Television has conditioned us to tolerate visually entertaining material measured out in spoonfuls of time, to the detriment of rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs. In this eloquent, persuasive book, Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. Before we hand over politics, education, religion, and journalism to the show business demands of the television age, we must recognize the ways in which the media shape our lives and the ways we can, in turn, shape them to serve out highest goals.

From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes on social media, the landscape of political communication is being transformed by the grassroots circulation of opinion on digital platforms and beyond. By exploring how everyday people assist in the promotion of political media messages to persuade their peers and shape the public mind, Joel Penney offers a new framework for understanding the phenomenon of viral political communication: the citizen marketer. Like the citizen consumer, the citizen marketer is guided by the logics of marketing practice, but, rather than being passive, actively circulates persuasive media to advance political interests. Such practices include using protest symbols in social media profile pictures, strategically tweeting links to news articles to raise awareness about select issues, sharing politically-charged internet memes and viral videos, and displaying mass-produced T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers that promote a favored electoral candidate or cause. Citizens view their participation in such activities not only in terms of how it may shape or influence outcomes, but as a statement of their own identity. As the book argues, these practices signal an important shift in how political participation is conceptualized and performed in advanced capitalist democratic societies, as they casually inject political ideas into the everyday spaces and places of popular culture. While marketing is considered a dirty word in certain critical circles - particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of political struggle - some of these very critics have determined that the most effective way to push back against the forces of neoliberal capitalism is to co-opt its own marketing and advertising techniques to spread counter-hegemonic ideas to the public. Accordingly, this book argues that the citizen marketer approach to political action is much broader than any one ideological constituency or bloc. Rather, it is a means of promoting a wide range of political ideas, including those that are broadly critical of elite uses of marketing in consumer capitalist societies. The book includes an extensive historical treatment of citizen-level political promotion in modern democratic societies, connecting contemporary digital practices to both the 19th century tradition of mass political spectacle as well as more informal, culturally-situated forms of political expression that emerge from postwar countercultures. By investigating the logics and motivations behind the citizen marketer approach, as well as how it has developed in response to key social, cultural, and technological changes, Penney charts the evolution of activism in an age of mediatized politics, promotional culture, and viral circulation.

This cutting-edge book explores the diverse and contested meanings of ''citizenship'' in the 21st century, as representative democracy faces a mounting crisis in the wake of the Digital Age. Luigi Ceccarini enriches and updates the common notion of citizenship, answering the question of how it is possible to fully live as a citizen in a post-modern political community. Employing an international, multidisciplinary framework, Ceccarini brings together the findings of continental political philosophy and history, and contemporary western political science and communication studies to advance our understanding of political motivation and participation in the present day. As new participatory and monitoring dynamics of online citizenship redefine the very form of public space, this timely book addresses the values, creativity and aspirations through which social actors engage with a networked society, making use of technological innovations and new forms of communication to participate in post-representative politics. A provocative call to action in an era defined by distrust, disillusionment and digitization, this book is crucial reading for scholars and researchers of political science, sociology and communication studies, particularly those seeking a thoroughly modern understanding of digital citizenship. It will also benefit advanced political science students in need of a historical overview of the concept of citizenship and how it has developed under the auspices of the Internet.

Bringing together a series of new perspectives and reflections on creative economies, this insightful Modern Guide expands and challenges current knowledge in the field. Interdisciplinary in scope, it features a broad range of contributions from both leading and emerging scholars, which provide innovative, critical research into a wide range of disciplines, including arts and cultural management, cultural policy, cultural sociology, economics, entrepreneurship, management and business studies, geography, humanities, and media studies. Designed to push the boundaries of understanding on the topic, this Modern Guide initially addresses definitional and methodological challenges, before offering new perspectives on the theory and practice of creative and cultural entrepreneurship, and exploring the role of networks and the importance of place and mobility. The book concludes by re-imagining creative economies, raising issues of inequality and justice, care and solidarity, and opportunities for value recognition, while providing new visions of inclusivity, cultural capability, and future development. A timely reflection on the importance of creative economies, this Modern Guide will be a critical read for students, scholars and policymakers working to support and develop future inclusive and sustainable creative economies.

