Through political and cultural analysis of representations of the so-called war on drugs, Oswaldo Zavala makes the case that the very terms we use to describe drug traffickers are a constructed subterfuge for the real narcos: politicians, corporations, and the military. Though Donald Trump's incendiary comments and monstrous policies on the border reveal the character of a deeply depraved leader, state violence on both sides of the border is nothing new. Immigration has endured as a prevailing news topic, but it is a fixture of modern society in the neoliberal era; the future will be one of exile brought on by state violence and the plundering of our natural resources to sate capitalist greed. Yet, the realities of violence in Mexico and along the border are obscured by the books, films, and TV series we consume. In truth, works like Sicario, The Queen of the South, and Narcos hide Mexico's political realities. Along with these examples, Zavala discusses Charles Bowden, 2666 by Roberto BolaNo, and other important Latin American writers as examples of works that do capture the realities of the drug war. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist will be useful for journalists, political scientists, philosophers, and writers of any kind who wish to break down the constructed barriers-physical and mental-created by those in power around the reality of the Mexican drug trade.

Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics-one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual. Are we cyborgs or citizens-or both? This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within.

Although US history is marred by institutionalized racism and sexism, postracial and postfeminist attitudes drive our polarized politics. Violence against people of color, transgendered and gay people, and women soar upon the backdrop of Donald Trump, Tea Party affiliates, alt-right members like Richard Spencer, and right-wing political commentators like Milo Yiannopoulos who defend their racist and sexist commentary through legalistic claims of freedom of speech. While more institutions recognize the volatility of these white men's speech, few notice or have thoughtfully considered the role of white nationalist, alt-right, and conservative white women's messages that organizationally preserve white supremacy. In Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet, author Wendy K. Z. Anderson details how white nationalist and alt-right women refine racist rhetoric and web design as a means of protection and simultaneous instantiation of white supremacy, which conservative political actors including Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Ivanka Trump have amplified through transnational politics. By validating racial fears and political divisiveness through coded white identity politics, postfeminist and motherhood discourse functions as a colorblind, gilded cage. Rebirthing a Nation reveals how white nationalist women utilize colorblind racism within digital space, exposing how a postfeminist framework becomes fodder for conservative white women's political speech to preserve institutional white supremacy.

Technology is rapidly advancing, and each innovation provides opportunities for such technology to mesh with the human enactment of physical intimacy or to be used in the quest for information about sexuality. However, the availability of this technology has complicated sexual decision making for young adults as they continually navigate their sexual identity, orientation, behavior, and community. Young Adult Sexuality in the Digital Age is a pivotal reference source that improves the understanding of the combination of technology and sexual decision making for young adults, examining the role of technology in sexual identity formation, sexual communication, relationship formation and dissolution, and sexual learning and online sexual communities and activism. While highlighting topics such as privacy management, cyber intimacy, and digital communications, this book is ideally designed for therapists, social workers, sociologists, psychologists, counselors, healthcare professionals, scholars, researchers, and students.

Focusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin American cinema. The volume questions the concept of "national cinemas" by examining how Chilean film dialogues with trends in genre-based, political, and art-house cinema around the world, while remaining true to local identities. Contributors place current Chilean cinema in a historical context and expand the debate concerning the artistic representation of recent political and economic transformations in contemporary Chile. Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World opens up points of comparison between Chile and the ways in which other national cinemas are negotiating their place on the world stage. The book is divided into five parts. "Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the Worl"" examines Chilean filmmakers at international film festivals, and political and affective shifts in the contemporary Chilean documentary. "On the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks" explores on the emergence of Chilean horror cinema and the performance of martial arts in Chilean films. "Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality and Adaptation Beyond Chile(an Cinema)" covers the intermedial transfer from Chilean literature to transnational film and from music video to film. "Migrations of Gender and Genre" contrasts films depicting transgender people in Chile and beyond. "Politicized Intimacies, Transnational Affects: Debating (Post)memory and History" analyzes representations of Chile's traumatic past in contemporary documentary and approaches mourning as a politicized act in postdictatorship cultural production. Intended for scholars, students, and researchers of film and Latin American studies, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World evaluates an active and emergent film movement that has yet to receive sufficient attention in global cinema studies.

Never look at social media the same way again. Social media are an integral part of contemporary society. From news and politics to language and everyday life, they have changed the way we communicate, use information and understand the world. So we have to ask critical questions about social media. We have to dig deeper into issues of ownership, power, class and (in)justice. This book equips you with a critical understanding of the complexities and contradictions at the heart of social media's relationship with society. The revised and expanded

