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.

Contributors from diverse backgrounds explore a range of issues in relation to the media and journalism's role in ascribing meaning to tourism practices. This fascinating account offers a thoroughly international and interdisciplinary perspective on an increasingly important field of journalism scholarship.

This book is an academic work which reviews and critiques the research literature concerning violent games and their alleged effects on players. It examines the debates about the potential effects of these games and the divisions between scholars working in the field. It places the research on violent video games in the longer historical context of scholarly work on media violence. It examines research from around the world on the nature of video games and their effects. It provides a critique of relevant theories of media violence effects and in particular theories developed within the older media violence literature and then considers how useful this and newer scholarly work might be for policy-makers and regulators. The book identifies where gaps exist in the extent literature and where future research attention might be directed.

This book captures the contested terrain of contemporary masculinity and explores a range of conceptualisations, with a specific focus on the role of the media and promotional culture within the context of sport. Asking whether sport is the final frontier of masculinity in society, the book focuses on how the production and representation of sport-related advertising and marketing contribute to the shifting and contested nature of masculinity and its alleged crisis. Drawing upon conceptual and empirical examples spanning across sport celebrity, professional sport leagues, beer advertising and indigenous cultures, the authors explore the links between sport, masculinity, promotional and consumer culture. Collectively, the chapters illustrate how advertising and promotional campaigns continue to circulate representations of particular forms of hegemonic masculinity while also accommodating new forms. Sport, Promotional Culture and the Crisis of Masculinity will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of sociology of sport, media studies, marketing, gender and masculinity studies.

This book argues that today we live in the culture of the past that delimits our world and configures our potentialities. It explores how the past invades our presents and investigates the affective uses of the past in the increasingly elusive present. Remembering and forgetting are part of everyday life, popular culture, politics, ideologies and mythologies. In the time of the ubiquitous digital media, the ways individuals and collectivities re-presence their pasts and how they think about the present and the future have undergone significant changes. The book focuses on affective micro-archives of the memories of the socialist Yugoslavia and investigates their construction as part of the media archaeological practices. The author further argues that these affective practices present a way to reassemble the historical and relegitimize individual biographies which disintegrated along with the country in 1991.

This book introduces a Digital Social System Praxis Framework (DSSPF) integrating Computational Media, Evolutionary Systems Thinking and Design Thinking approaches to E-transformation practice, also called Community Informatics Design (CID). The DSSPF framework is intended to create communication spaces dedicated to knowledge production and sharing for social and organizational change. It allows social systems researchers and practitioners to recognize their synergistic roles in the praxis process to shape their future through social innovation projects. This transdisciplinary text provides potential students and practitioners fundamental concepts and tools for such design. It offers resources from the Pragmatic and Systemic philosophy of science for the co-construction of social architectures and infrastructures, and multi-aspectual design methodologies by which government, organizations and civil society can learn to ethically co-design common ground. This approach provides complementary and common patterns from known methods, models, and theories of social systems interventions that could support a generic framing of large scale sociotechnical systems: digital social innovation ecosystem, living Labs, Fab Labs, enterprise collaborative networks. There will be a particular focus on understanding and addressing the dimensions that make people from different communities of practice able to communicate and collaborate through multiple digital media, design platforms, worldviews and modeling approaches.

This book uncovers how music experience-live and recorded-is changing along with the use of digital technology in the 2000s. Focussing on the Nordic region, this volume utilizes the theory of mentalization: the capacity to perceive and interpret what others are thinking and feeling, and applies it to the analysis of mediated forms of agency in popular music. The rise of new media in music production has enabled sound recording and processing to occur more rapidly and in more places, including the live concert stage. Digital technology has also introduced new distribution and consumption technologies that allow record listening to be more closely linked to the live music experience. The use of digital technology has therefore facilitated an expanding range of activities and experiences with music. Here, Yngvar Kjus addresses a topic that has a truly global reach that is of interest to scholars of musicology, media studies and technology studies.

This is the first book to explore the broad influence of computers and television on the evolution of the American legal process. Katsh asserts that the electronic media have had an increasingly powerful impact on all facets of American law - its methods, values, and societal role. These changes, he argues, are related primarily to the appearance of new means of storing, processing and communicating information. Highly publicized legal cases, such as those involving libel verdicts, obscenity prosecutions, the First Amendment and other areas of media law have focused attention on only one part of the new media's impact on law. Katsh broadens the debate about the relationship between law and the electronic media, explaining the critical role of information in many different aspects of the legal process and arguing that the influence of new modes of communication can be seen in changes occurring in goals, doctrines, concepts, and beliefs that underlie our system of law. In the history of law, fundamental change has occurred very infrequently. This book looks at law in an evolutionary and historical light and explains why these new forms of electronic communications may be the trigger for one of these rare transformations.

