From reality television to celebrity gossip magazines, today's technologies have enabled a vast number of personal narratives that document our existence and that of others. Multiple academic disciplines now define the self as fluid and entirely changeable: little more than a performance that is chosen according to the situation. While news journalists still pursue the authentic narrative, advertising and politics might be accused of exploiting the narrative tendency, and across media the personal and public become increasingly merged. Real Lives, Celebrity Stories collects research from published and experienced professionals, practitioners and scholars who discuss narratives of real people across cultures and history and in multiple media. It uses narrative theory to interrogate the processes by which we create, promote and consume these stories of real people, and the ways in which we construct our own stories of self. By bringing together different disciplines it offers a theory of the production(s) of self in public spaces such as music, literature, fanfic, television, cinema, comics, news media, journalism, and politics.

Cable television, on the brink of a boom in the 1970s, promised audiences a new media frontier-an expansive new variety of entertainment and information choices. Music video, 24-hour news, 24-hour weather, movie channels, children's channels, home shopping, and channels targeting groups based on demographic characteristics or interests were introduced.

Cable Visions looks beyond broadcasting's mainstream, toward cable's alternatives, to critically consider the capacity of commercial media to serve the public interest. It offers an overview of the industry's history and regulatory trends, case studies of key cable newcomers aimed at niche markets (including Nickelodeon, BET, and HBO Latino), and analyses of programming forms introduced by cable TV (such as nature, cooking, sports, and history channels).

This volume brings together a range of different specialists in the arts and cultural industries, as well as international academics and public intellectuals, to explore how media and communication practices for social change are currently being reconfigured in both conceptual and rhetorical terms.

Media, Myth and Terrorism is a rigorous case study of Blitz mythology in British newspaper responses to the July 7th bombings. Considering how the press, politicians and the public were caught up in popular accounts of Britain's past, Kelsey explores the ideological battleground that took place in the weeks following the bombings.

In the digital era, users from around the world are constantly connected over a global network and they can connect, share, and collaborate like never before. To make the most of this new environment, researchers and software developers must understand the influence of the global network on users. Media Influence: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly material on the effect of media on cultures, individuals, and groups. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as social media, media ethics, and audience engagement, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for researchers, academics, professionals, students, and practitioners interested in media influence.

This volume summarizes the author's work on social information seeking (SIS), and at the same time serves as an introduction to the topic. Sometimes also referred to as social search or social information retrieval, this is a relatively new area of study concerned with the seeking and acquiring of information from social spaces on the Internet. It involves studying situations, motivations, and methods involved in seeking and sharing of information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Twitter, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. The first part of the book introduces various foundational concepts, including information seeking, social media, and social networking. As such it provides the necessary basis to then discuss how those aspects could intertwine in different ways to create methods, tools, and opportunities for supporting and leveraging SIS. Next, Part II discusses the social dimension and primarily examines the online question-answering activity. Part III then emphasizes the collaborative aspect of information seeking, and examines what happens when social and collaborative dimensions are considered together. Lastly, Part IV provides a synthesis by consolidating methods, systems, and evaluation techniques related to social and collaborative information seeking. The book is completed by a list of challenges and opportunities for both theoretical and practical SIS work. The book is intended mainly for researchers and graduate students looking for an introduction to this new field, as well as developers and system designers interested in building interactive information retrieval systems or social/community-driven interfaces.

This unique book explores the social processes which shape fictional representations of police and crime in television dramas. Exploring ten leading British and European police dramas from the last twenty-five years, Colbran, a former scriptwriter, presents a revealing insight into police dramas, informed by media and criminological theory.

The Yearbook addresses the overriding question: what are the effects of the 'opening up' of science to the media? Theoretical considerations and a host of empirical studies covering different configurations provide an in-depth analysis of the sciences' media connection and its repercussions on science itself. They help to form a sound judgement on this recent development.

