This book offers critical readings of issues in education and technology and demonstrates how researchers can use critical perspectives from sociology, digital media, cultural studies, and other fields to broaden the "ed-tech" research imagination, open up new topics, ask new questions, develop theory, and articulate an agenda for informed action.

This book explores ways in which passions came to be conceived, performed and authenticated in the eighteenth-century marketplace of print. It considers satire and sympathy in various environments, ranging from popular novels and journalism, through philosophical studies of the Scottish Enlightenment, to last words, aesthetics, and plastic surgery.

Although Christians are lovers of the Bible, not all have learned and followed the venerable Christian custom of praying directly from Scripture. In this thoroughly readable and helpful book, Evan Howard shows Christians how to recover and reap the rewards of this vital practice. Praying the Scriptures features down-to-earth guidance on praying the Lord's Prayer and the Psalms, on praying out of the Scriptures for worship, thanksgiving, revival and personal needs. It includes a clear and thorough listing of biblical passages for a variety of prayers. Free of gimmickry but full of practical advice, this book is for new Christians and those who desire a deeper, more biblically saturated prayer life.

The book covers tools in the study of online social networks such as machine learning techniques, clustering, and deep learning. A variety of theoretical aspects, application domains, and case studies for analyzing social network data are covered. The aim is to provide new perspectives on utilizing machine learning and related scientific methods and techniques for social network analysis. Machine Learning Techniques for Online Social Networks will appeal to researchers and students in these fields.

This book conveys Thackeray's development as a book reviewer, journalist, art exhibition critic, short-story writer, satirical essayist and novelist a development that culminates in the creation of his masterpiece, Vanity Fair one of the glories of English imaginative writing. Articulating the connections between these vigorous and lively youthful works, and the growth of Thackeray as an increasingly profound participant observer, Harden reveals the exuberant imaginative growth and deepening understanding of a supremely perceptive critic of human social life.

The mainstreaming of pornographic imagery into fashion and popular culture at the turn of the millennium in Britain and the US signalled a dramatic cultural shift in construction of both femininity and masculinity. For men and women, raunch became the new cool. This engaging book draws from a diverse range of examples including film, popular tabloids, campus culture, mass media marketing campaigns, facebook profiles, and art exhibits to explore expressions and meanings of porn chic. Bringing a cultural and feminist lens to the material, this book challenges the reader to question the sexual agency of the 12-year-old girl dressed to seduce in fashions inspired by Katie Price, the college co-ed flashing her breasts for a film maker during Spring break, and the waitress making her customer happy with chicken wings and a nice set of Hooters. Further it explores the raunchy bad boys being paid handsomely to tell the world about their sexual exploits, online, on film, and in popular press bestsellers. The book also contains thought-provoking artwork by Nicola Bockelmann which focuses on the permeable border between pornography and mainstream culture and urges viewers to question everyday explicitness. Balancing a popular culture approach and a strong analytic lens, Porn Chic will engage a wide audience of readers interested in popular culture, fashion, and gender studies.

How the provisions of the First Amendment pertain to high school publications is thoroughly examined in this practical reference manual. Ingelhart presents a comprehensive and useful review of nearly all court cases and legal provisions relating to high school newspapers, yearbooks, and magazines, as well as to the students producing them. The overall concept of a free press as provided for in the First and Fourteenth Amendments is discussed. Related free expression matters are presented as background for understanding the Constitutional protections provided for high school journalists. Court-approved restraints on or regulations of the high school press are examined in depth, as are other forms of expression considered outside First Amendment coverage. Special problems concerning printers, photographers, and suppliers are also considered, as are the legal quandries of advisers. The entire volume is carefully arranged into specific sections for quick and convenient use as a reference source. An annotated alphabetical listing of all cases referred to includes available legal citations and indicates the location of additional information.

September 11th, 2001 remains a focal point of American consciousness, a site demanding ongoing excavation, a site at which to mark before and after "everything" changed. In ways both real and intangible the entire sequence of events of that day continues to resonate in an endlessly proliferating aftermath of meanings that continue to evolve. Presenting a collection of analyses by an international body of scholars that examines America's recent history, this book focuses on popular culture as a profound discursive site of anxiety and discussion about 9/11 and demystifies the day's events in order to contextualize them into a historically grounded series of narratives that recognizes the complex relations of a globalized world. Essays in Reframing 9/11 share a collective drive to encourage new and original approaches for understanding the issues both within and beyond the official political rhetoric of the events of the "The Global War on Terror" and issues of national security. >

As mass communication is a major topic of interest in American colleges, there is also a growing interest in comparative mass media in other countries. This book is designed to put current practices in the United States in comparative perspective and thus shed new light on American media practices. It is designed as a resource for the growing number of courses dealing with international media, and a recommended supplement for basic mass communications courses that provide a global perspective.