A lot of personal data is being collected and stored as we use our media devices for business and pleasure in mobile and online spaces. This book helps us contemplate what a post-Facebook or post-Google world might look like, and how the tensions within capitalist information societies between corporations, government and citizens might play out.

This book explores communication during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Featuring the work of leading communication scholars from around the world, it offers insights and analyses into how individuals, organisations, communities, and nations have grappled with understanding and responding to the pandemic that has rocked the world. The book examines the role of journalists and news media in constructing meanings about the pandemic, with chapters focusing on public interest journalism, health workers and imagined audiences in COVID-19 news. It considers public health responses in different countries, with chapters examining community-driven approaches, communication strategies of governments and political leaders, public health advocacy, and pandemic inequalities. The role of digital media and technology is also unravelled, including social media sharing of misinformation and memetic humour, crowdsourcing initiatives, the use of data in modelling, tracking and tracing, and strategies for managing uncertainties created in a pandemic.

Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode.

One of the consequences of the digital revolution is the availability and pervasiveness of media and technology. They became an integral part of many people's lives, including children, who are often exposed to media and technology at an early age. Due to this early exposure, children have become targeted consumers for businesses and other organizations that seek to utilize the data they generate. The Handbook of Research on Children's Consumption of Digital Media is a scholarly research publication that examines how children have become consumers as well as how their consumption habits have changed in the age of digital and media technologies. Featuring current research on cyber bullying, social media, and digital advertising, this book is geared toward marketing and advertising professionals, consumer researchers, international business strategists, academicians, and upper-level graduate students seeking current research on the transformation of child to consumer.

There have been famous chefs for centuries. But it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the modern celebrity chef business really began to flourish, thanks largely to media advances like television which allowed ever greater numbers of people to tune in.

"Food Media" charts the growth of this enormous entertainment industry, and also how, under the threat of the obesity 'epidemic', some of its stars have taken on new authority as social activists, while others continue to provide delicious distractions from a world of potentially unsafe food. The narrative that joins these chapters moves from private to public consumption, and from celebrating food fantasies to fueling anxieties about food realities, with the questionable role of interference in people's everyday food choices gaining ground along the way.

Covering celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Rachael Ray, and popular trends like foodies, food porn and fetishism, "Food Media" describes how the intersections between celebrity culture and food media have come to influence how many people think about feeding themselves and their families - and how often that task is complicated when it need not be.

Joel Osteen, the smiling preacher, has quickly emerged as one of the most recognizable Protestant leaders in the country. His megachurch, the Houston based Lakewood Church, hosts an average of over 40,000 worshipers each week. Osteen is the best-selling author of numerous books, and his sermons and inspirational talks appear regularly on mainstream cable and satellite radio. How did Joel Osteen become Joel Osteen? How did Lakewood become the largest megachurch in the U. S.? Salvation with a Smile, the first book devoted to Lakewood Church and Joel Osteen, offers a critical history of the congregation by linking its origins to post-World War II neopentecostalism, and connecting it to the exceptionally popular prosperity gospel movement and the enduring attraction of televangelism. In this richly documented book, historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere carefully excavates the life and times of Lakewood's founder, John Osteen, to explain how his son Joel expanded his legacy and fashioned the congregation into America's largest megachurch. As a popular preacher, Joel Osteen's ministry has been a source of existential strength for many, but also the routine target of religious critics who vociferously contend that his teachings are theologically suspect and spiritually shallow. Sinitiere's keen analysis shows how Osteen's rebuttals have expressed a piety of resistance that demonstrates evangelicalism's fractured, but persistent presence. Salvation with a Smile situates Lakewood Church in the context of American religious history and illuminates how Osteen has parlayed an understanding of American religious and political culture into vast popularity and success.