There have never been so many ways of producing news and news-like content. From podcasts, to YouTube, blogs and the phenomenal popularity of social media, seismic shifts are underway in global media.News 2.0 bridges the gap between theory and practice to present an integrated approach to journalism that redefines the profession. Key ideas in journalism theory, political economy and media studies are used to explore the changing cultures of journalism in an historical context.Hirst explains the fragmentation of the mass audience for news products, and how digital commerce has disconnected consumers from real democracy. He argues that journalism requires a restatement of the role of journalists as public intellectuals with a commitment to truth, trust and the public interest.'. a powerful reply to those whose utopian dreams cloud their thinking about the political, social, economic and cultural implications of digital convergence.' - Vincent Mosco, Canada Research Chair, Queen's University'. essential reading for students, journalists and everyone interested in the future of news and journalism.' - Bob Franklin, Professor of Journalism Studies, Cardiff University'. tackles the urgent questions that surround journalism from a pragmatic yet radical perspective. ' - Janet Wasko, Knight Chair in Communication Research, University of Oregon'Anyone interested in where journalism finds itself now, and where it may be headed any time soon, should start by reading this book.' - Michael Bromley, Professor of Journalism, University of Queensland

"Housework and Housewives in American Advertising" traces the surprisingly persistent depiction of housework as women's work in advertising from the late 1800s to today. Jessamyn Neuhaus shows advertising to be our most significant public discourse about housework, analyzing print ads and TV commercials, as well as ad agency documents and trade journals, to demonstrate how the housewife figure framed household labor as exclusively feminine care for the family. Paying particular attention to the transitional decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Neuhaus demonstrates that even when overtly stereotypical images of housewives became unmarketable, advertising continued to gender housework with the more racially diverse and socially acceptable 'housewife moms' of today.

This collection reflects on the international political economy of media and the valuable lessons to be learned from the media reforms currently taking place across South America. The contributors present a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives on the ongoing battle for media space in South America, and the volume includes a foreword by Ernesto Laclau.

Beneficial to scholars and students in the fields of media and communication, politics and technology, this book outlines the significant role of search engines in general and Google in particular in widening the digital divide between individuals, organisations and states. It uses innovative methods and research approaches to assess and illustrate the digital divide by comparing the popular search queries in Google and Yahoo in different countries as well as analysing the various biases in Google News and Google Earth. The different studies developed and presented in this book provide various indications of the increasing customisation and popularisation mechanisms employed by popular search engines, which together with organising the world s information inevitably also intensify information inequalities and reinforce commercial and US-centric priorities and agendas.
Develops an extensive historical investigation of information, power and the digital divideProvides new social and political perspectives to understand search engines in general and Google in particularSuggests original methods to study and assess the digital divide as well as the extent of commercialisation and Americanisation worldwide"

Runner-up for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Book Prize 2015 Beyond the Screen presents an expanded conceptualization of cinema which encompasses the myriad ways film can be experienced in a digitally networked society where the auditorium is now just one location amongst many in which audiences can encounter and engage with films. The book includes considerations of mobile, web, social media and live cinema through numerous examples and case studies of recent and near-future developments. Through analyses of narrative, text, process, apparatus and audience this book traces the metamorphosis of an emerging cinema and maps the new spaces of spectatorship which are currently challenging what it means to be cinematic in a digitally networked era.

How is The Simpsons a satirical artwork engaged with important social, political, and cultural issues? Matthew A. Henry offers the first comprehensive understanding of the show as a satire and explores the ways in which The Simpsons participates in the so-called "culture war" debates taking place in American society. Situating The Simpsons within the framework of satirical humor in American media, the tradition of the nuclear family sitcom, and the history of the Fox Television network, this book explores American culture thematically, examining how the show satirically engages with issues of race and ethnicity, national identity, gender and sexuality, social and economic class, and religion.

This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve controversies in philosophical dialogue or public debate settings, this orientation has tended to preempt questions about where controversy is located and how it is shaped. This project contributes to descriptive, ethnographic research about controversy, using discourse analysis to address a problem in argumentation.

