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.

Telling the stories behind television's approaches to race relations, multiculturalism and immigration in the 'golden age' of British television, this book focuses on the 1960s and 1970s and argues that the makers of television worked tirelessly to shape multiculturalism and undermine racist extremism.

American football and postmodernist theory are both objects of popular and scholarly interest that reveal remarkable sociological insights. Analysis of media-driven commercial football documents how narratives of sportsmanship/brutality, heroism/antiheroism, athleticism/self-indulgence, honor/chicanery, and chivalry/sexism compete and thrive.

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.

This cutting edge book considers how advances in technologies and new media have transformed our perception of education, and focuses on the impact of the privatisation of digital tools as a mean of knowledge production. Arguing that education needs to adapt to the modern learner, the book's unique approach is based on a disassociation with the deeply ingrained attitude with which people have traditionally viewed education - learning the existing symbolic systems of certain disciplines and then expressing themselves strictly within the operational modes of these systems. The ways of knowledge production - exploring, recording, representing, making meaning of and sharing human experiences - have been fundamentally transformed through the infusion of digital technologies into all aspects of human activity, allowing learners to engage with their immediate natural, social and cultural environments by capitalising on their individual abilities and interests. This book proposes a new approach to teaching and learning termed 'cinematic bricolage', which involves generating knowledge from heterogeneous resources in a 'do-it-yourself' manner while making meaning through multimodal representations. It shows how cinematic bricolage reconnects ways of knowing with ways of being, empowering the individual with a sense of personal identity and responsibility, helping to shape more aware social citizens.

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.

What can queer feminist writing strategies such as parody and irony do to outsmart the sexism of smart objects, environments and materials and open out the new dialecticism of structure and scale, critique and creativity? Drawing on science and technology studies and feminist theory, this book examines the gendering of current and future media technologies such as smart phones, Google glass, robot nurses, tablets and face recognition. Kember argues that there is a tendency to affirm and celebrate the existence of smart and often sexist objects, environments and materials in themselves; to elide writing and other forms of mediation; and to engage in disembodied knowledge practices. Disembodied knowledge practices tend towards a scientism that currently includes physics envy and are also masculinist. Where there is some degree of convergence between masculinist and feminist thinking about objects, environments and materials, there is also divergence, conflict and the possible opening towards a politics of imedia. Presenting a lively manifesto for refiguring imedia, this book forms an often neglected gender critique of developments in smart technologies and will be essential reading for scholars in Communication Studies, Cultural and Media, Science and Technology and Feminism.

This landmark collection brings leading scholars in the field of political communication to debate one of the most important questions of our age: Can the media serve democracy? For the media to be democratic, they must enter into a positive relationship with their readers, viewers and listeners as citizens rather than consumers who buy things, audiences who gaze upon spectacles or isolated egos, obsessed with themselves. The media's first task is to remind people that they are inhabitants of a world in which they can make a difference. By enabling citizens to encounter and make sense of events, relationships and cultures of which they have no direct experience, the media constitute a public arena in which members of the public come together as more than passing strangers.

Best known for "The Piano," Jane Campion is a author/director whose films explore the relationship between literature and cinema. This book mixes cultural and textual analysis of Campion's films alongside consideration of concepts such as context, pastiche and genre. All those interested in Campion or adaptation studies must read this text.

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.

This book offers comparative studies of the production, content, distribution and reception of film and television drama in Europe. The collection brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences to focus on how new developments are shaped by national and European policies and practices, and on the role of film and television in our everyday lives. The chapters explore key trends in transnational European film and television fiction, addressing issues of co-production and collaboration, and of how cultural products circulate across national borders. The chapters investigate how watching film and television from neighbouring countries can be regarded as a special kind of cultural encounter with the possibility of facilitating reflections on national differences within Europe and negotiations of what characterizes a national or a European identity respectively.

This book analyses parental anxieties about their children's healthcare issues in urban China, engaging with wider theoretical debates about modernity, risk and anxiety. It examines the broader social, cultural and historical contexts of parental anxiety by analysing a series of socio-economic changes and population policy changes in post-reform China that contextualise parental experiences. Drawing on Wilkinson's (2001) conceptualisation linking individual's risk consciousness to anxiety, this book analyses the situated risk experiences of parents' and grandparents', looking particularly into their engagement with various types of media. It studies the representations of health issues and health-related risks in a parenting magazine, popular newspapers, commercial advertising and new media, as well as parents' and grandparents' engagement with and response to these media representations. By investigating 'a culture of anxiety' among parents and grandparents in contemporary China, this book seeks to add to the scholarship of contemporary parenthood in a non- Western context.

