An accessible and engaging textbook which has been tailored to the author's own Language, Society and Power module so each edition is refined by student feedback. Virtually all English Langauge and Linguistics degrees around the world have a Language and Society/Sociolinguistics module and most are core courses. This is the ideal textbook for both undergraduate students of linguistics as well as those not studying linguistics full-time but who are interested in the study of language and society. Packed with pedagogical features such as activity boxes, chapter summaries, and further reading. Also accompanied by a companion website with updated features such as a 'who's who' of Twitter, links to blogs, and further discussion questions. This makes it the complete package for students of language and society Includes an 'applied' chapter on projects which has been designed to help students understand what sociolinguists do and how they conduct research, intended to help students conduct their own research in turn.

This edited volume aims to unpack the digitisation of art and media within the dynamics of participatory culture, and how these changes affect the power relations between the production and consumption of these new forms in a globalised Asia. This follows the rise of new art forms and social media platforms in wake of rapid and ongoing digitisation, which has, in turn, produced far-reaching implications for changing media ownership and its role in social, cultural, economic, as well as political activities. New challenges arise every day in relation to digital art and design practices and social media communications, and their respective impact on identity politics. This book showcases a diverse range of interdisciplinary research on these concomitant changes and challenges associated with digital media and technologies within the context of a globalised Asia. The case studies included present perspectives on Asia's evolving digital humanities landscape from Hong Kong, China, India, Korea and from across Southeast Asia, with topics that tackle organisational digital marketing, brand advertising and design, mobile gaming, interactive art, and the cultural activities of ethnic and sexual minority communities in the region. This book will of interest to scholars in digital humanities focused on new media and cultural studies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book explores the current human rights crisis created by the War on Drugs in Mexico. It focuses on three vulnerable communities that have felt the impacts of this war firsthand: undocumented Central American migrants in transit to the United States, journalists who report on violence in highly dangerous regions, and the mourning relatives of victims of severe crimes, who take collective action by participating in human rights investigations and searching for their missing loved ones. Analyzing contemporary novels, journalistic chronicles, testimonial works, and documentaries, the book reveals the political potential of these communities' vulnerability and victimization portrayed in these fictional and non-fictional representations. Violence against migrants, journalists, and activists reveals an array of human rights violations affecting the right to safe transit across borders, freedom of expression, the right to information, and the right to truth and justice.

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 book examines the major business communication theories, delving into their relationships and practical applications. Many business communication studies lack a strong theoretical grounding-a deficit that creates difficulties for researching business communication phenomena and building upon previous studies. The book addresses this issue by cataloging and briefly describing the major business communication theories, as well as giving a typology of these theories to better integrate them. This book provides value to business communication researchers (who can use it to build upon and develop their work), experts in practice (who can apply it to improve business communications), and academics (who can use it to enhance their instructional designs). It also offers insights into new developments on the business communication theory horizon.

This book extends current understandings of the effects of using locative social media on spatiality, the experience of time and identity. This is a pertinent and timely topic given the increase in opportunities people now have to explicitly and implicitly share their location through digital and mobile technologies. There is a growing body of research on locative media, much of this literature has concentrated on spatial issues. Research here has explored how locative media and location-based social media (LBSN) are used to communicate and coordinate social interactions in public space, affecting how people approach their surroundings, turning ordinary life "into a game", and altering how mobile media is involved in understanding the world. This book offers a critical analysis of the effect of usage of locative social media on identity through an engagement with the current literature on spatiality, a novel critical investigation of the temporal effects of LBSN use and a view of identity as influenced by the spatio-temporal effects of interacting with place through LBSN. Drawing on phenomenology, post-phenomenology and critical theory on social and locative media, alongside established sociological frameworks for approaching spatiality and the city, it presents a comprehensive account of the effects of LBSN and locative media use.

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.

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.

This book argues for an overhaul of the way media assistance is evaluated, and explores how new thinking about evaluation can reinforce the shifts towards better media development. The pursuit of media freedom has been the bedrock of media development since its height in the 1990s. Today, citizen voice, participation, social change, government responsiveness and accountability, and other 'demand-side' aspects of governance, are increasingly the rubric within which assistance to media development operates. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of media development and communication for social change whilst simultaneously representing a deep commitment to translating theoretical concepts in action-oriented ways.

The explosive growth in data, computational power, and social media creates new opportunities for innovating the processes and solutions of Information and communications technology (ICT) based policy-making and research. To take advantage of these developments in the digital world, new approaches, concepts, instruments and methods are needed to navigate the societal and computational complexity. This requires extensive interdisciplinary knowledge of public administration, policy analyses, information systems, complex systems and computer science. This book provides the foundation for this new interdisciplinary field, in which various traditional disciplines are blending. Both policy makers, executors and those in charge of policy implementations acknowledge that ICT is becoming more important and is changing the policy-making process, resulting in a next generation policy-making based on ICT support. Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0 point to the specific applications of social networks, semantically enriched and linked data, whereas policy-making has also to do with the use of the vast amount of data, predictions and forecasts, and improving the outcomes of policy-making, which is confronted with an increasing complexity and uncertainty of the outcomes. The field of policy-making is changing and driven by developments like open data, computational methods for processing data, opining mining, simulation and visualization of rich data sets, all combined with public engagement, social media and participatory tools.