Handbook of Media Economics provides valuable information on a unique field that has its own theories, evidence, and policies. Understanding the media is important for society, and while new technologies are altering the media, they are also affecting our understanding of their economics. Chapters span the large scope of media economics, simultaneously offering in-depth analysis of particular topics, including the economics of why media are important, how media work (including financing sources, institutional settings, and regulation), what determines media content (including media bias), and the effects of new technologies. The volumes provide a powerful introduction for those interested in starting research in media economics.

Along with its interrelated companion volume, The Technology, Business, and Economics of Streaming Video, this book examines the next generation of TV-online video. It reviews the elements that lead to online platforms and video clouds and analyzes the software and hardware elements of content creation and interaction, and how these elements lead to different styles of video content. What are the models of this new content? What kind of cultural and societal acceleration can we expect? What are the societal implications of the next-generation media system? What problems are emerging? What kind of market power is emerging in media industries, around the world? And how can one deal with them? The author addresses these questions with facts and figures, ranging across technology, economics, communications studies, business, policy, and law. He reviews the regulatory options, and recommends a new approach for video media. Media professionals in academia, management, technology, policy and creative production will value the approachable yet thorough information presented in The Content, Impact, and Regulation of Streaming Video.

Duduza. Bopha. Imbiza. Phapha. Asixoliseni. Amapopeye . . . What is the power of a single word?

Six days a week, advertising creative Melusi Tshabalala posts a Zulu word on his Everyday Zulu Facebook page and tells a story about it. His off-beat sense of humour, razor-sharp social observations and frank political commentary not only teaches his followers isiZulu but also offer insight into the world Melusi inhabits as a 21st century Zulu man.

Over the past few months he has built up a big and a loyal following that include radio host Jenny Crwys-Williams and Afrikaans author Marita van der Vyfer. He pokes fun at our differences and makes us laugh at ourselves and each other.

Melusi asks critical questions of everyone, from Aunty Helen, Dudu-Zille to Silili (Cyril Ramaphosa) and even Woolworths (why are their aircons always set on ‘jou moer’?). His fans love him for his honesty and commitment to pointing out subtle and overt forms of prejudice and racism.

Melusi’s Everyday Zulu holds up a mirror that shows South African society in all its flaws and its sheer humanity. Most importantly, he shows the power of words and that there’s umzulu in all of us!

