This is the most complete and compelling account of idols and celebrity in Japanese media culture to date. Engaging with the study of media, gender and celebrity, and sensitive to history and the contemporary scene, these interdisciplinary essays cover male and female idols, production and consumption, industrial structures and fan movements.

This book is an exploration of the extent to which young people in the UK are disaffected with traditional politics, and particularly the role played by televisual representations of the political process. The authors look at how television represents young people themselves, and at how young people use new forms of media to inform themselves politically --

This book shares and analyses the stories of Opal, a senior Alyawarra woman. Through her stories the reader glimpses the harsh colonial realities which many Aboriginal Australians have faced, highlighting the cultural embeddedness of autobiographical memory from a philosophical, psychological and anthropological perspective.

This collection of essays appears on the wave of digital media tutoring developments in university and college writing centers in the United States and around the world. It provides students and scholars of literacy, new media, and communication as well as writing center practitioners with a valuable new tool for understanding the progress and direction of new media debates at the intersection of writing, technology, and communication. Comprised of twenty essays by leading scholars in media, communication, composition, and writing center studies, Writing Centers and New Media is a major new reader that provides rich cross-disciplinary scholarship. As a rich resource for students and scholars, and as a sourcebook for writing center practitioners, this collection fills a critical gap in writing center scholarship that is essential and significant for the emerging practice of new media tutoring and for future developments in writing center studies.

Cosmopolitanism and the Media explores the diverse implications of today's digital media environments in relation to people's worldviews and social practices. The book presents an empirically grounded account of the relationship between cosmopolitanized lifeworlds and forces of surveillance, control and mobility.

This lucid and original work argues for a new style of political leadership, one which pays deliberate and sophisticated attention to the emotional dynamics of the public. In exploring this basic idea of 'emotional governance', Barry Richards also examines the often unhelpful contributions of the news media to the 'emotional public sphere'. A case study of terrorism, as a highly emotional topic and as a key political issue in many liberal democracies, grounds the book's ideas in today's political landscape.

This study challenges the conventional polarities used to describe British politics of the 1790s: Pitt versus Fox, Burke versus Paine, Church versus Dissent, ruling class versus working class, Jacobin versus anti-Jacobin. Such polarities were sedulously promoted by Pitt's wartime government, which applied "Jacobin" shamelessly to all its critics and opponents, and thus foreshadowed the McCarthyite tactic of guilt by association. The author seeks to make the less strident but more persuasive contemporary voices again audible. He takes seriously those who who deplored Britain's alliance with the partitioners of Poland.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT), originally a social theory, seeks to organize objects and non-human entities into social networks. Its most innovative claim approaches these networks outside the anthropocentric view, including both humans and non-human objects as active participants in a social context; because of this, the theory has applications in a myriad of domains, not merely in the social sciences. Applying the Actor-Network Theory in Media Studies applies this novel approach to media studies. This publication responds to the current trends in international media studies by presenting ANT as the new theoretical paradigm through which meaningful discussion and analysis of the media, its production, and its social and cultural effects. Featuring both case studies and theoretical and methodical meditations, this timely publication thoroughly considers the possibilities of these disparate, yet divergent fields. This book is intended for use by researchers, students, sociologists, and media analysts concerned with contemporary media studies.

Kazan tests several hypotheses on development communications derived from the ideas of Marx, Toynbee, Lerner, McLuhan, Frey, and Schiller, through three years of research he conducted in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar. He focuses on whether media content, rather than the process of media exposure (i.e., vicarious exposure to different experiences), is the decisive factor in cultivating modernity. Particularly, Kazan examines whether Gulf media, which convey socially and politically restricted "traditional" content in "traditional" societies, cultivate attitudinal "traditionality" or "modernity." Investigated are the differences in the impact of local, regional, and foreign media, and various media organs--including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, video, and electronic media. Kazan also tests the notion of cultural imperialism, such as the degrees of credibility that respondents lend to Western media, their interest in and satisfaction with Western and regional media, and the amount of time respondents allocate to Western and local media. Specific media studied include the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, Monte Carlo Radio, the BBC, Voice of the Arabs, Voice of the Arab Homeland, Radio of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the local broadcasting services of each Gulf country. Dr. Kazan presents both a review and a critique of classical and mainstream theories of modernization in general, and those of development communication in particular, to determine the degrees of validity, relevance, and applicability of these theories to the development situation of Gulf societies. Furthermore, Kazan develops an integrated mass media effects modelthat factors in both macro and micro processes that are dynamically interconnected, interdependent, and continuously evolving and changing, to account for the impact of media on modernity and development. Media impact, according to this model, should be understood, not only in terms of the socio-economic and psychological characteristics of the media audience, but also in terms of the dynamics of the whole socio-cultural and political system. Kazan concludes his study with a critique of the Western paradigm of development and presents the outline of a new paradigm of development that is more in harmony with the new physics, with the ecosystems, and with social justice.

