From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation's social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan's past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.

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"

This edited collection calls for renewed attention to the concept of the sociological imagination, allowing social scientists to link private issues to public troubles. Inspired by the eminent Glasgow-based sociologist, John Eldridge, it re-engages with the concept and shows how it can be applied to analyzing society today.

Leisure time today is driven by fandom from sports fans to comic collectors, gamers, and cosplayers. Fandom has developed into a self-identifying social construct researchers are still attempting to understand. While some fandoms such as cosplayers are still developing, other fandoms, for instance the secondary sports fan, have been completely ignored. Fandom is an important facet in today's society with such enthusiasm and support shaping not only the fan but also society at large. Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Media Fandom is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research that reviews some of the most exigent facets of today's fandom and highlights understudied cultures of fandom as well as emerging intricacies of established fandom. While promoting topics such as esports, influencer culture, and marketing trends, this publication explores both qualitative and quantitative approaches as well as the methods of social science and critical perspectives. This book is ideally designed for marketers, media strategists, brand managers, consumer behavior analysts, researchers, academics, and students.

The first book to compare and contrast the rise of mass circulation press in Britain and America. It provides insights into the origins of tabloid journalism and explores a range of cross-cultural and literary issues, tracing the history of key newspapers and the careers of influential journalists such as Bennett, Russell, Harmsworth and Pulitzer.

In the past decade, the field of memory has been dramatically reconfigured. Global conditions have powerfully impacted on memory debates, and at the same time, claims to memory are negotiated globally. This is a fundamental shift, as until recently, the dynamics of memory production unfolded primarily within the bounds of the nation-state; coming to terms with the past was largely a national project. Under the impact of processes of globalization, this has changed fundamentally. Today it has become impossible to understand the trajectories of memory outside a global frame of reference. This book offers an innovative inroad into the various problematics of memory in a global age. It presents analytical categories to chart the terrain, and it supplies richly documented case studies that illustrate the complexities of contemporary ways of appropriating the past. Written from different cultural positions and from different disciplinary backgrounds, the collection of essays emphasizes the positionality of memory production as it is negotiated locally and globally.

During the American Civil War, political ideology was the most important determinant of French journalistic attitudes. Conservatives usually supported the South while Liberals usually supported the North. Provincial newspapers, however, less consistently followed ideological patterns than their Parisian and big-city colleagues. Slavery was not a determinant of French attitudes, since all French were opposed to slavery; rather, both Conservatives and Liberals used the issue of slavery as a device to garner support. While Conservatives remained firm in believing that the South would prevail until the very end, Liberal journalists sometimes despaired of a Union triumph in the face of Northern military defeats.

A comprehensive and sustained analysis of the development of storytelling for television Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

Film Distribution in the Digital Age critically examines the evolution of the landscape of film distribution in recent years. In doing so, it argues that the interlocking ecosystem(s) of media dissemination must be considered holistically and culturally if we are to truly understand the transnational flows of cultural texts.

From the outset, Silvio Berlusconi's career was expected to be short, and he has been considered finished several times, only to have reemerged victorious. This fascinating political and historical study shows that Berlusconi's success and resilience have lain in his ability to provide answers to longstanding questions in Italian history.

This book takes a radically new approach to the well-worn topic of children's relationship with the media, avoiding the "risks and benefits" paradigm while examining very young children's interactions with film and television. Bazalgette proposes a refocus on the learning processes that children must go through in order to understand what they are watching on televisions, phones, or iPads. To demonstrate this, she offers unique insight from research done with her twin grandchildren starting from just before they were two years old, with analysis drawn from the field of embodied cognition to help identify minute behaviours and expressions as signals of emotions and thought processes. The book makes the case that all inquiry into early childhood movie-viewing should be based on the premise that learning-usually self-driven-is taking place throughout.