A cutting-edge view of the digital humanities at a time of global pandemic, catastrophe, and uncertainty Where do the digital humanities stand in 2023? Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 presents a state-of-the-field vision of digital humanities amid rising social, political, economic, and environmental crises; a global pandemic; and the deepening of austerity regimes in U.S. higher education. Providing a look not just at where DH stands but also where it is going, this fourth volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series features both established scholars and emerging voices pushing the field’s boundaries, asking thorny questions, and providing space for practitioners to bring to the fore their research and their hopes for future directions in the field. Carrying forward the themes of political and social engagement present in the series throughout, it includes crucial contributions to the field—from a vital forum centered on the voices of Black women scholars, manifestos from feminist and Latinx perspectives on data and DH, and a consideration of Indigenous data and artificial intelligence, to essays that range across topics such as the relation of DH to critical race theory, capital, and accessibility. Contributors: Harmony Bench, Ohio State U; Christina Boyles, Michigan State U; Megan R. Brett, George Mason U; Michelle Lee Brown, Washington State U; Patrick J. Burns, New York U; Kent K. Chang, U of California, Berkeley; Rico Devara Chapman, Clark Atlanta U; Marika Cifor, U of Washington; María Eugenia Cotera, U of Texas; T. L. Cowan, U of Toronto; Marlene L. Daut, U of Virginia; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Kate Elswit, U of London; Nishani Frazier, U of Kansas; Kim Gallon, Brown U; Patricia Garcia, U of Michigan; Lorena Gauthereau, U of Houston; Masoud Ghorbaninejad, University of Victoria; Abraham Gibson, U of Texas at San Antonio; Nathan P. Gibson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich; Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College; Hilary N. Green, Davidson College; Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist U; Matthew N. Hannah, Purdue U Libraries; Jeanelle Horcasitas, DigitalOcean; Christy Hyman, Mississippi State U; Arun Jacob, U of Toronto; Jessica Marie Johnson, Johns Hopkins U and Harvard U; Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins U; Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Duke U; Mills Kelly, George Mason U; Spencer D. C. Keralis, Digital Frontiers; Zoe LeBlanc, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jason Edward Lewis, Concordia U; James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Alison Martin, Dartmouth College; Linda García Merchant, U of Houston Libraries; Rafia Mirza, Southern Methodist U; Mame-Fatou Niang, Carnegie Mellon U; Jessica Marie Otis, George Mason U; Marisa Parham, U of Maryland; Andrew Boyles Petersen, Michigan State U Libraries; Emily Pugh, Getty Research Institute; Olivia Quintanilla, UC Santa Barbara; Jasmine Rault, U of Toronto Scarborough; Anastasia Salter, U of Central Florida; Maura Seale, U of Michigan; Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe, Normandale Community College; Astrid J. Smith, Stanford U Libraries; Maboula Soumahoro, U of Tours; Mel Stanfill, U of Central Florida; Tonia Sutherland, U of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Gabriela Baeza Ventura, U of Houston; Carolina Villarroel, U of Houston; Melanie Walsh, U of Washington; Hēmi Whaanga, U of Waikato; Bridget Whearty, Binghamton U; Jeri Wieringa, U of Alabama; David Joseph Wrisley, NYU Abu Dhabi. Cover alt text: A text-based cover with the main title repeating right-side up and upside down. The leftmost iteration appears in black ink; all others are white.

You need to read this book if you have an interest in where new technology is taking storytelling. "Set the Storyworld to Random" is about storytelling, media and modern audiences.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Strategic communication as a research field and a professional practice is becoming increasingly relevant for organizations. Bringing together contributions from almost 60 leading international scholars, this dynamic Research Handbook on Strategic Communication is a timely contribution to a vivid and developing academic field.

Divided into three key parts – fundamentals, perspectives, and processes – the Research Handbook provides a holistic overview of target-oriented communication in and between organizations and society. The Handbook begins by addressing core issues in the discipline, introducing theories of communication, strategy, propaganda, and the public sphere. Chapters further explore strategic communication from a range of institutional, democratic, spatial, gendered, professional, and technological perspectives. The final section covers an extensive array of strategic communication processes, from corporate branding, communication management, and public diplomacy to corporate social responsibility, political communication, and social media.

Offering an advanced overview of relevant theories, concepts, and methods in strategic communication, this comprehensive Research Handbook will be an essential resource for graduate students and scholars of communication studies, sociology, social psychology, organizational theory, marketing, and public relations. Practitioners will benefit from its combination of theoretical and practical insights.

Drawing together key frameworks and disciplines that illuminate the importance of communication around climate change, this Research Handbook offers a vital knowledge base to address the urgency of conveying climate issues to a variety of audiences. International scholars survey the key disciplinary foundations of climate change communication including: climate science, audience studies, sociology, and the efficacy of diverse communication forms ranging from science communication, political communication and visual communication to film, theatre and the novel. Featuring key ideas critical to the contemporary climate discussion, such as climate denial, psychology, the use of images, journalism, campaigns, health, justice and climate change fiction, this timely Research Handbook intervenes in the global debate to offer a pathway for researchers and communicators to stimulate new methods of conceptualising and communicating climate mitigation. Presenting an in-depth exploration of climate change messaging in relation to interpretive communities, this book is crucial reading for scholars and students of media and communications, climate science and environmental studies. Its key practical insights will also benefit practitioners of climate communication and science.

