Spracklen explores the impact of the internet on leisure and leisure studies, examining the ways in which digital leisure spaces and activities have become part of everyday leisure. Covering a range of issues from social media and file-sharing to romance on the Internet, this book presents new theoretical directions for digital leisure.

This volume describes the use of mass media and other communication channels by corporations, bureaucrats, politicians and consumer advocates to influence the development and implementation of public policy in areas of science, technology and social service delivery. It provides answers to the critical question--who sets the media agenda, how, and for what purposes. This book is the first to reveal the degree of inequality that exists between participants in any policy debate.

Fascination with satellite television and Internet technology has become an obsession. People throughout the world watch television and believe what they see and hear--without realizing that pictures are selected and stories are sometimes distorted. Concurrently, the world's elite are drawn to the increasing availability of news on the Internet, effectively widening the gap between those who have and do not have access to the new technologies. This analysis of the worldwide impact of new communications technologies shows how ordinary citizens can protect themselves from media brainwashing. Interviews from across the globe shed light on this dynamic and on the roles of viewers as victims or victors in different situations. This is a book for the media professional; students and scholars in the fields of journalism, communications, political science, international relations, and business; as well as for government officials and concerned citizens who do not want to be controlled by the media.

Fridays of Rage reveals Al Jazeera's surprising rise to that most respected of all Western media positions: the watchdog of democracy. Al Jazeera served as the nursery for the Arab world's democratic revolutions, promoting Friday as a "day of rage" and popular protest. This book gives readers a glimpse into how Al Jazeera has strategically cast its journalists as martyrs in the struggle for Arab freedom while promoting itself as the mouthpiece and advocate of the Arab public. In addition to heralding a new era of Arab democracy, Al Jazeera has become a major influence over Arab perceptions of American involvement in the Arab World, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the rise of global Islamic fundamentalism, and the expansion of the political far right. Al Jazeera's blueprint for "Muslim-democracy" was part of a vision announced by the network during its earliest broadcasts. The network embarked upon a mission to reconstruct the Arab mindset and psyche. Al Jazeera introduced exiled Islamist leaders to the larger Arab public while also providing Muslim feminists a platform. The inclusion and consideration of Westerners, Israelis, Hamas, secularists and others earned the network a reputation for pluralism and inclusiveness. Al Jazeera presented a mirror to an Arab world afraid to examine itself and its democratic deficiencies. But rather than assuming that Al Jazeera is a monolithic force for positive transformation in Arab society, Fridays of Rage examines the potentially dark implications of Al Jazeera's radical re-conceptualization of media as a strategic tool or weapon. As a powerful and rapidly evolving source of global influence, Al Jazeera embodies many paradoxes-the manifestations and effects of which we are likely only now becoming apparent. Fridays of Rage guides readers through this murky territory, where journalists are martyrs, words are weapons, and facts are bullets.

Since 1952, when Eisenhower's media consultants decided they could warm up the General's personality and overcome selective exposure by using short spots on television, advertising has played a major role in American presidential campaigns. By the late 1990s, candidates and their political parties spend hundreds of millions on TV ads. Political spots have become the dominant form of communication between voters and candidates.

Kaid and Johnston report the results of a systematic and thorough analysis of virtually all of the political commercials used in general election campaigns from 1952 through the 1996 presidential contest. Important to scholars, students, and other researchers involved with political communications, mass communications, and presidential elections.

Best known for "The Piano," Jane Campion is a author/director whose films explore the relationship between literature and cinema. This book mixes cultural and textual analysis of Campion's films alongside consideration of concepts such as context, pastiche and genre. All those interested in Campion or adaptation studies must read this text.

This book offers comparative studies of the production, content, distribution and reception of film and television drama in Europe. The collection brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences to focus on how new developments are shaped by national and European policies and practices, and on the role of film and television in our everyday lives. The chapters explore key trends in transnational European film and television fiction, addressing issues of co-production and collaboration, and of how cultural products circulate across national borders. The chapters investigate how watching film and television from neighbouring countries can be regarded as a special kind of cultural encounter with the possibility of facilitating reflections on national differences within Europe and negotiations of what characterizes a national or a European identity respectively.

This book provides new theoretical approaches to the subject of virtuality. All chapters reflect the importance of extending the analysis of the concept of "the virtual" to areas of knowledge that, until today, have not been fully included in its philosophical foundations. The respective chapters share new insights on art, media, psychic systems and technology, while also presenting new ways of articulating the concept of the virtual with regard to the main premises of Western thought. Given its thematic scope, this book is intended not only for a philosophical audience, but also for all scientists who have turned to the humanities in search of answers to their questions.

Everyday consumers buy into the concept of brands and their associated meanings--the perception of quality, a symbolic relationship, a vicarious experience, or even a sense of identity. Marketing Semiotics suggests that the extent to which consumers recognize, internalize, and relate to brand meanings is not only an academic question. These meanings contribute to "brand equity," the financial value of intangible brand benefits that exceed the use value of goods, and impacts upon a firm's financial performance. Therefore, the management of brand equity demands first and foremost the management of brand meanings, or semiotics.
The book uses structural semiotics, a discipline that extends the laws of structural linguistics to the analysis of verbal, visual, and spatial sign systems, to shed light on the cultural codes and discourse of brands. It proposes that semiotic research should form the cornerstone of brand equity management, since brands rely so heavily on sign systems that contribute to profitability by distinguishing brands from simple commodities, from competitors, and engaging consumers in the brand world.
The book includes dozens of global business cases where semiotics has been used to refocus, reposition, or extend the brand to new products, customers, and markets. Drawing upon twenty years of academic and consulting experience, the book provides actionable direction for steering brands through technological and cultural change, differentiating brands in the competitive environment, and counteracting the natural depletion of brand meaning over time.