The turn of the twenty-first century has seen an ever-increasing profile for religion, contrary to long-standing predictions of its decline. Instead, the West has experienced what some call a realignment of religion where it persists in conjunction with other institutions and structures. Outside the West, religion is an ever more prominent force in social and political movements of both reform and retrenchment. Across these contexts, no issue in religion is of as much concern as fundamentalism or rather the fundamentalisms within various traditions which are seen to be fomenting religious, social, ethnic, and political tension and conflict. The contributions to this volume represent the first effort to look at fundamental is ms and the media together and address the resulting relations and interactions from critical perspectives of history, technology, geography, and practice. The result lays important groundwork for scholarship on these new and increasingly important phenomena.

Influential author of highly unconventional crime fiction, screenwriter, and occasional film director, Sebastien Japrisot was one of those rare contemporary writers in France able to establish an international reputation for himself. Although Japrisot's novels in particular continue to be read and studied across the world, this volume is the first ever academic study of Japrisot's work in the fields of both literature and cinema. Through a combination of thematic and text-specific studies, this volume takes in, and examines the legacy of, Japrisot's work from his youthful writings under his real name, Jean-Baptiste Rossi, to his crime fiction and screen writings of the 1960s and 1970s, concluding with his final novel Un long dimanche de fiancailles (A Very Long Engagement). It is both an essential introduction to Japrisot and a valuable academic assessment of his work's importance in the field of contemporary French literature and film.

The Beverly Hillbillies includes the portrayal of rich versus poor, the American dream, wealth, and social mobility in popular culture. The Hillbillies was a phenomenon of post-World War II America, the second wave after the 1950s, the dustbelt Depression meets the promise of opportunity achieved through luck. Luck counts in liberal society. It is, said Machiavelli, "the arbiter of half of what we do." But is success based on luck really the American dream? And who is the bigger success story-the Hillbillies or those who have earned their wealth? Whom do we want to be or be like? Everyone wants to win the lottery, but is everyone willing to do what it takes to achieve financial independence without winning the lottery? Does winning the lottery bring social status or can it only be achieved by labor? In sum, Paul Henning's brilliant comedy series The Beverly Hillbillies is replete with political ideas and has come to occupy a special place in popular culture as a classic television icon because of its deeper meaning and relationship to how we think about wealth, status, social mobility and the American dream.

Social Media Abyss plunges into the paradoxical condition of the new digital normal versus a lived state of emergency. There is a heightened, post-Snowden awareness; we know we are under surveillance but we click, share, rank and remix with a perverse indifference to technologies of capture and cultures of fear. Despite the incursion into privacy by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, social media use continues to be a daily habit with shrinking gadgets now an integral part of our busy lives. We are thrown between addiction anxiety and subliminal, obsessive use. Where does art, culture and criticism venture when the digital vanishes into the background? Geert Lovink strides into the frenzied social media debate with Social Media Abyss - the fifth volume of his ongoing investigation into critical internet culture. He examines the symbiotic yet problematic relation between networks and social movements, and further develops the notion of organized networks. Lovink doesn't just submit to the empty soul of 24/7 communication but rather provides the reader with radical alternatives. Selfie culture is one of many Lovink's topics, along with the internet obsession of American writer Jonathan Franzen, the internet in Uganda, the aesthetics of Anonymous and an anatomy of the Bitcoin religion. Will monetization through cybercurrencies and crowdfunding contribute to a redistribution of wealth or further widen the gap between rich and poor? In this age of the free, how a revenue model of the 99% be collectively designed? Welcome back to the Social Question.

This book describes the application of a high-level technology to solve problems in distributed systems that have networked structures with millions to billions of nodes. The main difference from other works is that the approach is based on holistically and simultaneously analysing these systems using a spatial pattern-matching mode, which produces solutions hundreds of times faster than usual. The latest version of the technology is described, together with implementation details and basic Spatial Grasp Language. In addition, the book highlights numerous solutions, covering graph and network problems, their use in large social, industrial, and business ecosystems, social robotics and driverless transport, and the possibility of extrapolating from known gestalt laws on distributed systems, which could potentially be applied in civil and defence contexts. The book is intended for system scientists, business and industry managers, economists, application programmers, security and defence personnel, as well as university students.

Selecting journals that speak for a very large number of topics addressed by the conservative press, this volume profiles selected conservative journals published since 1787. The conservative press has scarcely spoken with a single voice, whether the topics treated or even the time inhabited are the same or different. Yet, these journals testify to the persistent vigor and importance of conservatism. Together they provide a focused survey of the history of American conservative thought from the late 18th Century to the late 19th Century. Along with the companion volume covering the 20th Century conservative press, the book provides an important resource on conservative thought in America.