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Technology and Politics is a landmark resource that offers a comprehensive overview of the ways in which technological development is reshaping politics. Providing an unparalleled starting point for research, it addresses all the major contemporary aspects of the field. Divided into five thematic parts, the Encyclopedia investigates the existing academic literature on the main subfields in this area, before introducing innovative digital research methods. It then highlights the pivotal political and non-political actors leading the process of technological innovation, clarifies key concepts and terms in the field, and finally covers emerging and debated topics. This Encyclopedia will be particularly invaluable for early career researchers and advanced students in politics looking for a concise entry point into any of the various ways in which technology shapes the field. It will also be useful for practitioners to familiarise themselves with the analytical opportunities provided by computational social and political sciences. Key Features: Entries written by over 90 scholars from 33 different countries on 5 continents Accessible starting point for research into the key literature, topics and debates in the field Introduces important new digital methods such as machine learning, text analysis and network analysis Defines and clarifies the meaning of contested terms such as disinformation, echo chambers and fake news

In today's digital era, women's voices are heard everywhere-from smart home devices to social media platforms, virtual reality, podcasts, and even memes-but these new forms of communication are often accompanied by dated gender politics. In Women's Voices in Digital Media, Jennifer O'Meara dives into new and well-established media formats to show how contemporary screen media and cultural practices police and fetishize women's voices, but also provide exciting new ways to amplify and empower them. As she travels through the digital world, O'Meara discovers newly acknowledged-or newly erased-female voice actors from classic films on YouTube, meets the AI and digital avatars in Her and The Congress, and hears women's voices being disembodied in new ways via podcasts and VR voice-overs. She engages with dialogue that is spreading with only the memory of a voice, looking at how popular media like Clueless and The Simpsons have been mined for feminist memes, and encounters vocal ventriloquism on RuPaul's Drag Race that queers and valorizes the female voice. Through these detailed case studies, O'Meara argues that the digital proliferation of screens alters the reception of sounds as much as that of images, with substantial implications for women's voices.

The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and "forever illegals." Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition. Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years-bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump-and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.

Though the emergence of media archaeology has provided a necessary challenge to the dominant strains of film theory, the contributors to this special issue argue that there are important blind spots. They point out how the focus in media archaeology on historical narratives-especially on models of temporality-has led to a blind spot with regard to non-Western media. Drawing on resources in film studies for thinking about the trans- or international movement of media, the authors set out the need for and terms of a globalizing media archaeology.

Khaya Dlanga has established himself as one of the most influential individuals in South African media, particularly social media, a platform he uses to promote discussion on topics that range from the frivolous to the profound. In to quote myself, Khaya recounts entertaining and moving stories about his roots and upbringing in rural Transkei, how he made his mark at school as well as his time spent studying advertising and as a stand-up comedian. He also shares his political views, how he overcame homelessness to become one of the most influential marketers in South Africa and he gives the reader a dose of the truly weird and wonderful that is routinely a part of his life.

This groundbreaking text is one of the first collections to exclusively explore, develop, and evaluate theories of Black girls and Black girlhoods. This contributed volume brings together emerging and established scholars from North America to discuss what Black girlhood means historically and in the 21st century, and how concepts of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and nationality inform or affect identities of Black girls beyond school or urban settings. Divided into two sections, special topics covered include Black feminism, intersectionality, pleasure and erotic agency, media and fan activism, construction of self, leadership, social change, toxic masculinity, and self-care. The Black Girlhood Studies Collection is a vital resource that will evoke meaningful discussion and change for students in African studies, Black studies, child and youth studies, gender and women studies, media studies, and sociology courses globally. FEATURES: engages in contributions from emerging and established scholars from a breadth of diverse disciplines and backgrounds includes pedagogical features such as a chapter introductions and conclusions, keywords, discussion questions, and glossaries

American Boarding School Fiction, 1981-2021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers - the center was filled with students: white, male, Protestant students at boys' schools. More recently, a new generation of writers-including Richard A. Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff-has transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in unprecedented ways. These new writers present characters who are rich and underprivileged, white and Black, male and female, adolescent and middle-aged, conformist and rebellious. By turning their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, they have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.