Unruly Media argues that we're on the crest of a new international, intermedial style in which sonic and visual parameters become heightened and accelerated. This audiovisual turn, driven by digital technologies and socioeconomic changes, calls for new forms of attention. Post-classical cinema, with its multi-plot narratives and flashy style, fragments under the influence of audiovisual numbers and music-video-like sync. Music video, after migrating to the web, becomes more than a way of selling songs. YouTube's brief and low-res clips encompass many forms, and foreground reiteration, graphic values and affective intensity. All three of these media are riven by one another: a trajectory from YouTube through music video to the new digital cinema reveals structural commonalities, especially in the realms of rhythm, texture and form. Music video, YouTube, and postclassical cinema remain undertheorized. This is the first book to account for the current audiovisual landscape across medium and platform-to try to characterize the audiovisual swirl. Unruly Media includes both new theoretical models and readings of numerous current multimedia works. It also includes several chapters devoted to the oeuvre of highly popular directors, their films, commercials and music videos. Unruly Media argues that attending equally to soundtrack and image can show how these media work, and the ways they both mirror and shape our modern experience.

The Media Convergence Handbook sheds new light on the complexity of media convergence and the related business challenges. Approaching the topic from a managerial, technological as well as end-consumer perspective, it acts as a reference book and educational resource in the field. Media convergence at business level may imply transforming business models and using multiplatform content production and distribution tools. However, it is shown that the implementation of convergence strategies can only succeed when expectations and aspirations of every actor involved are taken into account. Media consumers, content producers and managers face different challenges in the process of media convergence. Volume I of the Media Convergence Handbook encourages an active discourse on media convergence by introducing the concept through general perspective articles and addressing the real-world challenges of conversion in the publishing, broadcasting and social media sectors.

This book investigates what influence online incivility-through user-generated comments on news websites-has on public debate. Built on the premise that public discussions about important topics are vital to a healthy democracy, the book analyzes 3,508 online comments in order to understand what factors in comments make them more susceptible to incivility, defined as nasty remarks rife with profanity. It also examines comments for attributes of deliberation, which are discussions across difference supported by evidence and rational arguments. Using an experiment, the book shows that uncivil comments jumpstart a chain reaction, leading first to negative emotion and then to greater intention to get politically involved. Overall, Online Incivility and Public Debate: Nasty Talk argues that while incivility mars online debate, it may also spark interest in important topics and allow for positive "deliberative moments" of quality discussion.

Newspapers and journalism began in the Middle East in the nineteenth century and evolved during a period of accelerated change which shaped their unique political, social and cultural role. Drawing on a wealth of sources, this study for the first time explores the press as a Middle Eastern institution. It focuses on the circumstances that influences the growth of the Arab press, its own impact on local historical developments, and the long-term effects that early patterns of its emergence have had on later evolution.

A year after popular uprisings overthrew dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, a former diplomat and press officer travelled to Cairo and Tunis to interview local journalists and learn about both their experiences under the previous regimes and how they were navigating the political transitions. Based on these conversations, the resulting study explains the shifting red lines under the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes, examining how these lines were enforced and how the regimes manipulated media to manufacture popular acquiescence or apathy.

This book explores cultural conceptions of the child and the cinematic absence of black children from contemporary Hollywood film. Debbie Olson argues that within the discourse of children's studies and film scholarship in relation to the conception of "the child," there is often little to no distinction among children by race-the "child" is most often discussed as a universal entity, as the embodiment of all things not adult, not (sexually) corrupt. Discussions about children of color among scholars often take place within contexts such as crime, drugs, urbanization, poverty, or lack of education that tend to reinforce historically stereotypical beliefs about African Americans. Olson looks at historical conceptions of childhood within scholarly discourse, the child character in popular film and what space the black child (both African and African American) occupies within that ideal.

This book examines how sports journalists covered the historic coming out stories of National Basketball Association (NBA) veteran Jason Collins and football All-American Michael Sam in the context of sports' "toy department" reputation as a field whose standards are often criticized as lacking in rigor and depth compared to other forms of journalism. Employing a media sociology approach, reporting about Collins and Sam is addressed in the book via three content analysis studies and interviews with two prominent sports journalists. An overview of other pertinent research is provided along with a detailed account of both athletes' stories. This work should appeal to readers interested in sports journalism, the role of sport in society, and media coverage of gay professional athletes.