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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Communication studies > Media studies
The News Untold offers an important new perspective on media
narratives about poverty in Appalachia. It focuses on how
small-town reporters and editors in some of the region's poorest
communities decide what aspects of poverty are news, how their
audiences interpret those decisions, and how those two related
processes help shape broader understandings of economic need and
local social responsibility. Focusing on patterns of both media
creation and consumption, The News Untold shows how a lack of
constructive news coverage of economic need can make it harder for
the poor to voice their concerns. Critical and inclusive news
coverage of poverty at the local level, Michael Clay Carey writes,
can help communities start to look past old stereotypes and
attitudes and encourage solutions that incorporate broader sets of
community voices. Such an effort will require journalists and
community leaders to reexamine some of the professional traditions
and social views that often shape what news looks like in small
towns.
Literary critics and authors have long argued about the importance
or unimportance of an author's relationship to readers. What can be
said about the rhetorical relationship that exists between author
and reader? How do authors manipulate character, specifically, to
modulate the emotional appeal of character so a reader will feel
empathy, awe, even delight? In At Arm's Length: A Rhetoric of
Character in Children's and Young Adult Literature, Mike Cadden
takes a rhetorical approach that complements structural, affective,
and cognitive readings. The study offers a detailed examination of
the ways authorial choice results in emotional invitation. Cadden
sounds the modulation of characters along a continuum from those
larger than life and awe inspiring to the life-sized and
empathetic, down to the pitiable and ridiculous, and all those
spaces between. Cadden examines how authors alternate between
holding the young reader at arm's length from and drawing them into
emotional intensity. This balance and modulation are key to a
rhetorical understanding of character in literature, film, and
television for the young. Written in accessible language and of
interest and use to undergraduates and seasoned critics, At Arm's
Length provides a broad analysis of stories for the young child and
young adult, in book, film, and television. Throughout, Cadden
touches on important topics in children's literature studies,
including the role of safety in children's media, as well as
character in multicultural and diverse literature. In addition to
treating ""traditional"" works, he analyzes special cases-forms,
including picture books, verse novels, and graphic novels, and
modes like comedy, romance, and tragedy.
This volume examines communicative justice from the perspective of
the pluriverse and explores how it is employed to work towards key
pluriverse goals of environmental, cognitive, sociocultural,
sociopolitical, and political economy justice. The book identifies
and explains the unequal power relations in place that limit the
possibilities of communication justice, the challenges and
difficulties faced by activists and communities, the ways in which
communities and movements have confronted power structures through
discourse and material action, and their successes and limitations
in creating new structures that promote the right to, and
facilitate a future for, communicative justice. The volume features
contributions based on experiences of resistance and transformation
in the Global South-Bolivia, Ecuador, India, Malawi, and
collaborations between the continents of Latin America and
Africa-as well as notable studies from the Global North-Japan,
Spain, and the United Kingdom-that defy hegemonic models. This book
is essential for students and scholars interested in media and
communication activism, media practice for development and social
change, and communication for development and social change, as
well as those actively engaged with activism and social justice.
Since 2010 "curation" has become a marketing buzzword. Wrenched
from its traditional home in the world of high art, everything from
food to bed linens to dog toys now finds itself subject to this
formerly rarified activity. Most of the time the term curation is
being inaccurately used to refer to the democratization of choice -
an inevitable development and side effect of the economics of long
tail distribution. However, as any true curator will tell you -
curation is so much more than choosing - it relies upon human
intelligence, agency, evaluation and carefully considered criteria
- an accurate, if utopian definition of the much-abused and
overused term. Television on Demand examines what happens when
curation becomes the primary way in which media users or viewers
engage with mass media such as journalism, music, cinema, and, most
specifically, television. Mass media's economic model is based on
mass audiences - not a cornucopia of endless options from which
individuals can customize their intake. The rise of a curatorial
culture where viewers create their own entertainment packages and
select from a buffet of viewing options and venues has caused a
seismic shift for the post-network television industry - one whose
ultimate effects and outcomes remain unknown. Curatorial culture is
a revolutionary new consumption ecology - one that the post-network
television producers and distributors have not yet figured out how
to monetize, as they remain in what anthropologists call a
"liminal" state of a rite of passage - no longer what they used to
be, but not yet what they will become. How does an
advertiser-supported medium find leave alone quantify viewers who
DVR This is Us but fast-forward through the commercials; have a
season pass to The Walking Dead via iTunes to watch on their daily
commutes; are a season behind on Grey's Anatomy via Amazon Prime
but record the current season to watch after they're caught up;
binge watched Orange is the New Black the day it dropped on
Netflix; are watching new-to-them episodes of Downton Abbey on
pbs.org; never miss PewDiePie's latest video on YouTube, graze on
Law & Order: SVU on Hulu and/or TNT and religiously watch Jimmy
Fallon on The Tonight Show via digital rabbit ears? While audiences
clamor for more story-driven and scripted entertainment, their
transformed viewing habits undermine the dominant economic
structures that fund quality episodic series. Legacy broadcasters
are producing more scripted content than ever before and
experimenting with new models of distribution - CBS will premiere
its new Star Trek series on broadcast television but require fans
to subscribe to its AllAccess app to continue their viewing. NBC's
original Will & Grace is experiencing a syndication renaissance
as a limited-run season of new episodes are scheduled for fall
2017. At the same time, new producing entities such as Amazon
Studios, Netflix and soon Apple TV compete with high-budget
"television" programs that stream around traditional distribution
models, industrial structures and international licensing
agreements. Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the
Transformation of TV explains and theorizes curatorial culture;
examines the response of the "industry," its regulators, its
traditional audience quantifiers, and new digital entrants to the
ecosystem of the empowered viewer; and considers the viable
future(s) of this crucial culture industry.
The power of the moving image to conjure marvelous worlds has
usually been to understand it in terms of 'move magic'. On film, a
fascination for enchantment and wonder has transmuted older beliefs
in the supernatural into secular attractions. But this study is not
about the history of special effects or a history of magic. Rather,
it attempts to determine the influence and status of secular magic
on television within complex modes of delivery before discovering
interstices with film. Historically, the overriding concern on
television has been for secular magic that informs and empowers
rather than a fairytale effect that deceives and mystifies. Yet,
shifting notions of the real and the uncertainty associated with
the contemporary world has led to television developing many
different modes that have become capable of constant hybridization.
The dynamic interplay between certainty and indeterminacy is the
key to understanding secular magic on television and film and
exploring the interstices between them. Sexton ranges from the
real-time magic of street performers, such as David Blaine, Criss
Angel, and Dynamo, to Penn and Teller's comedy magic, to the
hypnotic acts of Derren Brown, before finally visiting the 2006
films The Illusionist and The Prestige. Each example charts how the
lack of clear distinctions between reality and illusion in modes of
representation and presentation disrupt older theoretical
oppositions. Secular Magic and the Moving Image not only
re-evaluates questions about modes and styles but raises further
questions about entertainment and how the relations between the
program maker and the audience resemble those between the conjuror
and spectator. By re-thinking these overlapping practices and
tensions and the marking of the indeterminacy of reality on media
screens, it becomes possible to revise our understanding of
inter-medial relations.
In Film and Video Intermediality, Janna Houwen innovatively
rewrites the concept of medium specificity in order to answer the
questions "what is meant by video?" and "what is meant by film?"
How are these two media (to be) understood? How can film and video
be defined as distinct, specific media? In this era of mixed moving
media, it is vital to ask these questions precisely and especially
on the media of video and film. Mapping the specificity of film and
video is indispensable in analyzing and understanding the many
contemporary intermedial objects in which film and video are mixed
or combined.
Migration, Mobility and Sojourning in Cross-cultural Films:
Interculturing Cinema draws on existing scholarship on global
movements and intercultural communication in cinema to analyze six
cross-cultural films. Ishani Mukherjee and Maggie Griffith Williams
locate key themes that tie into the complexity and implications of
global movements, including migrants' experiences of culture-shock,
cultural assimilation and/or integration, cultural identities in
transition, social mobility and movements, and the short-term
intercultural impact that sojourners experience in unfamiliar
cultural space. Mukherjee and Williams explore how intercultural
communication functions in the storytelling and in the formation of
character relationships in these films, arguing that the depictions
of migration, mobility, and the resulting intercultural
communications are complex and stressful moments of conflict that
lead to mixed results. Scholars of film studies, communication,
migrant studies, sociology, and cultural studies will find this
book particularly useful.
Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration: US Teens' Use of Social
Media to Negotiate Offline Struggles considers teens' social media
use as a lens through which to more clearly see American
adolescence, girlhood, and marginality in the twenty-first century.
Detailing a year-long ethnography following a racially, ethnically,
and economically diverse group of female, rural, teenaged
adolescents living in the Midwest region of the United States, this
book investigates how young women creatively call upon social media
in everyday attempts to address, mediate, and negotiate the
struggles they face in their offline lives as minors, females, and
ethnic and racial minorities. In tracing girls' appreciation and
use of social media to roots anchored well outside of the
individual, this book finds American girls' relationships with
social media to be far more culturally nuanced than adults
typically imagine. There are material reasons for US teens' social
media use explained by how we do girlhood, adolescence, family,
class, race, and technology. And, as this book argues, an unpacking
of these areas is essential to understanding adolescent girls'
social media use.
Although many developments surrounding the Internet campaign are
now considered to be standard fare, there were a number of new
developments in 2016. Drawing on original research conducted by
leading experts, The Internet and the 2016 Presidential Campaign
attempts to cover these developments in a comprehensive fashion.
How are campaigns making use of the Internet to organize and
mobilize their ground game? To communicate their message? The book
also examines how citizens made use of online sources to become
informed, follow campaigns, and participate. Contributions also
explore how the Internet affected developments in media reporting,
both traditional and non-traditional, about the campaign. What
other messages were available online, and what effects did these
messages have had on citizen's attitudes and vote choice? The book
examines these questions in an attempt to summarize the 2016 online
campaign.
This book presents the first comprehensive analysis of the
political communication elite- high-ranking journalists, editors,
politicians and their communication advisors - that shapes the
content and form of political messages, news, debate and decisions
in modern democracies. Based on an innovative combination of elite
theory and political communication studies, the book develops an
integrated and comprehensive approach to elite cohesion in
political communication, focusing on the extent and patterns of
attitudinal consonance among media and political elites. Building
on unique survey data from more than 1,500 high-ranking politicians
and journalists in six European countries (Sweden, Denmark,
Germany, Austria, France and Spain), the book provides unique
insights into current reality of mediatized politics, and the key
players shaping it.
Israeli television, currently celebrating fifty years of
broadcasting, has become one of the most important content sources
on the international TV drama market, when serials such as
Homeland, Hostages, Fauda, Zaguory Empire and In Treatment were
bought by international networks, HBO included. Offering both a
textual reading and discourse analysis of contemporary Israeli
television dramas, Itay Harlap adopts a case study approach in
order to address production, reception and technological
developments in its accounts. His premise is that the meeting point
between social trends within Israeli society (primarily the rise of
opposition groups to the hegemony of the
Zionist-Jewish-masculine-Ashkenazi ideologies) and major changes in
the medium in Israel (which are comparable to international changes
that have been titled "post-TV"), led to the creation of television
dramas characterized by controversial themes and complex
narratives, which present identities in ways never seen before on
television or in other Israeli mediums.
The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 was one of the most brutal conflicts
to have erupted since the end of the Second World War. But although
the war occurred in 'Europe's backyard' and received significant
media coverage in the West, relatively little scholarly attention
has been devoted to cultural representations of the conflict.
Stephen Harper analyses how the war has been depicted in global
cinema and television over the past quarter of a century. Focusing
on the representation of some of the war's major themes, including
humanitarian intervention, the roles of NATO and the UN, genocide,
rape and ethnic cleansing, Harper explores the role of popular
media culture in reflecting, reinforcing -- and sometimes
contesting -- nationalist ideologies.
This edited collection examines the effects that macrosystems have
on the figuration of our everyday-of microdystopias-and argues that
microdystopic narratives are part of a genre that has emerged in
contract to classic dystopic manifestations of world-shattering
events. From different methodological and theoretical positions in
fieldworks ranging from literary works and young adult series to
concrete places and games, the contributors in Microdystopias:
Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment sound the depths of an
existential sense of shrinking horizons - spatially, temporally,
emotionally, and politically. The everyday encroachment on our
sense of spatial orientation that gradually and discreetly shrinks
the horizons of possibilities is demonstrated by examining what the
form of the microdystopic look like when they are aesthetically
configured. Contributors analyze the aesthetics that play a
particularly central and complex role in mediating, as well as
disrupting, the parameters of dystopian emergences and emergencies,
reflecting an increasingly uneasy relationship between the
fictional, the cautionary, and the real. Scholars of media studies,
sociology, and philosophy will find this book of particular
interest.
