Developing countries, especially African countries, face a myriad of problems as they try to counteract decades of national poverty and political ineffectiveness. If these countries are to secure an active role in world politics, they need communication techniques that are both broad and effective. In this book, Dr. Ngwainmbi presents a comprehensive approach to media and communication in developing countries. The author analyzes traditional methods of communication--dance, ritual, caste, religious oracles, and more--and shows how these communication agents, in addition to the basic affordable modern media, create the context for realizing development efforts. The author also examines the new world information and communication debate and raises new questions about its meaning to Africa. For more information, visit www.manigistics.com.

This book traces the theoretical explanation for clusters back to the work of classical economists and their more modern disciples, who saw economic development as a process involving serious imbalances in the exploitation of resources. Initially, natural resource endowments explained the formation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century industrial districts. Today, geographical concentrations of scientific and creative knowledge are the key resource. But these require a support system, ranging from major injections of basic research funding, to varieties of financial investment and management, tothe provision of specialist incubators, for economic value to be realised. These are also specialised forms of knowledge that contribute to a serious imbalance in the distribution of economic opportunity.

Communicative visuals, including written text, have a diverse range of forms and purposes. In this volume, the authors show that it is possible to both describe and explain the major properties of diverse visual-communication forms and purposes within a common theoretical framework of information design and ethics. For those unaccustomed to thinking of written text as a visual form belonging to the same general class as other visual forms (colour, texture, shape, imagery, etc.), consider how a text's readability suffers if we remove all white space and punctuation, which can be identified as visual signals of the same subtype as grid lines and bullet points, dividing and calling attention to adjacent information. The authors identify deep connections between foundational visual design elements and the grammar of language itself. No physicist or chemist today questions the value of a single theory that describes and explains a wide variety of phenomena, but oddly enough, the authors have frequently been asked why they are interested in advancing a unified theory of visual communication. The simplest answer is: to treat visual communication as a science, and seeking unified theories is just what science does. In more practical terms, a unified approach to visual communication allows us to teach visual design students relatively few things that will enable them to do relatively many things.

Communicative visuals, including written text, have a diverse range of forms and purposes. In this volume, the authors show that it is possible to both describe and explain the major properties of diverse visual-communication forms and purposes within a common theoretical framework of information design and ethics. For those unaccustomed to thinking of written text as a visual form belonging to the same general class as other visual forms (colour, texture, shape, imagery, etc.), consider how a text's readability suffers if we remove all white space and punctuation, which can be identified as visual signals of the same subtype as grid lines and bullet points, dividing and calling attention to adjacent information. The authors identify deep connections between foundational visual design elements and the grammar of language itself. No physicist or chemist today questions the value of a single theory that describes and explains a wide variety of phenomena, but oddly enough, the authors have frequently been asked why they are interested in advancing a unified theory of visual communication. The simplest answer is: to treat visual communication as a science, and seeking unified theories is just what science does. In more practical terms, a unified approach to visual communication allows us to teach visual design students relatively few things that will enable them to do relatively many things.

There is a clear need for a systematic, integrative, and rigorous normative theory of the information society. In this book, Duff offers a prescriptive theory to help to guide the academic and policy communities as they debate the future shape of emerging post-industrial, information-based societies. He argues that information policy needs to become anchored in a left-liberal philosophy which foregrounds a feasible permutation of the core ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood. The information society, if it is to be worth having at all, cannot be allowed to be largely the outcome of the free play of market forces and technological determinism. The social structure, including the information economy, must be subjected to a regulatory axiological system as explicated by some leading proponents of social democracy. This text will be of interest to scholars and students at the cutting edge of information studies, journalism and media, computer science, sociology, politics, philosophy, management and law.

Following the enchanting story recounted in When I Was Puerto Rican of the author's emergence from the barrios of Brooklyn to the prestigious Performing Arts High School in Manhattan, Esmeralda Santiago delivers the tale of her young adulthood, where she continually strives to find a balance between becoming American and staying Puerto Rican. While translating for her mother Mami at the welfare office in the morning, starring as Cleopatra at New York's prestigious Performing Arts High School in the afternoons, and dancing salsa all night, she begins to defy her mother's protective rules, only to find that independence brings new dangers and dilemmas.