This book focuses on journalistic news values from an audience perspective. The audience influences what is deemed newsworthy by journalists, not only because journalists tell their stories with a specific audience in mind, but increasingly because the interaction of the audience with the news can be measured extensively in digital journalism and because members of the audience have a say in which stories will be told. The first section considers how thinking about news values has evolved over the last fifty years and puts news values in a broader perspective by looking at news consumers' preferences in different countries worldwide. The second section analyses audience response, explaining how audience appreciation and 'clicking' behaviour informs headline choices and is measured by algorithms. Section three explores how audiences contribute to the creation of news content and discusses mainstream media's practice of recycling audience contributions on their own social media channels.

As the pioneering work in its field, Jewish Serials of the World brings together a diverse body of literature essential to the study of the Jewish press from 1674 to the present. It identifies pertinent primary source materials and provides comprehensive coverage of the secondary literature in a field where no bibliographical control has ever existed. Arranged for the most part geographically, the citations include descriptions of significant publications of books, pamphlets, theses and articles, as well as jubilee issues of Jewish newspapers and magazines. In addition to internal cross-references, the work also contains subject and author indexes.

When Mona Lisa smiled enigmatically from the cover of the Italian magazine Epoca in 1957, she gazed out at more than three million readers. As Emma Barron argues, her appearance on the cover is emblematic of the distinctive ways that high culture was integrated into Italy's mass culture boom in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when popular appropriations of literature, fine art and music became a part of the rapidly changing modern Italian identity. Popular magazines ran weekly illustrated adaptations of literary classics. Television brought opera from the opera house into the homes of millions. Readers wrote to intellectuals and artists such as Alberto Moravia, Thomas Mann and Salvatore Quasimodo by the thousands with questions about literature and self-education. Drawing upon new archival material on the demographics of television audiences and magazine readers, this book is an engaging account of how the Italian people took possession of high culture and transformed the modern Italian identity.

This essay places the emerging brain-Internet interface within a broad historical context: that the Internet represents merely the next stage in a very long history of human cognition whereby the brain couples with symbolic technologies. Understanding this 'deep history' provides a way to imagine the future of brain-Internet cognition.

This study is based on the authors' fieldwork inside Cultural Enterprise Office, a small Scottish agency that supports creative businesses. It discusses UK policy on the creative economy, the rise of intermediaries between policy-making and the marketplace, and the playing out in the delivery of business advice services to creative microbusinesses.

This book looks closely at some of the most significant films within the field of queer Sinophone cinema. Examining queerness in films produced in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the book merges the Sinophone with the queer, theorising both concepts as local and global, homebound as well as diasporic. Queerness in this book not only problematises the positioning of non-normative desires within the Sinophone; it also challenges Eurocentric critical perspectives on filmic representation that are tied to the idea of the binary between East/West. New Queer Sinophone Cinema will appeal to scholars in Chinese and film studies, as well as to anyone who is interested in queer Chinese cinema.

This book examines how the perception of terrorism threat erodes civil liberties, sows doubt about the loyalties of immigrants, and heightens the left-right ideological divide. The book presents original analysis of survey data and experiments conducted in Australia, Europe and the United States. Research in the book posits questions that others have largely avoided: How does the threat of terrorist violence undermine multicultural democracies? What are the psychological and social mechanisms that explain how the threat of terrorism can change political attitudes? What is the relationship between terrorism and death threats? What is the role of media in shaping the perception of terrorism threat? And what are the ethical responsibilities of journalists? This book will help readers distinguish between groundless speculation and solid scientific knowledge of the topic. Moreover, it provides concrete recommendations on how to prevent the most negative consequences of the polarization of political attitudes, such as social divisions, exclusivism and conflict. Given the broad geographical scope of the research presented in the book, specifically North America, Europe and Australia, this book will appeal to broad scope of readers.

This book examines nobrow, a cultural formation that intertwines art and entertainment into an identifiable creative force. In our eclectic and culturally turbocharged world, the binary of highbrow vs. lowbrow is incapable of doing justice to the complexity and artistry of cultural production. Until now, the historical power, aesthetic complexity, and social significance of nobrow "artertainment" have escaped analysis. This book rectifies this oversight. Smart, funny, and iconoclastic, it scrutinizes the many faces of nobrow, throwing surprising light on the hazards and rewards of traffic between high entertainment and genre art.

Through an interdisciplinary conversation with contributors from social anthropology, religious studies, film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Crafting Chinese Memories is a novel book which addresses how works of art shape memories, and offers new ways of conceptualising storytelling, memory-making, art, and materiality. It explores the memories of artists, filmmakers, novelists, storytellers, and persons who come to terms with their own histories even as they reveal the social memories of watershed events in modern China.