topic in IS&N. In summary, this book reflects the state of the art in research on IS&N topics, with the focus mentioned above, not only from European Union co-funded projects (mainly in the ACTS programme), but also from research organisations around the globe. February 2000 Jaime Delgado George D. Stamoulis Alvin Mullery Didoe Prevedourou Keith Start Previous IS&N Conferences and Proceedings The first IS&N conference was organised in 1992 in Paris, France. Since then, the IS&N conferences have been held almost every year, with proceedings published as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series of Springer-Verlag. These are as follows. "Towards a Pan-European Telecommunication Service Infrastructure - IS&N'94", Hans-Jiirgen Kugler, Al Mullery, Norbert Niebert (Eds.), Aachen, Germany, September 1994, LNCS 851, ISBN 3-540-58420-X. "Bringing Telecommunication Services to the People - IS&N'95", Anne Clarke, Mario Campolargo, Nikos Karatzas (Eds.), Heraklion, Greece, October 1995, LNCS 998, ISBN 3-540-60479-0. "Intelligence in Services and Networks: Technology for Cooperative Competition - IS&N'97\ Al Mullery, Michel Besson, Mario Campolargo, Roberta Gobbi, Rick Reed (Eds.), Cernobbio, Italy, May 1997, LNCS 1238, ISBN 3-540-63135-6.

The issue of costing and pricing in the telecommunications industry has been hotly debated for the last twenty years and we are still wrestling over the cost of the local exchange for access by interexchange and competitive local exchange carriers, as well as for universal service funding. With the advent of competition, the historical costing schemes had to change. Federal regulators wanted to ensure that monopoly rates did not subsidize competitive offerings. As a result, various costing methodologies were devised to allocate costs among the dominant carriers' services. The issue of costs can be summarized as two-fold: the quantitative determination of the level of costs and the proper attribution of those costs. Both are fraught with questions. The amount of costs, for instance, can vary from book costs to marginal costs. The attribution of costs can vary from those that are directly attributable to those that are joint and common. Hence, the need for costing theories and models. The industry is constantly in search of theories and models that more accurately reflect the underlying costs of service. It is in this light that the papers have been compiled for The New Investment Theory of Real Options in Telecommunications. Real options theory attempts to consider management's flexibility in valuation analysis and corrects the deficiencies of the traditional discounted present-value and decision tree analyses. This book sets forth an introduction and overview of the subject, and then provides the reader with a primer on real options. The volume highlights the controversies that surround the application of real options in the telecommunications industry; however, the editors haveeffectively separated the issues of application from those of interpretation.

Charting production, distribution, censorship, and reception, this book examines Y Tu Mama Tambien in its presentation as a journey of self-discoveries. Three young adults enjoy a road trip together in search of a legendary beach. Behind their stories are mythologies of youth, a network of ideas in the film that reflects life outside the theaters. The deceptively complex film leaves the characters and its viewers with, instead of oversimplified and hollow answers, provocative questions and existential concerns. Made independently in Mexico, the film crosses over transnational issues, global markets, and mainstream and alternative aesthetics. It transforms road movie and youth film genres and shows a 'musical, magical' Mexico to the world. This book synthesizes several approaches in order to extensively examine Y Tu Mama Tambien. Covering the film's production history, its distribution and censorship, and larger industrial, political, and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the too-often overlooked aspects of youthful sexuality alongside figurations of maturity, rites of passage, and covenants-made, broken, and remade-that not only inform representations of identity but also complicate the processes of identity formation themselves.

Since its introduction in the early 1960s, Spanish-language television in the United States has grown in step with the Hispanic population. Industry and demographic projections forecast rising influence through the 21st century. This book traces U.S. Spanish-language television's development from the 1960s to 2013, illustrating how business, regulation, politics, demographics and technological change have interwoven during a half century of remarkable change for electronic media. Spanish-language media play key social, political and economic roles in U.S. society, connecting many Hispanics to their cultures of origin, each other, and broader U.S. society. Yet despite the population's increasing impact on U.S. culture, in elections and through an estimated $1.3 trillion in spending power in 2014, this is the first comprehensive academic source dedicated to the medium and its history. The book combines information drawn from the business press and trade journals with industry reports and academic research to provide a balanced perspective on the origins, maturation and accelerated growth of a significant ethnic-oriented medium.