Content Management Systems (CMSs) are used in almost every industry by millions of end-user organizations. In contrast to the 90s, they are no longer used as isolated applications in one organization but they support critical core operations in business ecosystems. Content management today is more interactive and more integrative: interactive because end-users are increasingly content creators themselves and integrative because content elements can be embedded into various other applications. The authors of this book investigate how Semantic Technologies can increase interactivity and integration capabilities of CMSs and discuss their business value to millions of end-user organizations. This book has therefore the objective, to reflect existing applications as well as to discuss and present new applications for CMSs that use Semantic Technologies. An evaluation of 27 CMSs concludes this book and provides a basis for IT executives that plan to adopt or replace a CMS in the near future.

This volume explores agenda-setting theory in light of changes in the media environment in the 21st century. In the decades since the original Chapel Hill study that launched agenda-setting research, the theory has attracted the interest of scholars worldwide. Agenda Setting in a 2.0 World features the work of a new generation of scholars. The research provided by these young scholars reflects two broad contemporary trends in agenda-setting: A centrifugal trend of research in the expanding media landscape and in domains beyond the original focus on public affairs, and a centripetal trend further explicating agenda-setting's core concepts.

Today, social media offers an alternative broadcast and communication medium for nonprofit advocacy organizations. At the same time, social media ushers in a "noisy" information era that renders it more difficult for nonprofits to make their voices heard. This book seeks to unpack the prevalence, mechanisms, and ramifications of a new model for nonprofit advocacy in a social media age. The keyword for this new model is attention. Advocacy always starts with attention: when an organization speaks out on a cause, it must ensure that it has an audience and that its voice is heard by that audience; it must ensure that current and potential supporters are paying attention to what it has to say before expecting more tangible outcomes. Yet the organization must also ensure that advocacy does not end with attention: attention should serve as a springboard to something greater. The authors elaborate how attention fits into contemporary organizations' advocacy work and explain the key features of social media that are driving the quest for attention. Developing conceptual models, they explain why some organizations and messages gain attention while others do not. Lastly, the book explores how organizations are weaving together online and offline efforts to deliver strategic advocacy outcomes.

In 1931, the United States and France embarked on a broadcasting partnership built around radio. Over time, the transatlantic sonic alliance came to personify and to shape American-French relations in an era of increased global media production and distribution. Drawing on a broad range of American and French archives, Derek Vaillant joins textual and aural materials with original data analytics and maps to illuminate U.S.-French broadcasting's political and cultural development. Vaillant focuses on the period from 1931 until France dismantled its state media system in 1974. His analysis examines mobile actors, circulating programs, and shifting institutions that shaped international radio's use in times of war and peace. He explores the extraordinary achievements, the miscommunications and failures, and the limits of cooperation between America and France as they shaped a new media environment. Throughout, Vaillant explains how radio's power as an instantaneous mass communications tool produced, legitimized, and circulated various notions of states, cultures, ideologies, and peoples as superior or inferior. A first comparative history of its subject, Across the Waves provocatively examines how different strategic agendas, aesthetic aims and technical systems shaped U.S.-French broadcasting and the cultural politics linking the United States and France.

The international business environment has undergone major turbulence in 2020 following the onset of lockdowns, travel restrictions and social distancing all prompted by Covid-19. These restrictions have limited the revenue generation capacity of both countries and businesses - large and small. While the winners have been mostly those sectors with a digital footprint such as streaming services and video-conferencing giants, the creative industries have felt a much harder blow. Against this backdrop, The Creative Industries and International Business Development in Africa takes an unorthodox approach to showcasing the trends and challenges of the contemporary creative economy with a view to positioning the sector for a global audience. Drawing upon the categorisations of the Creative Industries Federation, the book interrogates, and highlights, the challenges, and opportunities of the creative industries in Africa. This is with a view to aggregating how the sector has coped with a myriad of challenges even before the pandemic. Discussions across the chapters document the changing landscape of the sector, capturing insights from the global value chain to everything digital - from arts to publishing, fashion, film and music production and distribution. Further insights are discussed around recent events such as the take-off of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and the exit of Britain from the EU - with the latter event reinvigorating the Commonwealth Agenda and renewed interest in Africa's creative industries.

