As timely as the latest tweet, this book tracks the digital revolution as a paradigm shift that is transforming popular culture in as yet unforeseen ways. Bloggerati, Twitterati: How Blogs and Twitter Are Transforming Popular Culture explores the ongoing digital revolution and examines the way it is changing-and will change-the way people live and communicate. Starting from the proposition that the Internet is now the center of popular culture, the book offers descriptions of blogs and Twitter and the online behavior they foster. It looks at the demographics of users and the impact of the Internet on knowledge, thinking, writing, politics, and journalism. A primary focus is on the way blogs and tweets are opening up communication to the people, free from gatekeepers and sanctioned rhetoric. The other side of the coin is the online hijacking of the news and its potential for spreading misinformation and fomenting polarization, topics that are analyzed even as the situation continues to evolve. Finally, the book gathers predictions from cultural critics about the future of digital popular culture and makes a few predictions of its own. Sidebars featuring original and exclusive interviews with media personalities Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington, Martha Stewart, and others A timeline showing the history of the Internet, blogs, Twitter, and social media Cartoons depicting humorous aspects of Internet culture Snapshot views of blogs A bibliography and listings of selected blogsites

The music industry is going through a period of immense change brought about in part by the digital revolution. What is the role of music in the age of computers and the internet? How has the music industry been transformed by the economic and technological upheavals of recent years, and how is it likely to change in the future?

This is the first major study of the music industry in the new millennium. Wikstrom provides an international overview of the music industry and its future prospects in the world of global entertainment. They illuminate the workings of the music industry, and capture the dynamics at work in the production of musical culture between the transnational media conglomerates, the independent music companies and the public.

"The Music Industry" will become a standard work on the music industry at the beginning of the 21st century. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies, popular music, sociology and economics. It will also be of great value to professionals in the music industry, policy makers, and to anyone interested in the future of music.

Despite the pervasive rhetorics of immersion and embodiment found in industrial and social discourses, playing a video game is an exercise in non-linearity. The pervasiveness of trial and error mechanics, unforgiving game over screens, loading times, minute tweakings of options and settings, should lead us to consider video games as a medium that cannot eschew fragmentation. Every Game is an Island is an analysis and a critique of grey areas, dead ends and extremities found in digital games, an exploration of border zones where play and non-play coexist or compete. Riccardo Fassone describes the complexity of the experience of video game play and brings integral but often overlooked components of the gameplay experience to the fore, in an attempt to problematize a reading of video games as grandiosely immersive, all-encompassing narrative experiences. Through the analysis of closures and endings, limits and borders, and liminal states, this field-advancing study looks at the heart of a medium starting from its periphery.

It was over a decade ago that experimental psychologists and media-effects researchers declared the debate on the effects of violent video gaming as "essentially over," referring to the way violence in videogames increases aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors in players. Despite the decisive tone of this statement, neither the presence nor popularity of digital games has since diminished, with games continuing to attract new generations of players to experience its technological advancements in the narration of violence and its techniques of depiction. Drawing on new insights achieved from research located at an intersection between humanities, social and computer sciences, Gareth Schott's addition to the Approaches in Digital Game Studies series interrogates the nature and meaning of the "violence" encountered and experienced by game players. In focusing on the various ways "violence" is mediated by both the rule system and the semiotic layer of games, the aim is to draw out the distinctiveness of games' exploitation of violence or violent themes. An important if not canonical text in the debates about video games and violence, Violent Games constitutes an essential book for those wishing to make sense of the experience offered by games as technological, aesthetic, and communicational phenomena in the context of issues of media regulation and the classification of game content "as" violence.

This book explores the significance of professional writers and their role in developing British storytelling in the 1920s and 1930s, and their influence on the poetics of today's transmedia storytelling. Modern techniques can be traced back to the early twentieth century when film, radio and television provided professional writers with new formats and revenue streams for their fiction. The book explores the contribution of four British authors, household names in their day, who adapted work for film, television and radio. Although celebrities between the wars, Clemence Dane, G.B. Stern, Hugh Walpole and A.E.W Mason have fallen from view. The popular playwright Dane, witty novelist Stern and raconteur Walpole have been marginalised for being German, Jewish, female or gay and Mason's contribution to film has been overlooked also. It argues that these and other vocational authors should be reassessed for their contribution to new media forms of storytelling. The book makes a significant contribution in the fields of media studies, adaptation studies, and the literary middlebrow.