In this fifth book on sport and the nature of reputation, editors
Lisa Doris Alexander and Joel Nathan Rosen have tasked their
contributors with examining reputation from the perspective of
celebrity and spectacle, which in some cases can be better defined
as scandal. The subjects chronicled in this volume have all proven
themselves to exist somewhere on the spectacular spectrum-the
spotlight seemed always to gravitate toward them. All have
displayed phenomenal feats of athletic prowess and artistry, and
all have faced a controversy or been thrust into a situation that
grows from age-old notions of the spectacle. Some handled the
hoopla like the champions they are, or were, while others struggled
and even faded amid the hustle and flow of their runaway celebrity.
While their individual narratives are engrossing, these stories
collectively paint a portrait of sport and spectacle that offers
context and clarity. Written by a range of scholarly contributors
from multiple disciplines, The Circus Is in Town: Sport, Celebrity,
and Spectacle contains careful analysis of such megastars as LeBron
James, Tonya Harding, David Beckham, Shaquille O'Neal, Maria
Sharapova, and Colin Kaepernick. This final volume of a project
that has spanned the first three decades of the twenty-first
century looks to sharpen questions regarding how it is that
reputations of celebrity athletes are forged, maintained,
transformed, repurposed, destroyed, and at times rehabilitated. The
subjects in this collection have been driven by this notion of the
spectacle in ways that offer interesting and entertaining inquiry
into the arc of athletic reputations. Contributions by Lisa Doris
Alexander, Matthew H. Barton, Andrew C. Billings, Carlton Brick,
Ted M. Butryn, Brian Carroll, Arthur T. Challis, Roxane Coche,
Curtis M. Harris, Jay Johnson, Melvin Lewis, Jack Lule, Rory
Magrath, Matthew A. Masucci, Andrew McIntosh, Jorge E. Moraga,
Leigh M. Moscowitz, David C. Ogden, Joel Nathan Rosen, Kevin A.
Stein, and Henry Yu.
Contributions by Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Marc DiPaolo, Emine
Akkulah Do?fan, Caroline Eades, Noelle Hedgcock, Tina Olsin Lent,
Rashmila Maiti, Jack Ryan, Larry T. Shillock, Richard Vela, and
Geoffrey Wilson In Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and
Process, editor Allen H. Redmon brings together eleven essays from
a range of voices in adaptation studies. This anthology explores
the political and ethical contexts of specific adaptations and, by
extension, the act of adaptation itself. Grounded in questions of
gender, genre, and race, these investigations focus on the ways
attention to these categories renegotiates the rules of power,
privilege, and principle that shape the contexts that seemingly
produce and reproduce them. Contributors to the volume examine such
adaptations as Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, Jacques Tourneur's
Out of the Past, Taylor Sheridan's Sicario and Sicario: Day of the
Soldado, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Wolf Totem, Spike Lee's He's Got
Game, and Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. Each chapter considers the
expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their
capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples,
two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase
another. Building on the growing trends in adaptation studies,
these essays explore the ways filmic texts experienced as
adaptations highlight ethical or political concerns and argue that
spectators are empowered to explore implications being raised by
the adaptations.
A collaboration of political activism and participatory culture
seeking to upend consumer capitalism, including interviews with The
Yes Men, The Guerrilla Girls, among others. Coined in the 1980s,
"culture jamming" refers to an array of tactics deployed by
activists to critique, subvert, and otherwise "jam" the workings of
consumer culture. Ranging from media hoaxes and advertising
parodies to flash mobs and street art, these actions seek to
interrupt the flow of dominant, capitalistic messages that permeate
our daily lives. Employed by Occupy Wall Street protesters and the
Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot alike, culture jamming
scrambles the signal, injects the unexpected, and spurs audiences
to think critically and challenge the status quo. The essays,
interviews, and creative work assembled in this unique volume
explore the shifting contours of culture jamming by plumbing its
history, mapping its transformations, testing its force, and
assessing its efficacy. Revealing how culture jamming is at once
playful and politically transgressive, this accessible collection
explores the degree to which culture jamming has fulfilled its
revolutionary aims. Featuring original essays from prominent media
scholars discussing Banksy and Shepard Fairey, foundational texts
such as Mark Dery's culture jamming manifesto, and artwork by and
interviews with noteworthy culture jammers including the Guerrilla
Girls, The Yes Men, and Reverend Billy, Culture Jamming makes a
crucial contribution to our understanding of creative resistance
and participatory culture.