Newspapers as a record of the day's events and conduit for public business have been part of life in the United States for several hundred years. While some newspapers claim the "newspaper of record" characteristics for themselves, others are so designated to serve specific community functions, such as the town chronicler or public notice distributor. The expression "newspaper of record" is most often found among works by lawyers, historians, and librarians. Yet many newspapers are now developing online news products that do not correspond directly to the newsprint version. Many are asking whether online newspapers will replace traditional newsprint products and whether the online version can or should be treated as equal to the newsprint version. State and municipal governments are exploring electronic distribution of public notices, challenging newspapers' exclusive claim to legal notice advertising revenue. Martin and Hansen focus on some of the traditional uses of newspapers by groups who use the "newspaper of record" concept, and they compare traditional newspapers to online newspapers as "records." After a historical review, they examine legal and archival uses for newspapers, report on several case studies of online newspaper production, and conclude with suggestions for future scholarly, legal, and industry focus on the "newspaper of record" concept. This valuable analysis serves professionals in journalism and law as well as scholars and researchers in journalism and archive management.

This book is an examination of the central role of incumbency in the televised world of American presidential elections and analyzes how an individual incumbent, Bill Clinton, influenced the recurring and predictable patterns of televised news in ways that secured his reelection. Dover advances a theoretical perspective on the importance of incumbency and links it to the institutional and rhetorical features of the presidential office. He describes how television news media responds to incumbency by depicting a strong incumbent, one who leads in the polls and eventually wins, as a statesman deserving of reelection, and by showing a weak incumbent, one who trails in the polls and eventually loses, as a troubled politician unqualified for office. Professor Dover demonstrates that the uniquely appearing events of the 1996 Campaign were not unique, but were instead additional manifestations of the recurring patterns by which incumbency and television news operate in American politics. Clinton became a strong incumbent before the election began and TV news media responded predictably. After examining how Clinton became a strong incumbent by defeating the Republicans in a highly televised series of battles in 1995 over Medicare and the federal budget, he then describes how the news media responded to Clinton's strength by directing attention to the most divisive aspects of the Republican nomination campaign while presenting Clinton as a statesman. He also examines the general election campaign from the same perspective, while demonstrating how TV news media constantly depicted Clinton as a likely winner while focusing on Dole as the probable loser. An important analysis for all students and researchers of presidential elections and political journalism.

Through enhancing reflection on the treatment of cultural diversity in contemporary Western societies, this collection aims to move the debate beyond the opposition between ethnicity and citizenship and demonstrate ways to achieve equality in multicultural and globalised societies.

China's boldest advocate for press and speech freedom provides a collection of his 1981-1999 arguments for greater freedom of press and speech, as presented to China's government, Party officials, and its intellectual community. Sun is the former Director of the Institute of the Institute of Jouranlism and Communication and the original Director of the Committee to Draft China's Press Law. His published articles-and four new ones for this book-chronicle a continuum of painstaking, relentless, and, ultimately, influential logic. He elucidates the media's disastrous role in the Cultural Revolution, the characteristics of socialist press freedom, the counter-productivity of centralized media governance, the need for law and for media diversity, and the freedoms necessary to empower the proletariat. Sun's intention is not opposition. He evokes the country's founding premises, the principal power of the proletariat, and the pattern of early, market economy successes to chisel away at entrenched centralism and lingering feudalism. This collection offers rare entry into the mind of an exceedingly brave and principled man who-for 20 years-has declared those principles through unmitigating difficulty and dullness. An important think-piece for all scholars and researchers involved with press freedoms and contemporary China.

This book presents the current state of the art in the field of e-publishing and social media, particularly in the Arabic context. The book discusses trends and challenges in the field of e-publishing, along with their implications for academic publishing, information services, e-learning and other areas where electronic publishing is essential. In particular, it addresses (1) Applications of Social Media in Libraries and Information Centers, (2) Use of Social Media and E-publishing in E-learning (3) Information Retrieval in Social Media, and (4) Information Security in Social Media.

Drawing on articles appearing in popular women's magazines from 1950 to 1989, this study documents changes in justifications of gender-based divisions of labor in the home and workplace. The study details the types of rationalizations that have been used to reconcile one new familial arrangement--two-parent workers with traditional gender values that promote men as breadwinners/fathers and women as housewives/mothers. The study reveals that changes have taken place only within the context of being a "good mother." A serious analysis of women's burden of being both breadwinner and homemaker, therefore, has not occurred. Women's magazines serve as moral guides for their readers, providing justifications for both working and nonworking readers. They rely heavily on "experts" to provide personal direction to their readers. This work is in the same vein as Susan Faludi's Backlash, which examines the use of the media in the control of gender ideologies.