Black Mirror is The Twilight Zone of the twenty-first century. Already a philosophical classic, the series echoes the angst of an era, a civilization and consciousness fully engulfed in the 24/7 media spectacle spanning the planet. With clever plots and existential themes, Black Mirror presents near-futures where humans collide with technology and each other-tomorrows that might arrive in five years or five minutes. Featuring scholars from three continents and ten nations, Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory is an international collection of critical media theory applied to one of the most intellectually provocative TV shows of our time and the all-too-real conditions that inspire it. Drawing from thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Marshall McLuhan, and Paul Virilio, the authors reverse-engineer Black Mirror by probing the ideas, meanings, and conditions embedded in the episodes. This book is organized around six key topics reflected and explored in Black Mirror-human identity, surveillance culture, spectacle and hyperreality, aesthetics, technology and existence, and dystopian futures.

The Politics of Laughter in the Social Media Age: Perspectives from the Global South brings to critical and intellectual attention the role of humour in the digital era in the Global South. Many citizens of the Global South live disempowered and precarious lives. Digital media and humour, as chapters in the volume demonstrate, have empowered these citizens through engagement with power and their peers, enabling a pursuit of a better future. Contributors to the volume, while alive to challenges associated with the digital divide, highlight the potentials of social media and humour to engage and seek redress on issues such as corruption, human rights violations, racism and sexism. Contributors expertly analyse memes, videos, cartoons and other social media texts to demonstrate how citizens mimic, disrupt, ridicule and challenge status quo. This book caters for academics and students in media and communication studies, political studies, sociology and Global South studies.

Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis is an original, critical, in-depth analysis of the media and communication thought of Canada's most highly acclaimed scholar, Harold Adams Innis. Even in Canada, however, Innis's writings until now have been only partially cited and interpreted: Innis is usually stereotyped as being merely an economic historian fixated on previous civilizations, whereas in fact he was an astute analyst whose main concerns were with present problems and future trajectories. In the United States, meanwhile, Innis's media and communication writings have been quite neglected and even denigrated. Drawing on Innis's less frequently cited work, including his long neglected Political Economy in the Modern State, Robert Babe opens up Innis's media scholarship as a whole, unfolding it in startling critical, yet ultimately appreciative ways. By comparing Innis's media scholarship with Wilbur Schramm's and Noam Chomsky's, moreover, Babe tests the claims, positions, and modes of analysis not only of Innis, but also of the other two celebrated scholars as well, casting new light on their works and allowing the reader to imagine what sort of discourses might have been possible had the three been in conversation together. Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis provides comparative insight into foundational media scholarship in the United States and Canada, and explores in some detail the relevance of Innis for twenty-first century digitized society.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of Ireland's response to the climate crisis. The contributions, written by leading scholars across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, humanities and beyond, shed light on diverse aspects of the climate crisis, the factors shaping Ireland's response, and prospects for the future. Long regarded as a 'climate laggard', Ireland's response to the urgent societal challenge of climate change has seen new momentum in recent times. The volume will serve as a key reference point for academics, students, policymakers, and a wide range of stakeholders. It will be of interest to readers within Ireland, as well as further afield, who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the constraints on, and opportunities for, successful climate action in Ireland.

The supernatural has become extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches, and wizard have become staples of entertainment industries, and many of these figures have received extensive critical attention. But one figure has remained in the shadows - the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in a variety of media from 1926 to 2014. Robin Roberts argues that the female ghost is well worth studying for what she can tell us about feminine subjectivity in cultural contexts. Subversive Spirits examines appearances of the female ghost in heritage sites, theater, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. Roberts's analysis begins with comedic female ghosts in literature and film and moves into horror by examining the successful play The Woman in Black and the legend of the weeping woman, La Llorona. Roberts then situates the canonical works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison in the tradition of the female ghost to explore how the ghost is used to portray the struggle and pain of women of color. Roberts further analyzes heritage sites that use the female ghost as the friendly and inviting narrator for tourists. The book concludes with a comparison of the British and American versions of the television hit Being Human, where the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity.

This open access book promotes the idea that all media types are multimodal and that comparing media types, through an intermedial lens, necessarily involves analysing these multimodal traits. The collection includes a series of interconnected articles that illustrate and clarify how the concepts developed in Ellestroem's influential article The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) can be used for methodical investigation and interpretation of media traits and media interrelations. The authors work with a wide range of old and new media types that are traditionally investigated through limited, media-specific concepts. The publication is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary research, advancing the frontiers of conceptual as well as practical understanding of media interrelations. This is the first of two volumes. It contains Ellestroem's revised article and six other contributions focusing especially on media integration: how media products and media types are combined and merged in various ways.