The aim of this book, Future of the Telecommunications Industry: Forecasting and Demand Analysis, is to describe leading research in the area of empirical telecommunications demand analysis and forecasting in the light of tremendous market and regulatory changes. Its purpose is to educate the reader about how traditional analytic techniques can be used to assess new telecommunications products and how new analytic techniques can better address existing products. The research presented focuses on new products such as Internet access and additional lines and new techniques such as hazard modeling, adaptive forecasting and neural networks. The scope of this volume includes new telecommunications products, new analytical techniques, and a review of market changes in the US and other countries. Some of the most critical questions facing the industry are addressed here, such as the impact of competition, customer churn, rate re-balancing, and early assessment of new products. The research includes a variety of different countries, products and analytic tools.

My curiosity with the economic efficiency and social benefits of provisions used by telecommunications carriers to limit their liability to customers for damages arising from service interruptions and network outages is a longstanding one. It began with the changing state regulatory environments in the late 1980's while representing AT&T as an attorney before numerous state legislatures in the Midwest. As telecommunications carriers faced the ramifications of deregulation, several legal consequences came to the fore. One important consequence was the impact of changing regulatory rules and requirements on the carriers' abilities to continue to limit their liability for damages to customers in a non-tariffed world. As a result, one of my responsibilities while employed by AT&T was to syek legislative relief in some state jurisdictions which would enable the continued use of limited liability provisions notwithstanding other deregulatory developments in the industry. In my capacity as an attorney, I succeeded in this task in the few jurisdictions for which I was given the charge. However, as an economist, these efforts piqued my interest regarding the economic effects of such limited liability provisions on consumer interests. What liability rules for the industry would really better serve general societal interests? As my career evolved, which involved returning to graduate school to pursue my Ph. D. and becoming the Director of Public Policy Studies at Ameritech, I had the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary research in telecommunications policy issues.

Global media expert Dal Yong Jin examines the nexus of globalization, digital media, and contemporary popular culture in this empirically rich, student-friendly book. Offering an in-depth look at globalization processes, histories, texts, and state policies as they relate to the global media, Jin maps out the increasing role of digital platforms as they have shifted the contours of globalization. Case studies and examples focus on ubiquitous digital platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix, in tandem with globalization so that the readers are able to apply diverse theoretical frameworks of globalization in different media milieu. Readers are taught core theoretical concepts which they should apply critically to a broad range of contemporary media policies, practices, movements, and technologies in different geographic regions of the world - North America, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia - with a view to determining how they shape and are shaped by globalization. End-of-chapter discussion questions prompt further critical thinking and research. Students doing coursework in digital media, global media, international communication, and globalization will find this new textbook to be an essential introduction to how media have influenced a complex set of globalization processes in broad international and comparative contexts.

Digital entertainment, from video games to simulation rides, is now a central feature of popular culture. Computer-based or digital technologies are supplanting the traditional production methods of television, film and video, provoking intense speculation about their impact on the character of art. Examining the digital imaging techniques across a wide range of media, including film, music video, computer games, theme parks and simulation rides, Visual Digital Culture explores the relationship between evolving digital technologies and existing media and considers the effect of these new image forms on the experience of visual culture.
Andrew Darley first traces the development of digital computing from the 1960s and its use in the production of visual digital entertainment. Through case studies of films such as Toy Story, key pop videos such as Michael Jackson's Black or White, and computer games like Quake and Blade Runner, Andrew Darley asks whether digital visual forms mark a break with traditional emphases on story, representation, meaning and reading towards a focus on style, image performance and sensation. He questions the implications of digital culture for theories of spectatorship, suggesting that these new visual forms create new forms of spectatorship within mass culture.

This book introduces students and general readers to the functions of international communications as well as their cultural contexts, and offers strategies for evaluating the media messages we receive through television, print media, radio, the internet, and advertising.

Recent developments in telecommunications have led to new developments in tele-services, particularly tele-health and tele-education, for the benefit of those living in either the developed world or the less developed world. The benefits accrue to individuals and also to society at large. An international and interdisciplinary Symposium was organized by the International Space University to bring together technical and non-technical people to consider the future applications of space techniques to tele-services. The Proceedings of this Symposium are essential reading for all who need to appreciate the broad range of issues involved in this developing area.

Crisis management is of increasing importance to organisations. With the rise of single-issue pressure groups, the development of sophisticated and informed consumers and volatile voters, no organisation in the public or private sector can afford to neglect preparation for dealing with the disasters that may befall it. This book aims to improve the relationship between the media and those subject to media scrutiny at a time of crisis or disaster by generating mutual understanding of their needs. Drawing on the experience of practitioners, it aims to disseminate good practice. Part I sets the context and raises some general issues on the theme of communicating at a time of crisis or disaster. Part II looks at the relationships between media and those who are trying to manage the crisis in public relations and public information terms. It contains a number of case studies, each contributed by an expert, clearly explaining how a variety of crises and disasters were managed by the organisations concerned, and how they were reported by the media. Part III is an extended case study of the Hillsborough disaster, taking a candid look at what happened from the perspective of four very different people who were closely involved in the aftermath. The final section includes chapters on the value of training and rehearsal, and some of the lessons learned from Dunblane.