The concept of creative industries has developed considerable academic and policy momentum in the 21st century. There has been a connection identified between the rise of creative industries and the urbanisation of the world's population, particularly in relation to the significance of cities as sites of cultural production and consumption. Much of the work on creative industries and cities, however, has drawn upon 'imagined geographies' about the relationship between creativity and place. This collection draws together contributions that critically appraise recent urban cultural policy discourses, as well as reflecting on the role of culture and creative industries in the future development of cities. This book is based on a special issue of The Information Society: An International Journal.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Historically, alternative media have been viewed as fundamental, albeit at times culturally peripheral, forces in social change. In this book, however, Kenix argues that these media do not uniformly subvert the hierarchies of access that are so central to mainstream media - in fact, their journalistic norms and routines have always been based on the professional standards of the mainstream. Kenix goes on to posit the perception of 'mainstream' and 'alternative' as a misconception. She argues that, although alternative media can - and do - construct distinct alternative communications, they have always existed on the same continuum as the mainstream and the two will continue to converge. Through comparative analysis, this book argues that many alternative and mainstream media are merging to create a continuous spectrum rooted in commercial ideology. Indeed, much of what is now considered alternative media actually draws very little from principles of the independent press, whereas many contemporary mainstream media now use communication techniques more commonly associated with media that do not operate for financial gain. This book puts forward a controversial but convincing argument around the relationship between alternative and mainstream media, drawing on examples from the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand to strengthen and develop the central premise.

Hailed everywhere as a brilliant biography, GONZO is a startling portrait of Hunter S. Thompson, the genius who spent a lifetime channeling his energy and insight into such landmark works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas--and revolutionized the art of writing. In their own words, an incredible array of stars--Sonny Barger, Jack Nicholson, Ralph Steadman, Jimmy Buffett, Anjelica Huston, Marilyn Manson, Jimmy Carter, and many more--bring into vivid focus Thompson's creative frenzies, love affairs, drug use, and, ultimately, his tragic suicide. As Thompson was fond of saying, "Buy the ticket, take the ride."
""Gonzo."..is no hagiography, and it is in its unflinching look at this singular character in American letters as fearless-if not more so-as anything Thompson ever dared write....The most comprehensive picture of Thompson so far, and...likely the best we'll ever get." --Patrick Beach, "Austin American-Statesman"
"A fond and exhilarating look back at the wild man of American journalism, put together by a couple of guys who were pretty close to him." --Billy Heller, "New York"" Post"

On the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, Union artillery lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson fell while bravely spurring his men to action. His father, Sam, a New York Times correspondent, was already on his way to Gettysburg when he learned of his son’s wounding but had to wait until the guns went silent before seeking out his son, who had died at the town’s poorhouse. Sitting next to his dead boy, Sam Wilkeson then wrote one of the greatest battlefield dispatches in American history. This vivid exploration of one of Gettysburg’s most famous stories - the story of a father and a son, the son’s courage under fire, and the father’s search for his son in the bloody aftermath of battle - reconstructs Bayard Wilkeson’s wounding and death, which have been shrouded in myth and legend, and sheds light on Civil War-era journalism, battlefield medicine, and the "good death."

Media representations of ageing play a role in stereotype formation and even reinforce them. Encountering these stereotypes can negatively impact the self-esteem, health status, physical wellbeing and cognitive performance of older people. This international collection examines different dimensions of ageing and ageism in a range of media. Chapters include explorations of the UK media during the COVID-19 pandemic; age, gender and mental health in Ghana; advertising in Brazil; magazines in Canada; Taiwanese newspapers; comics, graphic novels and more. Bringing together leading scholars, this book critically considers differences in media portrayals and how older adults use and interact with the media.

A unique cocktail of personal memoir, cultural criticism and Hollywood history by the one and only Quentin Tarantino. The long-awaited first work of nonfiction from the author of the number one New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a deliriously entertaining, wickedly intelligent cinema book as unique and creative as anything by Quentin Tarantino. In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with CINEMA SPECULATION, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans - and all movie lovers - could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT's and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever.

Fan Phenomena: Disney collects essays on Disney fans, spanning a variety of media (such as film, television, novels, stage productions and theme parks) and different fannish approaches (cosplay, fan art), as well as the company's reactions to them. It is a timely intervention that deals with crucial issues such as race and racism within the Disney fandom and in Disney texts, the role of queerness, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the advent of the streaming service Disney+. The authors come from variety of disciplines, such as cultural and media studies, marketing and communications, cultural history or theatre and performance studies, and include both leading experts in fan and Disney studies, as well as emerging voices in these fields, plus interviews with fan practitioners. It will be popular with scholars of cultural studies, cultural history, media studies, fan studies; Disney fans, and students at any level

What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokémon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. Yet this industry generates billions in revenue by thinking creatively about digital distribution, free-to-play content, and phenomena like e-sports and live streaming. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment? One Up offers a pioneering empirical analysis of innovation and strategy in the video game industry to explain how it has evolved from a fringe activity to become a mainstream form of entertainment. Joost van Dreunen, a widely recognized industry expert with over twenty years of experience, analyzes how game makers, publishers, and platform holders have tackled strategic challenges to make the video game industry what it is today. Using more than three decades of rigorously compiled industry data, he demonstrates that video game companies flourish when they bring the same level of creativity to business strategy that they bring to game design. Filled with case studies of companies such as Activision Blizzard, Apple, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nexon, Sony, Take-Two Interactive, Tencent, and Valve, this book forces us to rethink common misconceptions around the emergence of digital and mobile gaming. One Up is required reading for investors, creatives, managers, and anyone looking to learn about the major drivers of change and growth in contemporary entertainment.