This book seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. Taking an inclusive cultural studies perspective, it questions the ideological narrative of 'race' and 'ethnicity' that dominates explanations of conflicts and cleavages in the Malaysian context. The contributions are organised in three broad themes. 'Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexities and Hybridities' takes a range of empirical studies-literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation-to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities. This then opens up an examination of 'Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses', in which contributors deal with counter-hegemonic social movements-of anti-racism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing-that explicitly seek to open up greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. The third section, 'Identities and Narratives: Culture and the Media', then provides a close textual reading of some exemplars of new cultural and media practices found in oral testimonies, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative. This book is a valuable interdisciplinary work for advanced students and researchers interested in representations of identity and nationhood in Malaysia, and for those with wider interests in the fields of critical cultural studies and discourse analysis. "Here is a fresh, startling book to aid the task of unbinding the straitjackets of 'Malay', 'Chinese' and 'Indian', with which colonialism bound Malaysia's plural inheritance, and on which the postcolonial state continues to rely. In it, a panoply of unlikely identities-Bajau liminality, Kelabit philosophy, Islamic feminism, refugee hybridity and more-finds expression and offers hope for liberation". Rachel Leow, University of Cambridge "This book shakes the foundations of race thinking in Malaysian studies by expanding the range of cases, perspectives and outcomes of identity. It offers students of Malaysia an examination of identity and agency that is expansive, critical and engaging, and its interdisciplinary depth brings Malaysian studies into conversation with scholarship across the world". Sumit Mandal, University of Nottingham Malaysia "This is a much-needed work that helps us to take apart the colonial inherited categories of race which informed the notion of the plural society, the idea of plurality without multiculturalism. It complicates the picture of identity by bringing in religion, gender, indigeneity and sexual orientation, and helps us to imagine what a truly multiculturalist Malaysia might look like". Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore

This book argues that media and capitalism no longer exist as separated entities, and posits three reasons why one can no longer exist without the other. Firstly, mass media have become indispensable to capitalism due to the media's ability to sell the commodities of mass consumerism. Media capitalism also creates pro-capital attitudes among a target population and establishes an ideological hegemony. Thirdly, media capitalism provides mass deception to hide the pathologies of capitalism, which include mass poverty, rising inequalities, and the acceleration of global warming. To illuminate this, the book's historical chapter traces the emergence of media capitalism. Its subsequent chapters show how media capitalism has infiltrated the public sphere, society, schools, universities, the world of work and finally, democracy. The book concludes by outlining how societies can transition from media capitalism to a post-media- capitalist society.

This book explores the history of literature as a history of changing media and modes of communication, from manuscript to print, from the codex to the computer, and from paper to digital platforms. It argues that literature has evolved, and continues to evolve, in sync with material forms and formats that engage our senses in multiple ways. Because literary experiences are embedded in, and enabled by, media, the book focuses on literature as a changing combination of material and immaterial features. The principal agents of this history are no longer genres, authors, and texts but configurations of media and technologies. In telling the story of these combinations from prehistory to the present, Ingo Berensmeyer distinguishes between three successive dominants of media usage that have shaped literary history: performance, representation, and connection. Using English literature as a test case for a long view of media history, this book combines an unusual bird's eye view across periods with illuminating readings of key texts. It will prove an invaluable resource for teaching and for independent study in English or comparative literature and media studies.

Emerging digital technologies are playing an increasingly significant role in advancing citizen-based support all over the world. They have become tools used for protest movements, and in the establishment organizations use in campaigning. Exploring the Role of Social Media in Transnational Advocacy is an essential reference source for the latest scholarly research on the various dimensions of new technology platforms, highlighting the use in citizen-enabled, social advocacy campaigns. Featuring extensive coverage on a broad range of topics such as virtual communities, e-health, and e-government, this book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, students, and policy makers seeking current research on different aspects of social media in campaigns.

This book presents a comprehensive account of the use and effects of foreign languages in advertising. Based on consumer culture positioning strategies in marketing, three language strategies are presented: foreign language display to express foreignness, English to highlight globalness, and local language to appeal to ethnicity (for instance, Spanish for Hispanics in the USA). The book takes a multidisciplinary approach, integrating insights from both marketing and linguistics, presenting both theoretical perspectives (e.g., Communication Accommodation Theory, Conceptual Feature Model, Country-of-origin effect, Markedness Model, Revised Hierarchical Model) and empirical evidence from content analyses and experimental studies. The authors demonstrate that three concepts are key to understanding foreign languages in advertising: language attitudes, language-product congruence, and comprehension. The book will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, marketing and advertising.

Globalization, Gender, and Media tackles the emergence of "sexy violence" imagery and the coalescence of the sexual and violent meanings in contemporary global mainstream news, television, film, and social media. Tuija Parikka analyzes how such imagery advances particular interpretations of globalization, and the role of gender in such projects. Cases range from serious news journalism and film to social media spectacles, brought under the umbrellas of media production, contents, and perception. These versatile cases introduce issues revealing the limits of Western freedom discourse in the social media; universalizing an idea of motherhood and ethnicity in news production; time, home, and class in the formation of global imbalances of power online and in reality TV; instability of sex and gender in discourses of rape and porn; politicizing majority-minority relations in the social media. Globalization, Gender, and Media emphasizes the need to consider the interconnectedness and material - discursive aspects of globalization and the reality of gender in the media.