In the very near future, "smart" technologies and "big data" will
allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in
politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to
solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to
get more people to do the right thing. But how will such
"solutionism" affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and
irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily
manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such
problems are simply vices in disguise? What if some friction in
communication is productive and some hypocrisy in politics
necessary? The temptation of the digital age is to fix
everything--from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity--by
digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifying behavior. But when we
change the motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic behavior
we may also change the very nature of that behavior. Technology,
Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement--but only
if we keep solutionism in check and learn to appreciate the
imperfections of liberal democracy. Some of those imperfections are
not accidental but by design.
Arguing that we badly need a new, post-Internet way to debate the
moral consequences of digital technologies, "To Save Everything,
Click Here" warns against a world of seamless efficiency, where
everyone is forced to wear Silicon Valley's digital
straitjacket.
When Donald J. Trump announced his campaign for president in 2015,
journalists, historians, and politicians alike attempted to compare
his candidacy to that of Governor George C. Wallace. Like Trump,
Wallace, who launched four presidential campaigns between 1964 and
1976, utilized rhetoric based in resentment, nationalism, and anger
to sway and eventually captivate voters among America's white
majority. Though separated by almost half a century, the campaigns
of both Wallace and Trump broke new grounds for political
partisanship and divisiveness. In Fear, Hate, and Victimhood: How
George Wallace Wrote the Donald Trump Playbook, author Andrew E.
Stoner conducts a deep analysis of the two candidates, their
campaigns, and their speeches and activities, as well as their
coverage by the media, through the lens of demagogic rhetoric.
Though past work on Wallace argues conventional politics overcame
the candidate, Stoner makes the case that Wallace may in fact be a
prelude to the more successful Trump campaign. Stoner considers how
ideas about "in-group" and "out-group" mentalities operate in
politics, how anti-establishment views permeate much of the
rhetoric in question, and how expressions of victimhood often
paradoxically characterize the language of a leader praised for
"telling it like it is." He also examines the role of political
spectacle in each candidate's campaigns, exploring how media
struggles to respond to-let alone document-demagogic rhetoric.
Ultimately, the author suggests that the Trump presidency can be
understood as an actualized version of the Wallace presidency that
never was. Though vast differences exist, the demagogic positioning
of both men provides a framework to dissect these times-and perhaps
a valuable warning about what is possible in our highly digitized
information society.
The 2019 European Electoral Campaign: In the Time of Populism and
Social Media examines political advertising during the 2019
elections to the European Parliament, which has become the largest
supranational campaign of its kind in the world. Based on a
research project funded by the European Parliament, and an archive
of more than 11,000 campaign items, the book draws on results from
a major content analysis covering every one of the 28 member states
involved. The 2019 European Electoral Campaign delivers a unique
comparative assessment on the state of political communication
within a European Union convulsed by momentous change. This book
will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of
political communication, media, political science, history,
European (Union) studies as well as a wider readership including
politicians, political strategists, and journalists.
This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music
video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which
represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video,
a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively
under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has
remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the
music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the
intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other
hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of
avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the
digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the
integration of special effects into a form designed to be
disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video
virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This
collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from
a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting
key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring
its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its
functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film
and video art, and following the music video's dissemination into
the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media
have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video,
well beyond the limits of "music television".
News discourse helps us understand society and how we respond to
traumatic events. News Framing of School Shootings: Journalism and
American Social Problems provides insights into how we come to
understand broad societal issues like gun control, the influence of
violent media on children, the role of parents, and the struggles
of teenagers dealing with bullying. This book evaluates the news
framing of eleven school shootings in the United States between
1996 and 2012, including the traumatic Columbine and Sandy Hook
events. Michael McCluskey explores reasons behind news coverage
patterns, including differences in medium, news audience political
ideology, the influence of political actors and other sources, and
the contextual elements of each shooting.
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