Across the globe, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft have accumulated power in ways that existing regulatory and intellectual frameworks struggle to comprehend. A consensus is emerging that the power of these new digital monopolies is unprecedented, and that it has important implications for journalism, politics, and society. It is increasingly clear that democratic societies require new legal and conceptual tools if they are to adequately understand, and if necessary check the economic might of these companies. Equally, that we need to better comprehend the ability of such firms to control personal data and to shape the flow of news, information, and public opinion. In this volume, Martin Moore and Damian Tambini draw together the world's leading researchers to examine the digital dominance of technologies platforms and look at the evidence behind the rising tide of criticism of the tech giants. In fifteen chapters, the authors examine the economic, political, and social impacts of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, in order to understand the different facets of their power and how it is manifested. Digital Dominance is the first interdisciplinary volume on this topic, contributing to a conversation which is critical to maintaining the health of democracies across the world.

Entrepreneurial Cosplay takes a comprehensive and insightful look at the business of cosplay, exploring the ways that artists and fans engage in entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial practices to gain personal and professional success. Centred around the concept of entrepreneurship and the newly emerging concept of intrapreneurship - using entrepreneurial principles to enhance or further an existing concept, organization or product - the book showcases the ways in which cosplayers create new ideas, new ways of working, and new ways of doing things, exploiting their knowledge to create new opportunities. By analyzing the numerous motivations driving cosplay behavior (self-expression, external recognition, and financial gain), this volume provides a unique view of current cosplay practice and its relationship to economic activity. Offering important insight into this emerging area, this book will be of interest to scholars seeking to learn how entrepreneurial and economic models may be used to understand the emerging field of cosplay studies, as well as students and scholars working in the fields of Entrepreneurship, Business, Fan Studies, Visual Art Studies, and Gender Studies.

Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Days is a remarkable look at a historic city enmeshed in racial tensions, revealing untold or forgotten stories of secret deals, law enforcement intrigue, and courage alongside pivotal events that would sweep change across the nation. Birmingham, Alabama gave birth to momentous events that spawned the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and affected world history. But that is not why it is known as The Magic City. It earned that nickname with its meteoric rise from a cornfield valley to an industrial boomtown in the late 1800s. Images of snarling dogs and fire hoses of the 1960s define popular perception of the city, obscuring the complexity of race relations in a tumultuous time and the contributions of white citizens who quietly or boldly influenced social change. Behind the Magic Curtain peels back history’s veil to reveal little-known or never-told stories of an intriguing cast of characters that include not only progressive members of the Jewish, Christian, and educational communities, but also a racist businessman and a Ku Klux Klan member, who, in an ironic twist, helped bring about justice and forward racial equality and civil rights. Woven throughout the book are the firsthand recollections of a reporter with the state’s major newspaper of the time. Embedded with law enforcement, he reveals the fascinating details of their secret wiretapping and intelligence operations. With a deft hand, Thorne offers the insight that can be gained from understanding little-known but important perspectives, painting a multihued portrait of a city that has figured so prominently in history, but which so few really know.

Hollywood Drive: What it Takes to Break in, Hang in & Make it in the Entertainment Industry is the essential guide to starting and succeeding at a career in film and TV. The completely updated second edition features new interviews with industry professionals, information about the changing social media landscape, the wide array of distribution platforms that are available to aspiring filmmakers, and much more. Honthaner's invaluable experience and advice give those attempting to enter and become successful in the entertainment industry the edge they need to stand out among the intense competition. Hollywood Drive explores the realities of the industry: various career options, effective job search strategies, how to write an effective cover letter and resume, what to expect on your first job, the significance of networking and building solid industry relationships, how a project is sold, and how a production office and set operate. You'll learn how to define your goals and make a plan to achieve them, how to survive the tough times, how to deal with big egos and bad tempers, and how to put your passion to work for you. Although no book or class can totally prepare you for a career in the entertainment industry, Hollywood Drive offers insights, direction, and a sense of confidence.