Humor is pervasive in contemporary culture, and is generally celebrated as a public good. Yet there are times when it is felt to produce intolerance, misunderstanding or even hatred. This book brings together, for the first time, contributions that consider the ethics as well as the aesthetics of humor. The book focuses on the abuses and limits of humor, some of which excite considerable social tension and controversy. "Beyond a Joke" is an exciting intervention, full of challenging questions and issues.

Living Oil is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still photography, novels and memoirs. The book's unique focus is the aesthetic, sensory and emotional legacies of petroleum, from its rise to the preeminent modern fossil fuel during World War I through the current era of so-called Tough Oil. LeMenager conceives Tough Oil as a bid for continuity with the charismatic lifestyles of the American twentieth century that carries distinct and extreme external costs. She explores the uncomfortable, mixed feelings produced by oil's omnipresence in cultural artifacts such as books, films, hamburgers, and Aspirin tablets. The book makes a strong argument for the region as a vital intellectual frame for the study of fossil fuels, because at the regional level we can better recognize the material effects of petroleum on the day-to-day lives of humans and other, non-human lives. Varied forms of art, too, localize the material impacts of petro-culture. The fluid mobility of oil carries the book outside the United States, for instance to Alberta and Nigeria, emphasizing how both international and domestic resource regions have been mined to produce the idealized modern cultures of the so-called American Century.

The 'Indian Techie' has become a global icon, taking its place alongside McDonalds and MTV as one of the key symbols of contemporary globalization. India and the IT Revolution explores the contemporary emergence of cosmopolitan, high-tech India as marking the arrival of a truly global cyberculture. It argues against the notion that globalization is a process of 'Westernization', which radiates out unilaterally from the core, imposing itself upon a passive, backward periphery. Instead, it conceives of global culture as a dynamic, innovative network, which proceeds primarily from its edges.

Using a unique combination of cultural studies research, neo-pragmatist philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, the author sheds light on the formation of a social identity and the important role that mass media play in this process. Case studies covering a range of media and communities provide a model for developing a truly explanatory as well as descriptive account of self-media interaction that bridges the two opposing sides of the media audience debate and provides a significant new dimension to notions of "passive" and "active" media audiences.

More objects and devices are connected to digital networks than ever before. Things - from your phone to your car, from the heating to the lights in your house - have gathered the ability to sense their environments and create information about what is happening. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information. This has become known as 'the internet of things'. In this accessible introduction, Graham Meikle and Mercedes Bunz observe its promises of convenience and the breaking of new frontiers in communication. They also raise urgent questions regarding ubiquitous surveillance and information security, as well as the transformation of intimate personal information into commercial data. Discussing the internet of things from a media and communication perspective, this book is an important resource for courses analysing the internet and society, and essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the rapidly changing roles of our networked lives.

This book uses global perspectives to address questions of media ethics and justice in a local and transnational global environment, and examines the common denominator running through such disparate investigations of theories and practices of media ethics and justice in the democracies of India, South Africa, Pakistan, and the United States.

Two major regulatory activities have framed global media policies since World War II: the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) and the more recent World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Through extensive research and testimonies from those involved, this book presents an in-depth account from the 1970s to today of the major issues concerning information flow in international geopolitics, including a look at the negotiations surrounding the major policy debates. Few studies of NWICO and WSIS have considered the continuity between the two activities--or included in the debate the crucial intermediary period between--and this book provides new insight into an issue of multilingual and multicultural importance.