Informed by the interdisciplinary approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and theories of identity, nation, and media, the study investigates the ways Kurds, the world's largest stateless nation, use satellite television and Internet to construct their identities. This book examines the complex interrelationships between ethno-national identities, discourses, and new media. Not only does offer the first study of discursive constructions of Kurdish identity in the new media, this book is also the first CDA informed comparative study of the contents of the two media. The study pushes the boundaries of the growing area of studies of identity, nationalism and transnationalism, discourse studies, minority language, and digital media.

Memory Work studies how Jewish children of Holocaust survivors from the English-speaking diaspora explore the past in literary texts. By identifying areas where memory manifests - Objects, Names, Bodies, Food, Passover, 9/11 it shows how the Second Generation engage with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival.

This new book addresses a key issue in current debates around journalistic theory and practice. Drawing on his extensive research and teaching experience in this field, Guy Starkey offers a clearly structured, easily accessible discussion of "balance" in the media, and the difficulties inherent in both achieving and measuring it. Providing an analysis of theoretical issues, an exploration of practical considerations, and a review of methods for assessing journalistic output, it will appeal to students of journalism and media studies.

What does it mean to be a woman in the 21st century? The feminist movement has a long and rich history, but is its time now passed? This edited collection is driven by the question, why is feminism viewed by some (we would add a majority) as outdated, no longer necessary and having achieved its goals, and what role have the media played in this?

How have animation fans in Japan, South Korea, the United States, and Canada formed communities and dealt with conflicts across cultural and geographic distance? This book traces animation fandom from its roots in early cinema audiences, through mid-century children's cartoon fan clubs, to today's digitally-networked transcultural fan cultures.

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aThe phenomenal success of Nickelodeon reveals a great deal about the changing nature of the modern media, and about changing conceptions of childhood. Nickelodeon Nation offers a comprehensive account of the channelas evolution, providing fascinating insights into production and programming, and the responses of children themselves.a
--David Buckingham, Institute of Education, University of London

aWith both dispassionate market analyses and insidersa personal accounts, Nickelodeon Nation covers the channelas history and evolving philosophies thoroughly--like a bucket of Nick's signature green slime! Even aNickspertsa will find new insights and understanding.a
--David W. Kleeman, Executive Director, American Center for Children and Media

Nickelodeon is the highest rated daytime channel in the country, and its cultural influence has grown at an astounding pace. Why are Nickelodeon shows so popular? How are they developed and marketed? And where do they fit in the economic picture of the children's media industry? Nickelodeon Nation, the first major study of the only TV channel just for children, investigates these questions.

Intended for a wide range of readers and illustrated thorughout, the essays in Nickelodeon Nation are grouped into four sections: economics and marketing; the production process; programs and politics; and viewers. The contributors--who include a former employee in Nick's animation department, an investigative journalist, a developmental pyschologist who helped develop "Blue's Clues," and television and cultural studies scholors--show how Nickelodeon succeeds, in large part, by simultaneouslysatisfying both children and adults. For kids, Nick offers gross-out jokes and no-holds-barred goofiness, while for adults it offers a violence-free world, ethnic and racial diversity, and gender parity. Nick gives kids the fun they want by gently violating adult ideas of propriety, and satisfies adults by conforming to their vision of "quality" children's programming.

Nickelodeon Nation shows how, in only twenty years, Nickelodeon has transformed itself from the "green vegetable network"--distasteful for kids but "good for them," according to parents--into a super-cool network with some of the most successful shows on the air. This ground-breaking collection fills a major gap in our understanding of both contemporary children's culture and the television industry.

Contributors include: Daniel R. Anderson, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Henry Jenkins, Mark Langer, Vicki Mayer, Susan Murray, Heather Hendershot, Norma Pecora, Kevin S. Sandler, Ellen Seiter, Linda Simensky, and Mimi Swartz.

In Cold War historiography, the 1960s are often described as a decade of mounting diplomatic tensions and international social unrest. At the same time, they were a period of global media revolution: communication satellites compressed time and space, television spread around the world, and images circulated through print media in expanding ways. Examining how U.S. policymakers exploited these changes, this book offers groundbreaking international research into the visual media battles that shaped America's Cold War from West Germany and India to Tanzania and Argentina.