In this book, Fattorello addresses the differences between contingent and non-contingent information. The theory is translated into English for the first time and is contextualized and put into a historical framework by Prof. Ragnetti's additional text.

Although journalism has always been an important vehicle of collective memory, it has been neglected in discussions about how memory works. This fascinating book aims to correct that disjuncture, by tracking the ways in which journalism and shared memory mutually support, undermine, repair and challenge each other. How is journalism's address to memory different from that of other institutions? What would the study of memory look like without journalism? And how would our understanding of journalism fall short without paying attention to memory? Bringing together leading scholars in journalism and memory studies, this collection makes explicit the longstanding and complicated role that journalism has played in keeping the past alive. From anniversary issues and media retrospectives to simple verbal and visual analogies connecting past and present, journalism incorporates an address to earlier times across the wide array of its conventions and practices. How it does so and which triumphs and problems ensue in our understanding of collective memory constitute the charter of this volume.

As with all other forms of popular culture, comics in East Germany were tightly controlled by the state. Comics were employed as extensions of the regime's educational system, delivering official ideology so as to develop the "socialist personality" of young people and generate enthusiasm for state socialism. The East German children who avidly read these comics, however, found their own meanings in and projected their own desires upon them. Four-Color Communism gives a lively account of East German comics from both perspectives, showing how the perceived freedoms they embodied created expectations that ultimately limited the regime's efforts to bring readers into the fold.

Stieg Larsson was an unabashed feminist in his personal and professional life and in the fictional world he created, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest are full of graphic depictions of violence against women, including stalking, sexual harassment, child abuse, rape, incest, serial murder, sexual slavery, and sex trafficking, committed by vile individual men and by corrupt, secretive institutions. How do readers and moviegoers react to these depictions, and what do they make of the women who fight back, the complex masculinities in the trilogy, and the ambiguous gender of the elusive Lisbeth Salander? These lively and accessible essays expand the conversation in the blogosphere about the novels and films by connecting the controversies about gender roles to social trends in the real world.

Narrative and Genre introduces students to these key concepts in media studies, complementing Image and Representation published in 1998. It covers the major narrative theorists including Todorov, Propp, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and applies their ideas via case examples ranging from The X Files to newspaper reporting. It then moves on to offer an extensive analysis of the basic schema and conventions of genre, drawing on the film noir, the TV cop genre and science fiction for examples, and showing how the repertoire of elements of each ranges across setting, character, narrative, iconography, style and stars. Fresh, down-to-earth and well-structured, this is an excellent text for all those in post-16 education, whether in school, college or university.

For decades, Germany has been shaped and reshaped by the sounds of popular music-whether viewed as uniquely German or an ideological invader from abroad. This collected volume brings together leading figures in the field of German Studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies at large to survey the sociopolitical impact of music on conceptions of the German state and national identity, gender and sexuality, and transnational cultural production and consumption, expanding on the ways in which sounds, technologies, media practices, and exchanges of popular music provide a unique glimpse into the cultural dynamics of postwar Germany.

Why do we still read and discuss Chaucer? The answer may be simple: he is fun, and he challenges our intelligence and questions our certainties. This collected volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and pleasure that readers owe to him as even today, his poems have the capacity to change the way we engage with fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, and beauty.

What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated - from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space - an astro-culture - in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.

A New History of British Documentary is the first comprehensive overview of documentary production in Britain from early film to the present day. It covers both the film and television industries and demonstrates how documentary practice has adapted to changing institutional and ideological contexts.

We live in a world that is increasingly characterised as full of risk, danger and threat. Every day a new social issue emerges to assail our sensibilities and consciences. Drawing on the popular Economic Social and Research Council (ESRC) seminar series, this book examines these social issues and anxieties, and the solutions to them, through the concept of moral panic. With a commentary by Charles Critcher and contributions from both well-known and up-and-coming researchers and practitioners, this is a stimulating and innovative overview of moral panic ideas, which will be an essential resource.

An intellectual history of contrasting ideas around the power of the arts to bring about personal and societal change - for better and worse. A fascinating account of the value and functions of the arts in society, in both the private sphere of individual emotions and self-development and public sphere of politics and social distinction.

In the age of globalization, digitization, and media convergence, traditional hierarchies between media are breaking down. This book offers new approaches to understanding the politics and their underlying ideologies that are reshaping our global media landscape, including questions of audience participation and transmedia storytelling.

'Media and Nostalgia' is an interdisciplinary and international exploration of media and their relation to nostalgia. Each chapter demonstrates how nostalgia has always been a media-related matter, studying also the recent nostalgia boom by analysing, among others, digital photography, television series and home videos.

This collection of essays considers the ways in which feminism is still an important issue in twenty-first century society. Looking at various forms of literature, media, and popular culture, the book establishes that contemporary images of femininity are highly contested, complex, and frequently problematic.