Current characters in children's entertainment media illustrate a growing trend of representations that challenge or subvert traditional notions of gender and sexuality. From films to picture books to animated television series, children's entertainment media around the world has consistently depicted stereotypically traditional gender roles and heterosexual relationships as the normal way that people act and engage with one another. Heroes, Heroines, and Everything in Between: Challenging Gender and Sexuality Stereotypes in Children's Entertainment Media examines how this media ecology now includes a presence for nonheteronormative genders and sexualities. It considers representations of such identities in various media products (e.g., comic books, television shows, animated films, films, children's literature) meant for children (e.g., toddlers to teenagers). The contributors seek to identify and understand characterizations that go beyond these traditional understandings of gender and sexuality. By doing so, they explore these nontraditional representations and consider what they say about the current state of children's entertainment media, popular culture, and global acceptance of these gender identities and sexualities.

The Family Firm presents the first major historical analysis of the transformation of the royal household's public relations strategy in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V's first Christmas broadcast, Buckingham Palace worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor's approach to publicity. This book also focuses on audience reception by exploring how British readers, listeners, and viewers made sense of royalty's new media image. It argues that the monarchy's deliberate elevation of a more informal and vulnerable family-centred image strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with the royals, and that the tightening of these bonds had a unifying effect on national life in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War. Crucially, The Family Firm also contends that the royal household's media strategy after 1936 helped to restore public confidence in a Crown that was severely shaken by the abdication of King Edward VIII.

This book examines media coverage and public diplomacy regarding the North Korea nuclear controversy, with a focus on the history of military and diplomatic efforts to resolve tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Chapters consider both legacy and social media coverage in the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China, as well as the power of visual images and the role of military and hard power in shaping public understanding and events in the region.

We are living in a time of inflationary media. While technological change has periodically altered and advanced the ways humans process and transmit knowledge, for the last 100 years the media with which we produce, transmit, and record ideas have multiplied in kind, speed, and power. Saturation in media is provoking a crisis in how we perceive and understand reality. Media become inflationary when the scope of their representation of the world outgrows the confines of their culture's prior grasp of reality. We call the resulting concept of reality that emerges the culture's medialogy. Medialogies offers a highly innovative approach to the contemporary construction of reality in cultural, political, and economic domains. Castillo and Egginton, both luminary scholars, combine a very accessible style with profound theoretical analysis, relying not only on works of philosophy and political theory but also on novels, Hollywood films, and mass media phenomena. The book invites us to reconsider the way reality is constructed, and how truth, sovereignty, agency, and authority are understood from the everyday, philosophical, and political points of view. A powerful analysis of actuality, with its roots in early modernity, this work is crucial to understanding reality in the information age.

This book focuses on ethnic journalism in the Global South, approaching it from two angles: as a professional area and as a social mission. The book discusses journalistic practices and ethnic media in the Global South, managerial and editorial strategies of ethnic media outlets, their content specifics, target audience, distribution channels, main challenges and trends of development in the digital age.

This book presents the perspectives of some of the main players, both academics and professionals, in communication for sustainable development and social change so as to provide valuable lessons for future generations of change agents. It places emphasis on both the theoretical foundation and practical applications and ethical concerns in communication for development and social change. Most of the available historical accounts in development communications make a distinction between the modernization paradigm, the dependency paradigm and the multiplicity or participatory paradigm. These historical accounts have been dominated by framing developments within these paradigms, as the logical offspring of the Western drive to develop the world after colonization and the Second World War. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties, together with the rise of the U.S. as the only remaining 'superpower,' the emergence of the European Union and China, the gradual coming to the fore of regional powers, such as the BRICS countries, and the recent meltdown of the world financial system has rendered disastrous consequences for people everywhere. This book responds to these changes and challenges in presenting a rethinking of the "power" of development, and consequently the place and role of communication in it. It is aimed at both emerging research students, policymakers and social research practitioners who are interested in the history of communication for development and social change and the role and place of mayor players in it. This is most applicable to the political and educational sector, as well as scholars of history, social work, and human rights. The book will provide valuable insights for beginners in these fields who are not yet familiar with the increasingly important and emerging field of global social change.

Technology has become ubiquitous to everyday life in modern society, and particularly in various social aspects. This has significant impacts on adolescents as they develop and make their way into adulthood. Identity, Sexuality, and Relationships among Emerging Adults in the Digital Age is a pivotal reference source for the latest research on the role of digital media and its impact on identity development, behavioral formations, and the inter-personal relationships of young adults. Featuring extensive coverage across a range of relevant perspectives and topics, such as self-comparison, virtual communities, and online dating, this book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers and professionals seeking current research on the use and impact of online social forums among progressing adults.