Providing a comparative study on celebrity advocacy - from the work of Bono, George Clooney, Madonna, Greg Mortenson, and Kim Kardashian West - this book provides scholars and readers with a better understanding of some of the short-term and long-term impacts of various forms of celebrity activism. Each chapter illustrates how the impoverished rhetoric of celebrities often privileges the voices of those in the Global North over the efforts of local NGOs who have been working for years at addressing the same humanitarian crises. Whether we are talking about the building of schools for young women in Afghanistan or the satellite surveillance of potential genocidal acts carried out in the Sudan, various forms of celebrity advocacy resonate with scholars and members of the public who want to be seen "doing something." The author argues that more often than not, celebrity advocacy enhances a celebrity's reputation - but hinders the efforts of those who ask us to pay attention to the historical, structural, and material causes of these humanitarian crises.

While multimodality is one of the most influential semiotic theories for analysing media artefacts, the concepts of this theory are heterogeneous and widespread. The book takes the differences between approaches in Germany and those in international contexts as a starting point, offering new insights into the analysis of multimodal documents. It features contributions by researchers from more than 15 nations and various disciplines, including theoretical reflections on multimodality, thoughts about methodological, empirical, and experimental approaches as well as analyses of various multimodal artefacts.

The concept of crowdfunding, where grassroots creative projects are funded by the masses through websites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, has been steadily gaining attention over the last few years. Crowdfunding the Future undertakes a dynamic interdisciplinary approach to the examination of the new, and growing, phenomenon of crowdfunding and its encompassment of digital society and media industries. The book offers a wide range of perspectives and empirical research, providing analyses of crowdfunded projects, the interaction between producers and audiences, and the role that websites such as Kickstarter play in discussions around fan agency and exploitation, as well as the ethics of crowdfunding. With a series of chapters covering a global range of disciplines and topics, this volume offers a comprehensive overview on crowdfunding, examining and unraveling the international debates around this increasingly popular practice. The book is suitable for courses covering media studies, fandom, digital media, sociology, film production, anthropology, audience, and cultural studies.

The concept of crowdfunding, where grassroots creative projects are funded by the masses through websites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, has been steadily gaining attention over the last few years. Crowdfunding the Future undertakes a dynamic interdisciplinary approach to the examination of the new, and growing, phenomenon of crowdfunding and its encompassment of digital society and media industries. The book offers a wide range of perspectives and empirical research, providing analyses of crowdfunded projects, the interaction between producers and audiences, and the role that websites such as Kickstarter play in discussions around fan agency and exploitation, as well as the ethics of crowdfunding. With a series of chapters covering a global range of disciplines and topics, this volume offers a comprehensive overview on crowdfunding, examining and unraveling the international debates around this increasingly popular practice. The book is suitable for courses covering media studies, fandom, digital media, sociology, film production, anthropology, audience, and cultural studies.

In Making Media Studies, David Gauntlett turns media and communications studies on its head. He proposes a vision of media studies based around doing and making - not about the acquisition of skills, as such, but an experience of building knowledge and understanding through creative hands-on engagement with all kinds of media. Gauntlett suggests that media studies scholars have failed to recognise the significance of everyday creativity - the vital drive of people to make, exchange, and learn together, supported by online networks. He argues that we should think about media in terms of conversations, inspirations, and making things happen. Media studies can be about genuine social change, if we recognise the significance of everyday creativity, work to transform our tools, and learn to use them wisely. Making Media Studies is a lively, readable, and heartfelt manifesto from the author of Making is Connecting.

In Making Media Studies, David Gauntlett turns media and communications studies on its head. He proposes a vision of media studies based around doing and making - not about the acquisition of skills, as such, but an experience of building knowledge and understanding through creative hands-on engagement with all kinds of media. Gauntlett suggests that media studies scholars have failed to recognise the significance of everyday creativity - the vital drive of people to make, exchange, and learn together, supported by online networks. He argues that we should think about media in terms of conversations, inspirations, and making things happen. Media studies can be about genuine social change, if we recognise the significance of everyday creativity, work to transform our tools, and learn to use them wisely. Making Media Studies is a lively, readable, and heartfelt manifesto from the author of Making is Connecting.

World Wide Web is becoming an utility, not unlike electricity or running water in our homes. This creates new ways of using the web, where Social Media plays a particular role. This gives an unprecedented opportunity to study the emerging social phenomena in the virtual world. In addition, it opens new avenues for improving public services such as schooling and education. This book includes some of the latest developments in employing the information and communications technologies for examining both virtual and real-life social interactions. Investigating modern challenges such as online education, web security or organized cybercrime, this book outlines the state of the art in social applications and implications of ICT.

alieNATION presents research conducted by a national election team and leading scholars in political communication that explores a range of important topics and variables affecting voter attitudes and behavior in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. In exploring the messages, issues, and voters of the 2012 election, these studies employ multiple methods including experimental design, content analysis, rhetorical criticism, and survey research. Whereas other election research tends to investigate either the content or effects of campaign communication, the more comprehensive and systematic nature of this collection enables alieNATION to cohere thematically around considerations of voter alienation, political engagement, political efficacy, and ultimately, citizens' voting decisions.

Methods for studying writing processes have significantly developed over the last two decades. The rapid development of software tools which support the collection together with the display and analysis of writing process data and new input from various neighboring disciplines contribute to an increasingly detailed knowledge acquisition about the complex cognitive processes of writing. This volume, which focuses on research methods, mixed methods designs, conceptual considerations of writing process research, interdisciplinary research influences and the application of research methods in educational settings, provides an insight into the current status of the methodological development of writing process research in Europe.

Neil Postman's most popular work, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), provided an insightful critique of the effects of television on public discourse in America, arguing that television's bias towards entertaining content trivializes serious issues and undermines the basis of democratic culture. Lance Strate, who earned his doctorate under Neil Postman and is one of the leading media ecology scholars of our time, re-examines Postman's arguments, updating his analysis and critique for the twenty-first-century media environment that includes the expansion of television programming via cable and satellite as well as the Internet, the web, social media, and mobile technologies. Integrating Postman's arguments about television with his critique of technology in general, Strate considers the current state of journalism, politics, religion, and education in American culture. Strate also contextualizes Amusing Ourselves to Death through an examination of Postman's life and career and the field of media ecology that Postman introduced. This is a book about our prospects for the future, which can only be based on the ways in which we think and talk about the present.

This collection of essays, edited by Victor J. Vitanza, is a historiography of rhetoric, summarizing what has recently been accomplished in the revision of traditional histories of rhetoric and discussing what might be accomplished in the future. Featuring a variety of approaches--classical, revisionary, and avant-garde--it includes articles by Janet M. Atwill, James A. Berlin, William A. Covino, Sharon Crowley, Hans Kellner, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos, John Schilb, Jane Sutton, Kathleen Ethel Welch, Lynn Worsham, and Victor J. Vitanza.

In the first essay, Sharon Crowley identifies the major players and primary issues in a chronological narrative of the debate about the writing of the history of rhetoric that has arisen between traditionalists "/ "essentialists and revisionists/constructionists. In recent years, traditionalists have demanded a more complete and accurate history, while revisionists have sought a critical understanding of the various epistemological-ideological grounds upon which a history of rhetoric had been and could be constructed. Revisionists, in their search for multiple, contestatory histories, have begun to critique one another, breaking into two general groups: one favoring a political-social program, the other resisting and disrupting such an approach.

Vitanza echoes Crowley's review of this ongoing debate by asking a crucial question: What exactly does it mean to be a revisionist historian? By combining the disintegration of various revisionist and subversive positions into a communal "we," he asks an additional question: Who is the "we" writing histories of rhetoric?

The essays that follow give a rich answer to Vitanza's questions. They bring the writing of histories of rhetoric into the larger area of postmodern theory, raising neglected issues of race, gender, and class. Written with a variety of intentions, some of the essays are expository and highly argumentative while others are manifestos, innovative and far-reaching in tone. Still others are summaries and background studies, providing useful information to both the novice student and the experienced scholar.

This book, situated at a juncture between two disciplines, composition studies and speech, will be a landmark collection for many years.

Although community engagement to enhance justice, equity, and inclusion is at the heart of this book, dancing with difference is the overarching metaphor. It is used to explain diverse relations between contexts, institutions, structures, community organizations, and groups, and the diverse relationships between organizational representatives and community members. It is these dances with difference through which groups and individuals deal with contextual forces, negotiate cultural identities, subjectivities, and positioning, and orient themselves toward their work. Featuring case studies of several international, national, and local organizations, the book showcases both first-hand and public discourses related to community engagement work from Nepal and Northern Ireland to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the U.S. A framework of critical/interpretive intercultural praxis is offered to guide research and practice across the case studies. It is designed to benefit scholars, students, and practitioners who work in community-based settings by presenting a relevant and applicable guide for entering into community engagement.

Has the hype associated with the "revolutionary" potential of the World Wide Web and digital media for environmental activism been muted by the past two decades of lived experience? What are the empirical realities of the prevailing media landscape? Using a range of related disciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this book analyze and explain the complicated relationship between environmental conflict and the media. They shine light on why media are central to historical and contemporary conceptions of power and politics in the context of local, national and global issues and outline the emerging mixture of innovation and reliance on established strategies in environmental campaigns. With cases drawn from different sections of the globe - Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, Latin America, China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, Africa - the book demonstrates how conflicts emanate from and flow across multiple sites, regions and media platforms and examines the role of the media in helping to structure collective discussion, debate and decision-making.

This volume features the work of 15 scholars, who invite us to consider the theory of historiography: to re-ask difficult questions about the purposes and methodologies of writing histories of rhetorics, broadly defined, and to provoke us to question what it means, what it should mean, what it could mean to write histories of rhetoric, composition, communication.

The netted human we may call Homo Irretitus resides in a space made possible by technologies frequently referred to as new media, social media, emerging media, and Web 2.0. Traditional conceptualizations of audiences and producers are shifting so the very making of our social practices, spaces, and contexts in this brave new world of the World Wide Web, the work of Homo Irretitus in this intersectional space, must be interrogated. If we are to understand this space, we should approach it from varied vantage points. This book gathers scholars from both within and external to the core of new media studies, each of whom applies a unique theoretical perspective to the intersection of audience and production in the space enabled by emerging communications technologies. In doing so they help shed light on a variety of the tensions evident in the new digital spaces in which we create and recreate (and often produse) so much of our lives, our identities, and our selves. Focusing multiple spotlights on the intersection of audiences and production made possible by social software helps make clearer a more nuanced perspective than would otherwise be possible as well as opening up questions for further debate within the field.

As video games have become an important economic and cultural force, scholars are increasingly trying to better understand the ways that engagement with games may drive learning, literacy, and social participation in the twenty-first century. In this book, the authors consider games and just as importantly, the social interactions around games, not in terms of how they should be managed or incorporated into existing educational structures, but for what they tell us about the forms of learning and literacy that are already instantiated within the use of these media. To this end, this book delves deeply into James Paul Gee's (2004) productive and influential concept of the affinity space - the physical or virtual locations (or some combination of the two) where people come together around a shared interest or "affinity." By explicating how and why engaged fans of digital media do what they do in online spaces, the authors cast a light, as Gee did, on the promise of these media and the problems facing current educational systems.

For more than a decade, girl power has been a cultural barometer, reflecting girlhood's ever-changing meanings. How did girl power evolve from a subcultural rallying cry to a mainstream catchphrase, and what meaning did young girls find in its pop culture forms? From the riot grrrls to the Spice Girls to The Powerpuff Girls, and influenced by books like Reviving Ophelia and movements like Take Our Daughters to Work Day, Growing Up With Girl Power charts this history. It considers how real girls who grew up with girl power interpreted its messages about empowerment, girlhood, strength, femininity, race, and more, and suggests that for young girls, commercialized girl power had real strengths and limitations - sometimes in fascinating, unexpected ways. Encompassing issues of pre-adolescent body image, gender identity, sexism, and racism, Growing Up With Girl Power underscores the importance of talking with young girls, and is a compelling addition to the literature on girls, media, and culture. Supplemental resources are available online at GrowingUpWithGirlPower.com.

No single work is more responsible for the heightened interest in argumentation and informal reasoning--and their relation to ethics and jurisprudence in the late twentieth century--than Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's monumental study of argumentation, "La Nouvelle Rhetorique: Traite de l'Argumentation." Published in 1958 and translated into English as "The New Rhetoric" in 1969, this influential volume returned the study of reason to classical concepts of rhetoric. In The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, leading scholars of rhetoric Barbara Warnick, Jeanne Fahnestock, Alan G. Gross, Ray D. Dearin, and James Crosswhite are joined by prominent and emerging European and American scholars from different disciplines to demonstrate the broad scope and continued relevance of "The New Rhetoric" more than fifty years after its initial publication.
Divided into four sections--Conceptual Understandings of The New Rhetoric, Extensions of "The New Rhetoric," The Ethical Turn in Perelman and "The New Rhetoric," and Uses of "The New Rhetoric"--this insightful volume covers a wide variety of topics. It includes general assessments of "The New Rhetoric" and its central concepts, as well as applications of those concepts to innovative areas in which argumentation is being studied, such as scientific reasoning, visual media, and literary texts. Additional essays compare Perelman's ideas with those of other significant thinkers like Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon, explore his career as a philosopher and activist, and shed new light on Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca's collaboration. Two contributions present new scholarship based on recent access to letters, interviews, and archival materials housed in the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Among the volume's unique gifts is a personal memoir from Perelman's daughter, Noemi Perelman Mattis, published here for the first time.
"The Promise of Reason," expertly compiled and edited by John T. Gage, is the first to investigate the pedagogical implications of Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca's groundbreaking work and will lead the way to the next generation of argumentation studies.

News Literacy gathers leading scholars, educators, and media makers to explore new approaches to thinking about, examining, and evaluating news media and civic engagement around these fundamental questions: What are the most pressing issues in news, media, and culture in a converged, digital, and global media age? What are the best educational practices to foster media literate understanding, engagement, and expression across borders, across cultures, and across divides? The book will prepare future media practitioners (and citizens) to embrace new media environments that can simultaneously empower their craft and their civic voice. This means teaching not only about the various ways new technologies are used and to what end, but also how these tools can enable better engagement with audiences, more dialog with communities, and a more nuanced understanding of how information is processed through new media platforms. Such an approach can empower a more active, collaborative, and empowered information landscape for the digital age.

News Literacy gathers leading scholars, educators, and media makers to explore new approaches to thinking about, examining, and evaluating news media and civic engagement around these fundamental questions: What are the most pressing issues in news, media, and culture in a converged, digital, and global media age? What are the best educational practices to foster media literate understanding, engagement, and expression across borders, across cultures, and across divides? The book will prepare future media practitioners (and citizens) to embrace new media environments that can simultaneously empower their craft and their civic voice. This means teaching not only about the various ways new technologies are used and to what end, but also how these tools can enable better engagement with audiences, more dialog with communities, and a more nuanced understanding of how information is processed through new media platforms. Such an approach can empower a more active, collaborative, and empowered information landscape for the digital age.

According to Ben McCorkle, the rhetorical canon of delivery--traditionally seen as the aspect of oratory pertaining to vocal tone, inflection, and physical gesture--has undergone a period of renewal within the last few decades to include the array of typefaces, color palettes, graphics, and other design elements used to convey a message to a chosen audience. McCorkle posits that this redefinition, while a noteworthy moment of modern rhetorical theory, is just the latest instance in a historical pattern of interaction between rhetoric and technology. In "Rhetorical"

"Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study," McCorkle explores the symbiotic relationship between delivery and technologies of writing and communication. Aiming to enhance historical understanding by demonstrating how changes in writing technology have altered our conception of delivery, McCorkle reveals the ways in which oratory and the tools of written expression have directly affected one another throughout the ages.

To make his argument, the author examines case studies from significant historical moments in the Western rhetorical tradition. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, McCorkle illustrates how the increasingly literate Greeks developed rhetorical theories intended for oratory that incorporated "writerly" tendencies, diminishing delivery's once-prime status in the process. Also explored is the near-eradication of rhetorical delivery in the mid-fifteenth century--the period of transition from late manuscript to early print culture--and the implications of the burgeoning

print culture during the nineteenth century.

McCorkle then investigates the declining interest in delivery as technology designed to replace the human voice and gesture became prominent at the beginning of the 1900s. Situating scholarship on delivery within a broader postmodern structure, he moves on to a discussion of the characteristics of contemporary hypertextual and digital communication and its role in reviving the canon, while also anticipating the future of communication technologies, the likely shifts in attitude toward delivery, and the implications of both on the future of teaching rhetoric.

"Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse "traces a long-view perspective of rhetorical history to present readers a productive reading of the volatile treatment of delivery alongside the parallel history of writing and communication technologies. This rereading will expand knowledge of the canon by not only offering the most thorough treatment of the history of rhetorical delivery available but also inviting conversation about the reciprocal impacts of rhetorical theory and written communication on each other throughout this history.

The Propaganda Society analyzes the rapid expansion of propaganda and promotional activities in the leading "post-industrial" states under the regime of neoliberalism. With the outsourcing of manufacturing, these states have converted to service, selling, and speculative economies, with a concurrent rapid growth of advertising, marketing, public relations, sales management, branding, and other promotional enterprises. Aided by digital technologies and the removal - "deregulation" - of political, legal, administrative, and moral barriers to state and corporate expansion on a global scale, a group of dominant political and commercial actors have brought about a common discourse and convergent set of practices rooted in sophisticated and unprecedented levels of propaganda and promotion. Written by leading scholars in the field, each of the eighteen chapters in this book discuss the ways in which elite uses of propaganda have radically transformed media and information systems, political and public culture, the conduct of war and foreign relations, and the overall behavior of the state.

How does one make sense of YouTube? There is no reliable sample of videos on YouTube; no easily identifiable way to determine its dominant themes; no way to evaluate quality or impact; no seminal literature. Through genre analysis and digital media criticism, this book presents an accessible, yet critical introduction to "reading" YouTube. The book identifies certain videos by genre - from The Phenom and The Short to The Morph and The Experiment - and provides a thumbnail textual analysis of the videos - from celebrity culture to identity politics - that make up each of these genres. Each one starts with a brief summary/background followed by a theoretically informed mapping of the key issues. Designed primarily for classroom use, the book develops a conceptual language for students to use as they engage with the complex, interactive texts of YouTube and digital culture more generally.

This volume examines the role of history in the study of new media and of newness itself, discussing how the 'new' in new media must be understood to be historically constructed. Furthermore, the new is constructed with an eye on the future, or more correctly, an eye on what we think the future will be. Chapters by eminent scholars address the connection between historical consideration and new media. Some assess the historical descriptions of the development of new media; others hinge on the issue of newness as it relates to existing practices in media history. Remaining essays address the shifting patterns of storage at work in media inscription, as they relate to the practice of history, and to the past and contemporary cultural formations. Together they offer a ground-breaking assessment of the long history of new media, clearly recognizing that the new media of today will be the traditional media of tomorrow, and that an emphasis on the history of the future sheds light on what this newness can be said to represent.