Early in the 19th century the work of American newspaper journalists was intertwined with the work of politicians. Journalists were primarily printers and editors, and newspapers were largely political organs, funded and used by politicians for political reasons. As the 19th century progressed, not only journalists, but politicians, were involved in newspaper work.

Dooley explores the transformation of journalism, examining how journalists established occupational boundaries separating their work from that of politicians. She focuses on how an occupational group that had been inseparable from party politics early in the 19th century grew to be seen by many in society as more distant and independent from parties by the end of the century and became accepted as the citizenry's primary provider of political news and editorial opinion. This study of how journalists established occupational boundaries will be of interest to scholars and researchers of journalism history, political communication, and the sociology of work.

From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, including film, magazines, conduct books, TV and digital networking sites, Alison Winch reveals the ways in which friendships are increasingly encouraged to be strategic. Girlfriendship is examined as an affective social relation where slut-shamers, frenemies and bridezillas bond by controlling each other's body image through a 'girlfriend gaze'. Through a combination of psychosociological theory and media analysis, this book offers a complex understanding of patriarchy, by looking at how neoliberalism penetrates the intimate relations between women.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Knowing, measuring and understanding media audiences have become a multi-billion dollar business. But the convention that underpins that business, audience ratings, is in crisis. Rating the Audience is the first book to show why and how audience ratings research became a convention, an agreement, and the first to interrogate the ways that agreement is now under threat. Taking a historical approach, the book looks at the evolution of audience ratings and the survey industry. It goes on to analyse today's media environment, looking at the role of the internet and the increased difficulties it presents for measuring audiences. The book covers all the major players and controversies, such as Facebook's privacy rulings and Google's alliance with Nielsen. Offering the first real comparative study, it will be critical for media students and professionals.

The rising popularity of political communication research warrants this second volume. In 1990, the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) elevated the Political Communication Research Group (PCRG) to section status. The American Political Science Association recently formed a Political Communication section, and the International Communication Association's Political Communication section continues to thrive.

The rising popularity of political communication research warrants this second volume. In 1990, the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) elevated the Political Communication Research Group (PCRG) to section status. The American Political Science Association recently formed a Political Communication section, and the International Communication Association's Political Communication section continues to thrive.

Through the narratives and movements of survivors of the war in Lanka these interconnected essays develop the concept of 'survival media' as embodied and expressive forms of mobility across borders.

Have you ever wondered what makes storytelling and digital media a powerful combination? This edited volume examines the opportunities to think, do, and/or create jointly afforded by digital storytelling. The editors of this volume contend that digital storytelling and digital media can create spaces of empowerment and transformation by facilitating multiple kinds of border crossings and convergences involving groups of peoples, places, knowledge, methodologies, and teaching pedagogies. The book is unique in its inclusion of anthropologists and education practitioners and its emphasis on multiple subfields in anthropology. The contributors discuss digital storytelling in the context of educational programs, teaching anthropology, and ethnographic research involving a variety of populations and subjects that will appeal to researchers and practitioners engaged with qualitative methods and pedagogies that rely on media technology.

Representing a detailed analysis of footballers' wives and their role in contemporary British culture, this books explores how the generic and stereotypical 'Wag' has been created by newspaper and magazine coverage, auto/biographies and influential television programmes.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 From the presidential race to the battle for the office of New York City mayor, American political candidates' approach to new media strategy is increasingly what makes or breaks their campaign. Targeted outreach on Facebook and Twitter, placement of a well-timed viral ad, and the ability to roll with the memes, flame wars, and downvotes that might spring from ordinary citizens' engagement with the issues-these skills are heralded as crucial for anyone hoping to get their views heard in a chaotic election cycle. But just how effective are the kinds of media strategies that American politicians employ? And what effect, if any, do citizen-created political media have on the tide of public opinion? In Controlling the Message, Farrar-Myers and Vaughn curate a series of case studies that use real-time original research from the 2012 election season to explore how politicians and ordinary citizens use and consume new media during political campaigns. Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today's diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship-an ideal volume for students, scholars, and political analysts alike.