This study is about new media, the crisis of democracy and political renewal. It asks: What is the political? How can we understand politics in a network age? Can we talk sensibly about generational change? Analysing four international case studies, this book gives an optimistic assessment of how digital media supports new forms of politics

This work examines the operation of the First Amendment, especially where it concerns freedom of the press, during the nineteenth century. It examines contemporary nineteenth century views on press freedom, placing them in the context of the issues that prompted and shaped them. Primary sources--pamphlets, speeches, sermons, letters, diaries, newspapers, and official documents--were used to highlight free press issues. It confirms that First Amendment rights were controversial issues for many nineteenth century Americans. The Course of Tolerance examines previously ignored issues such as the Postal Bill of 1836 and press freedom during the Reconstruction period in the South, making this the most comprehensive volume on its subject to date. Other topics included are libel, the War of 1812, abolitionism, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. Through treatment of these issues, the reader is introduced to a broad variety of the nineteenth century's writings, many of which have not been analyzed thoroughly in this century. Following the main body of the book is a selected bibliography and index. This volume will be of great interest to students of communications law, journalism history, and First Amendment theory and philosophy.

This book concentrates exclusively on the dialogic turn in the governance of science and the environment. The starting point for this book is the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge in which practices claiming to be based on principles of dialogue and participation have spread across diverse social fields. As in other fields of social practice in the dialogic turn, the model of communication underpinning science and environmental governance is dialogue in which scientists and citizens engage in mutual learning on the basis of the different knowledge forms that they bring with them. The official aim is to involve citizens in processes of decision-making on scientific and environmental issues, including issues relating to the built environment such as urban planning. The attempt in this book has been made to build bridges across the fields of science and technology studies, environmental studies and media and communication studies in order to provide theoretically informed and empirically rich accounts of how citizen voices are articulated, invoked, heard, marginalised or silenced in science and environment communication.

This book identifies, documents, and analyzes the major dimensions of U.S. prime-time TV content. By exmining fictional TV series run in prime-time and on Saturday mornings over three seasons, the author and his research team have put together a fascinating study of American society according to television.

Film noir reflects the fatalistic themes and visual style of hard-boiled novelists and many ?migr? filmmakers in 1940s and 1950s America, emphasizing crime, alienation, and moral ambiguity. In The Philosophy of TV Noir, Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble argue that the legacy of film noir classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Sleep is also found in episodic television from the mid-1950s to the present. In this first-of-its-kind collection, contributors from philosophy, film studies, and literature raise fundamental questions about the human predicament, giving this unique volume its moral resonance and demonstrating why television noir deserves our attention. The introduction traces the development of TV noir and provides an overview and evaluation of the book's thirteen essays, each of which discusses an exemplary TV noir series. Realism, relativism, and integrity are discussed in essays on Dragnet, Naked City, The Fugitive, and Secret Agent. Existentialist themes of authenticity, nihilism, and the search for life's meaning are addressed in essays on Miami Vice, The Sopranos, Carnivale, and 24. The methods of crime scene investigation in The X-Files and CSI are examined, followed by an exploration of autonomy, selfhood, and interpretation in The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Millennium. With this focus on the philosophical dimensions of crime, espionage, and science fiction series, The Philosophy of TV Noir draws out the full implications of film noir and establishes TV noir as an art form in its own right.

Since the rise of television, much radio consists of 'capsule' news and music formats which are heard as background to other activities. However the medium offers a great deal more. This collection of essays shows how in North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and the South Pacific, radio continues to provide distinctive forms of content for the individual listener, yet also enables ethnic and cultural groups to maintain their sense of identity. Ranging from radio among the primordial communities to digital broadcasting and the internet, these essays suggest that the benefits and gratifications which radio confers remain unique and irreplaceable in this multi-media age. Andrew Crisell is Professor of Broadcasting Studies at the University of Sunderland. He is the author of "Understanding Radio" (2nd edition 1994) and "An Introductory History of British Broadcasting" (2nd edition 2002).

Russia's interactions with the West have been a perennial theme of Slavic Studies, and of Russian culture and politics. Likewise, representations of Russia have shaped the identities of many western cultures. No longer providing the 'Evil Empire' of 20th American popular consciousness, images of Russia have more recently bifurcated along two streams: that of the impoverished refugee and that of the sinister mafia gang. Focusing on film as an engine of intercultural communication, this is the first book to explore mutual perceptions of the foreign Other in the cinema of Russia and the West during, and after, communism. The book's structure reflects both sides of this fascinating dialogue: Part 1 covers Russian/Soviet cinematic representations of otherness, and Part 2 treats western representations of Russia and the Soviet Union. An extensive Introduction sets the dialogue in a theoretical context. The contributors include leading film scholars from the USA, Europe and Russia.

This book is the first scholarly exploration of the daytime serial television drama. The primary focus is on the social world as reflected in soap operas. Among the major areas examined within the society of daytime drama are the people, their problems, environment, and interactions.