Aestheticization of evil is a frequently used formula in cinema and television. However, the representation of evil as an aesthetic object pushes it out of morality. Moral judgments can be pushed aside when evil is aestheticized in movies or TV series because there is no real victim. Thus, situations such as murder or war can become a source of aesthetic pleasure. Narratives in cinema and television can sometimes be based on a simple good-evil dichotomy and sometimes they can be based on individual or social experiences of evil and follow a more complicated method. Despite the various ways evil is depicted, it is a moral framework in film and television that must be researched to study the implications of aestheticized evil on human nature and society. International Perspectives on Rethinking Evil in Film and Television examines the changing representations of evil on screen in the context of the commonness, normalization, aestheticization, marginalization, legitimization, or popularity of evil. The chapters provide an international perspective of the representations of evil through an exploration of the evil tales or villains in cinema and television. Through looking at these programs, this book highlights topics such as the philosophy of good and evil, the portrayal of heroes and villains, the appeal of evil, and evil's correspondence with gender and violence. This book is ideal for sociologists, professionals, researchers and students working or studying in the field of cinema and television and practitioners, academicians, and anyone interested in the portrayal and aestheticization of evil in international film and television.

Social media has emerged as a powerful tool that reaches a wide audience with minimum time and effort. It has a diverse role in society and human life and can boost the visibility of information that allows citizens the ability to play a vital role in creating and fostering social change. This practice can have both positive and negative consequences on society. Examining the Roles of IT and Social Media in Democratic Development and Social Change is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of social media within community development and democracy. While highlighting topics including information capitalism, ethical issues, and e-governance, this book is ideally designed for social workers, politicians, public administrators, sociologists, journalists, policymakers, government administrators, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on social advancement and change through social media and technology.

Link prediction is required to understand the evolutionary theory of computing for different social networks. However, the stochastic growth of the social network leads to various challenges in identifying hidden links, such as representation of graph, distinction between spurious and missing links, selection of link prediction techniques comprised of network features, and identification of network types. Hidden Link Prediction in Stochastic Social Networks concentrates on the foremost techniques of hidden link predictions in stochastic social networks including methods and approaches that involve similarity index techniques, matrix factorization, reinforcement, models, and graph representations and community detections. The book also includes miscellaneous methods of different modalities in deep learning, agent-driven AI techniques, and automata-driven systems and will improve the understanding and development of automated machine learning systems for supervised, unsupervised, and recommendation-driven learning systems. It is intended for use by data scientists, technology developers, professionals, students, and researchers.

Media plays a specific role within modern society. It has been and continues to be a tool for spreading terrorist messages. However, it can just as easily be used as a tool for countering terrorism. During these challenging times where both international and domestic terrorism continue to threaten the livelihoods of citizens, it is imperative that studies are undertaken to examine the media's role in the spread of terrorism, as well as to explore strategies and protocols that can be put in place to mitigate the spread. Media and Terrorism in the 21st Century presents the emerging ideas and insights from experts, academicians, and professionals on the role media and new media plays in terrorist propaganda from a critical international perspective. It examines the historical relation between media and terror and analyzes the difficulties and obstacles presented by the relation in the 21st century. Covering topics such as AI-based dataveillance, media development trends, and virtual terrorism, this book is an indispensable resource for government officials, communications experts, politicians, security professionals, sociologists, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

Culture is one of the most important elements for explaining individuals' behaviors within the social structure. It meets the various social needs of members of a society by directing how individuals must react to various events and how to act in specific circumstances. A planned and systematic process is required for disseminating this cultural accumulation as a policy, which is produced collectively by all members within their everyday life practices. The Handbook of Research on Examining Cultural Policies Through Digital Communication provides emerging research on this aspect of cultural policy, which is formed within the framework of this systematic process in a strategic manner and can be defined as various activities of the state intended for art, human sciences, and cultural inheritance. Creating such cultural policies involves the establishment of measures and organizations required for the development of each individual, providing economic and social facilities, all of which are actions intended for directing society. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as long-distance education, digital citizenship, and public diplomacy, this book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, sociologists, international and national organizations, and government officials.

The mass production and diversification of media have accelerated the development of popular culture. This has started a new trend in consumerism of desiring new consumption objects and devaluing those consumption objects once acquired, thus creating a constant demand for new items. Pop culture now canalizes consumerism both with advertising and the marketing of consumerist lifestyles, which are disseminated in the mass media. The Handbook of Research on Consumption, Media, and Popular Culture in the Global Age discusses interdisciplinary perspectives on media influence and consumer impacts in a globalizing world due to modern communication technology. Featuring research on topics such as consumer culture, communication ethics, and social media, this book is ideally designed for managers, marketers, researchers, academicians, and students.

What is the role of the war reporter today? Through interviews with prominent war and foreign correspondents such as John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Mary Dejevsky and Alex Thomson The War Correspondent delves into the most dangerous form of journalism. From Crimea to Vietnam, the Falklands to the Gulf and Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror, the books examines the attractions and risks of war reporting; the challenge of objectivity and impartiality in the war zone; the danger that journalistic independence is compromised by military control, censorship and public relations; as well as the commercial and technological pressures of an intensely concentrated, competitive news media environment. As history and ideology return to the reporting of international conflict, Greg McLaughlin asks what will that mean for a new generation of war correspondents, attuned not to history or ideology but to the politics of the next conflict.