Models of Journalism investigates the most fundamental questions of how journalists can best serve the public and what factors enable or obstruct them in doing so. The book evaluates previous scholarly attempts at modeling the function and influencing factors of journalism, and proceeds to develop a range of important new models that take contemporary challenges faced by journalists and journalism into account. Among these new models is the "chronology-of-journalism", which introduces a new set of influencing factors that can affect journalists in the 21st century. These include internal factors - journalistic principles, precedents and practices - and external factors - journalistic production, publication and perception. Another new model, the "journalistic compass", delineates differences and similarities between some of the most important journalistic roles in the media landscape. For each new model, Peter Bro takes the actions and attitudes of individual journalists as its starting point. Models of Journalism combines practice and theory to outline and assess existing theoretical models alongside original ones. The book will be a useful tool for researchers, lecturers and practitioners who are engaged with the ever-evolving notions of what journalism is and who journalists are.

Ethics and Media Culture straddles the practical and ethical issues of contention encountered by journalists. The book's various contributors cover a diversity of issues and viewpoints, attempting to broaden out the debates particularly in relation to Journalism Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology of Culture and Communications, Philosophy and History.
The debate concerning media ethics has intensified in recent years, fuelled mainly by the standards of journalist and media practices. The role of practitioners has taken centre-stage as concerns over what constitutes ethical, and therefore socially acceptable practice and behaviour, by the public, practitioners and intellectuals alike. The discursive relationship between the production and consumption of information is central to the debate regarding moral conduct, particularly in light of the commercialisation of the media. Considering that media institutions operate in a climate of intense competition, the value of information and its corresponding quality have begun to be critically assessed in terms of ethical understanding.
A degree of open-endedness is maintained in discussions throughout this book, which is intended to engage the reader with the issues raised and determine their own conclusions.
In-depth coverage of media ethics
Open-ended discussions invite readers to draw their own conclusions
Contributors offer varied approaches to the subjects addressed

Women, Inequality and Media Work investigates how women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries. Examining women's place in the production of media is vital to understanding the broader and related question of how women are (mis)represented in media content. This book goes behind the camera to explore the world of women working in media industries and unpacks the systemic gender inequality that they experience at work. It argues that women internalize their experience of gender inequality by adopting various beliefs: whether it is that gender does not matter in the workplace; that the workplace is now post-feminist; or by adopting a sense of self as liminal, neither fully included nor excluded from the industry. Drawing on detailed academic research and empirical investigation, Women, Inequality and Media Work is an important and timely book for students, researchers and those working in media industries.

Over the last few years, the O.J. Simpson case, then the Lewinsky-Clinton affair, and scores of minor scandals have dominated the US press, often taking precedence over important domestic and international issues. This tabloidization of the news media, both here and abroad, has proved that "the market" cannot insure media quality. In a democracy, for media to function well, they must be free of both political and economic muzzling. The only solution is to add self-regulation, or quality control, by professionals and public to the other two forces, the market and state regulation. In this controversial volume, Claude-Jean Bertrand sets out to define a set of accountability systems--democratic, efficient, and harmless--to insure true freedom and quality of media. This brief, highly literate volume focuses not on philosophical foundations of media ethics or case stories, but on what is now missing in the codes. Many books deal with media ethics but few deal with accountability. Media Ethics and Accountability Systems zeroes in on the many nongovernmental methods of enforcing "quality control," and on the difficulty of getting the media microcosm to accept such accountability. To remedy this lack, Bertrand proposes rethinking existing "media accountability systems," some 30 to 40 in number, and creation of new ones. He observes that existing systems are rooted in four basic approaches: training: the education of citizens in media use and the incorporation of ethics courses in journalistic education; evaluation: criticism (positive and negative) not only from politicians, consumerists, and intellectuals, but from media professionals themselves; monitoring: by independent, academic experts over extended periods of time into the long-term effects; and feedback: giving ear to the various segments of media users and their needs and tastes, rather than scrutinizing sales and ratings. Media Ethics will be of particular interest to academics in the fields of communication and journalism, as well as to the general reader with an interest in public issues and a civic concern for society.