Despite the disparities in conservative intellectual thought, the journals covered, even the more idiosyncratic and extreme, are connected by their core values of conservatism. The book is organized into sections reflecting these connections. The first section covers journals associated with Federal, Whig, or, in the Civil War era, Northern Democratic political interests. A later section includes journals sharing an attachment to Southern conservative values during the antebellum and Reconstruction periods. Two sections deal, respectively, with 19th Century Orthodox Protestant periodicals and 19th Century Catholic and Episcopal journals, and yet another section discusses journals united by a major focus on literary topics and cultural connections.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the present 'age of austerity' has repeatedly been compared to the wartime and postwar austerity years. For many, the rise of austerity nostalgia suggests a compliant public in thrall to the command to 'keep calm and carry on' while the welfare state is dismantled around them. Yet, at the same time, the idea that the Second World War can serve as a compelling historical precedent for sustainable living has found favour in environmental and anti-consumerist debate. Challenging dominant approaches to 'austerity', Rebecca Bramall explores the presence and persuasiveness of the past in contemporary popular culture, focusing intensively on the contradictions, antagonisms, alternatives and possibilities that the current conjuncture presents. In doing so, she exemplifies a new approach to emergent uses of the past, questioning longstanding assumptions about the relationship between history, culture and politics.

We cannot truly understand - let alone counter - terrorism in the 21st century unless we also understand the processes of communication that underpin it. This book challenges what we know about terrorism, showing that current approaches are inadequate and outdated, and develops a new communication model to understand terrorism in the media age.

With the increasing use and penetration of digital information technologies throughout its processes and products, the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental and irreversible transformation. Provided here is a comprehensive single-volume study of that transformation which demonstrates how publishing managers can best take advantage of the opportunities the profound changes will bring. In 15 clearly-written chapters, the seven key elements of publishing, the 7M's, are detailed. An enumeration of critical core concepts and over 30 figures and tables assist in this timely analysis that is essential reading for all stakeholders in the future of publishing.

This eloquent and masterful book details how the recent advancements in digital information technology mark a fundamental and irreversible transformation in the publishing industry. The clearly presented and highly readable text provides a much-needed, concise, easy-to-grasp introduction to this new world of digital publishing, the opportunities it presents, and what it means for managers in the industry, including the fundamental shift from format-based enterprises (e.g., book publishers) to firms that are developers and managers of intellectual properties in multiple forms which best meet their customers' information needs. Throughout the study, the author, a media executive who has held managerial positions in major book publishing, cable television, and software firms, focuses on the business strategies that both traditional print-based and new media publishing firms must implement to adapt and thrive in this rapidly evolving and complex environment.

After an introductory chapter that reviews the major symptoms of change in the current publishing industry environment, the author examines the Information Age and the new information industry as the foundation for his analysis. He then presents his new framework, the seven Ms of publishing, that serves both as the structural backbone and main thesis of the study. The central 11 chapters of the book detail these seven Ms: the five value-added Ms of Material, Mode, Media, Means, and Market; and the two infrastructural Ms of Management and Money. The author supports his analysis with over 30 figures and tables that vividly depict the key points of the study. He also delineates 45 core concepts of publishing in the Information Age within the seven Ms. The final chapter of the book presents the author's vision of the digital publishing enterprise and the paradigm of promise for managers and other stakeholders in the future of publishing.

This study, written by a Russian expert on the media, analyzes the unique role of the mass media--television and the press--in the social, political, and economic changes that began in the Soviet Union in 1985 under the name of perestroika and culminated recently in the country's dissolution. In addition, the work examines the restructuring of the media, from mouthpiece of the Communist Party to independent commentator. By viewing the struggle for control of the media as reflective of the country's political turmoil, the author provides a fascinating insight into the ways and means of Russian politics.

Challenges the conventional wisdom that media creates a toxic environment for America's youth, diverting us from the real origins of problems affecting children today. Are school shootings the result of violent video games? Do sex-laden movies lead to promiscuity? Can Goth music create alienation? Repeatedly we are told the answer to these and similar questions is a resounding yes. But is this the right answer? It's Not the Media considers why media culture is a perennial target of both fascination and concern, and why we are so often encouraged to believe it is the root of many social problems. A look beyond the attention-grabbing headlines and political stumping reveals that fearing media feels right because media represents what we fear. And changes in media culture are easier to see than the complex economic, social, and political changes we have experienced over the past few decades. Digging deeper into the historical and societal trends of the past century and drawing from the most current social science research on the effects of media on children, Sternheimer presents a compelling argument that fear of social change, and what it means to be a kid in a today's media-saturate

Words matter in terrorism research. Not only do they describe reality, but they actively take part in the construction of the world as we see, talk, hear, imagine and ultimately react to it. "The Tabloid Terrorist" introduces a constructivist approach to the study of terrorism by examining the discursive constitution of the terrorist in tabloid newspapers. It shows how language in the media affects our perceptions of "terrorists" and how particular constructions of the "terrorist" automatically make certain counter-terrorism policies possible, logical and seemingly appropriate.