Blogging: How Our Private Thoughts Went Public examines self-representational writing from its historical roots in personal diaries through to its current form in personal blogs. Widely available on the Internet, personal blogs are the latest form of an ever more public writing style of self-reflection. Utilizing Hannah Arendt's philosophy of public, private, and social, this book delves deeper into the question of public versus private and provides an entrance for Arendt's work into today's mediated world. Arendt's understanding of public, private, and social allows us to better understand the need for boundaries and for both public and private spaces in our lives. Several interpersonal communication theories, including Boundary Management and Parasocial Framework theory, are examined to better understand how people navigate public and private boundaries in communication. These theories help to provide a philosophical view of our over-shared and over-mediated world, and, specifically, how it affects our communication styles and practices.

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.

Digital Broadcasting presents an introduction to how the classic notion of 'broadcasting' has evolved and is being reinterpreted in an age of digitization and convergence. The book argues that 'digital broadcasting' is not a contradiction in terms, but-on the contrary-both terms presuppose and need each other. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary and international field of research and theory, it looks at current developments in television and radio broadcasting on the level of regulation and policy, industries and economics, production and content, and audience and consumption practices.

While policymakers in the world reiterate the importance of protecting voice diversity, traditional media conglomerates and new social media giants make their task increasingly challenging. This book assesses the current state of policy-making on media plurality and explores novel policy ideas for funding, regulatory and structural interventions.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity. Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.

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.

This book explores the disruptive changes in the media ecosystem caused by convergence and digitization, and analyses innovation processes in content production, distribution and commercialisation. It has been edited by Professors Miguel Tunez-Lopez (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Valentin-Alejandro Martinez-Fernandez (Universidade da Coruna, Spain), Xose Lopez-Garcia (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Xose Ruas-Araujo (Universidade de Vigo, Spain) and Francisco Campos-Freire (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain). The book includes contributions from European and American experts, who offer their views on the audiovisual sector, journalism and cyberjournalism, corporate and institutional communication, and education. It particularly highlights the role of new technologies, the Internet and social media, including the ethics and legal dimensions. With 30 contributions, grouped into diverse chapters, on information preferences and uses in journalism, as well as public audiovisual policies in the European Union, related to governance, funding, accountability, innovation, quality and public service, it provides a reliable media resource and presents lines of future development.

Portrayals of Children in Popular Culture: Fleeting Images, edited by Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic and Debbie Olson, is a collection which examines images of "children" and "childhood" in popular culture, including print, online, television shows, and films. The contributors to this volume explore the constructions of "children" and "childhood" rather than actual children or actual childhoods. In the chapters that are concerned with depictions of actual, individual children, the authors investigate how the images of those children conform or "trouble" current notions of what it means to be a child engaged in a contemporary "childhood." This is a unique volume, because of the academic discourse which is employed-that of "Childhood Studies." The Childhood Studies scholars represented in this collection utilize an interdisciplinary approach which draws upon various academic fields-their methodologies, theoretical approaches, and scholarly conventions-for the scholarly research in this collection. Together, the contributions to this collection interrogate classic notions of childhood innocence, knowledge, agency, and the fluid position of the signifier "child" within contemporary media forms. These interdisciplinary works function as a testament to the infectiousness of the child image in print, television, and cinematic contexts, and represent a new avenue of discursive scholarship; the questions raised and connections made provide fresh insights and unique perspectives to topics regarding children and childhood and their representation within multiple media platforms. The growing field of Childhood Studies is enriched by the intellectual originality represented by this volume's authors who ask new questions about the enduring and captivating image of the child.

This book examines new forms of representation that have changed our perception and interpretation of the humanities in an Asian, and digital, context. In analyzing written and visual texts, such as the use of digital technology and animation in different works of art originating from Asia, the authors demonstrate how literature, history, and culture are being redefined in spatialized relations amid the trend of digitization. Research studies on Asian animation are in short supply, and so this volume provides new and much needed insights into how art, literature, history, and culture can be presented in innovative ways in the Asian digital world. The first section of this volume focuses on the new conceptualization of the digital humanities in art and film studies, looking at the integration of digital technologies in museum narration and cinematic production. The second section of the volume addresses the importance of framing these discussions within the context of gender issues in the digital world, discussing how women are represented in different forms of social media. The third and final section of the book explores the digital world's impacts on people's lives through different forms of digital media, from the electromagnetic unconscious to digital storytelling and digital online games. This book presents a novel contribution to the burgeoning field of the digital humanities by informing new forms of representation and interpretations, and demonstrating how digitization can influence and change cultural practices in Asia, and globally. It will be of interest to students and scholars interested in digitization from the full spectrum of humanities disciplines, including art, literature, film, music, visual culture, media, and animation, gaming, and Internet culture. "This is a well-written book, and I enjoyed reading it. The first impression of the book is that it is very innovative - a down-to-the-earth academic volume that discusses digital culture." - Professor Anthony Fung, Professor, Director, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong "This book has contributed to the existing field of humanities by informing new forms of representation and interpretations, and how digitization may change cultural practices. There is comprehensive information on how the humanities in the digital age can be applied to a wide range of subjects including art, literature, film, pop music, music videos, television, animation, games, and internet culture." - Dr Samuel Chu, Associate Professor, The Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong