This book examines the convergence of media in the largest residential virtual community to date in the gaming world: Second Life. This user content-driven platform has brought media makers and audiences together in interactive environments where news, entertainment, and art have become programming for virtual media networks with implications for traditional mainstream programming and distribution. New media moguls are emerging from Second Life and expanding to the larger Metaverse. This book explores media's role in reporting and reflecting the social, political, and economic issues within Second Life and beyond, and includes more than a dozen interviews of active Second Life residents.

The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this edited volume is one of the first scholarly works to engage the emerging area of multi-user location-based mobile games and hybrid reality games. It is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses covering mobile phone or gaming culture, media history and educational technology, as well as researchers and the general public.

While there exists a wide range of material covering violence against women, very little scholarly attention has been paid to international media treatments of gendered violence. This volume addresses the gap by providing a broad overview of contemporary representations of gendered violence, enabling comparison and contrast in forms of violence and constructions of gender across a wide range of political and geographic contexts. From nonfictional accounts of the mass rapes during the Rwandan genocide to the sexual objectification of women in Serbian media and depictions of prostitute murders in the Chinese media, this book provides an overview of media representations of gendered violence around the globe. In addition to documenting specific challenges and shortcomings of mainstream representations, chapters present insight into the various forms of resistance and hope that exist in each particular area, and analytical essays open up new lines of inquiry by offering an assessment of the uneven changes that feminist activism has enabled around the world. Suitable for students and scholars in women's studies, gender studies, media, sociology, and education, Local Violence, Global Media can be used as a supplementary text in courses on media violence, sociology of media, gendered violence in media, and international perspectives on women's studies.

Expanding William F. Pinar's notion of autobiography from an individual to a national scale, this book takes the reader on an inner journey to explore the fragmented condition of the post-9/11 American national psyche. It excavates the many layers of the emerging social context within which multiple, conflicting national narratives of identity compete, and uses notions of democracy, nation, and citizen as signposts of contested terrain inside a troubled nation. While reminding us that the old, enduring questions remain unresolved, the book identifies and grapples with new questions that are central to emergent visions of 'educating for democracy' in contemporary America, situated now within a frenetic post-9/11 world.

This book provides a practical and theoretical look at how media education can make learning and teaching more meaningful and transformative. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and analyzes a case study involving an elementary school that received a federal grant to integrate media literacy and the arts into the curriculum. The ideas and experiences of working teachers are analyzed through a critical media literacy framework that provides realistic challenges and hopeful examples and suggestions. The book is a valuable addition to any education course or teacher preparation program that wants to promote twenty-first century literacy skills, social justice, civic participation, media education, or critical technology use. Communications classes will find it useful as it explores and applies key concepts of cultural studies and media education.

Die Tryin' traces the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture. It fuses feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory to analyze the social imaginary that is produced by -- and produces -- a particular form of masculinity: boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated series of practices, products, and performances, all coalescing to produce a real and imagined masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence, and is reflective of larger masculine edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus, videogames form the central object of study as consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away from current games research, the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual culture, cultural studies, and performance studies, instead of a sociological/structural inspection of the form.

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This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the Conference on Historical News Discourse (Chined) that was held in Florence (Italy) on 2-3 September 2004. The aim of the Conference was to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of recent research in the field of news discourse in early modern Britain. The first section of the volume focuses on news discourse in serial publications while the second part examines aspects of news language in non-serial works. Contributions include synchronic and diachronic analyses of reportage, polemic, propaganda, review journalism and advertisements in a wide range of texts including newsletters, pamphlets and newspapers. Each section is structured chronologically so that the reader can appreciate aspects of the general historical development of news discourse. The variety of topics and methodologies reflects some of the most interesting research being carried out in the field.

If you are like many people, including the author at one time, your fear of public speaking may be holding you back and limiting your influence and potential. This book is designed to help you confront and conquer your fear of public speaking. Each of the twenty lessons builds upon the other and guides you through a systematic process to freedom. Public speaking is a skill that is important and valuable for many obvious reasons. Ralph Waldo Emerson declares rightfully, "Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel." Being a good communicator can enhance your chances to be a leader, to influence an audience, or perhaps to land a business deal or new job opportunity. Sooner or later, you will be asked or even forced to speak in a public setting. Though this thought is exhilarating to some, it also terrifies a great number of others. Sadly, fear of public speaking silences scores of voices, causing many to lose out on a variety of opportunities. Indeed, being a competent public speaker may enhance your career, business influence, and potential for success. Whether your fear of public speaking is slight or severe this book will help to face it down and defeat it, once and for all. You will also find a variety of tools and tips to help you improve your ability to speak in front of others. There really is a way to overcome your fear of speaking in public. By purchasing this course and looking for ways to apply it, you have taken an important first step. However, in order to deal with the fears that bind you, you will need to commit to doing some hard work. But, let me assure you that if you read the lessons carefully and do the exercises suggested herein, you will notice a marked difference in yourself by the end of this course. The only way you will conquer the fear of public speaking is confronting it head on. That is exactly what "Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking" will help you do.

Through life-changing stories, respected thinkers and authentic presentations, Keynote promotes a deeper understanding of the world and gives students the courage and means to express themselves in English. Communication, collaboration and creative thinking drive students towards real 21st century outcomes and encourage them to respond to ideas and find their own voice. Both students and teachers will emerge with new confidence, new ideas and a new determination to communicate in this increasingly information-rich world of Global English.

This book contains eight studies on Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), with work by FDG's foremost proponents, who provide both an introduction to the theory and a glimpse of current research projects. FDG derives its name from taking the discourse act as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. Each such unit receives four paralle analyses displaying its interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic and phonological characteristics respectively. What is striking about the emergence of FDG is that it enters into lively debate with various other contemporary frameworks that share its functionalist orientation. This facet of FDG is highlighted in this book, every chapter of which brings out the interconnectedness of current theoretical trends.

Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production is the first comprehensive study of the latest wave of online news publications. The book investigates the collaborative publishing models of key news Websites, ranging from the worldwide Indymedia network to the massively successful technology news site Slashdot, and further to the multitude of Weblogs that have emerged in recent years. Building on collaborative approaches borrowed from the open source software development community, this book illustrates how gatewatching provides an alternative to gatekeeping and other traditional journalistic models of reporting, and has enabled millions of users around the world to participate in the online news publishing process.

Normative texts are meant to be highly impersonal and decontextualised, yet at the same time they also deal with a range of human behaviour that is difficult to predict, which means they have to have a very high degree of determinacy on the one hand, and all-inclusiveness on the other. This poses a dilemma for the writer and interpreter of normative texts. The author of such texts must be determinate and vague at the same time, depending upon to what extent he or she can predict every conceivable contingency that may arise in the application of what he or she writes. The papers in this volume discuss important legal and linguistic aspects relating to the use of vagueness in legal drafting and demonstrate why such aspects are critical to our understanding of the way normative texts function.

Das Thema Fremdwortbildung gehoert erst seit kurzem zum Forschungsgegenstand der germanistischen Wortbildungslehre. In traditionellen Arbeiten blieb dieser Bereich - auch aus puristischen Grunden - dagegen weitgehend ausgespart. Die Bestrebungen, diese Lucke zu schliessen, reichen bis in die 1960er Jahre zuruck. Seitdem wurde die Fremdwortbildungsforschung zwar intensiviert, doch bestehen auch noch heute zahlreiche Forschungsdesiderate, wozu sowohl empirische Untersuchungen als auch methodisch-theoretische UEberlegungen zahlen. Der Band zeichnet anhand von 31 Beitragen die Forschungsgeschichte nach und soll zugleich Anregungen fur die zukunftige Klarung offener Fragen und Probleme liefern. Eine Einfuhrung und eine Bibliographie runden die Textsammlung ab und dienen der weiteren Orientierung.

Ongoing interest in the turmoil of the 1960s clearly demonstrates how these social conflicts continue to affect contemporary politics. In The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements, Kristen Hoerl focuses on fictionalized portrayals of 1960s activism in popular television and film. Hoerl shows how Hollywood has perpetuated politics deploring the detrimental consequences of the 1960s on traditional American values. During the decade, people collectively raised fundamental questions about the limits of democracy under capitalism. But Hollywood has proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change. Film and television are salient resources of shared understanding for audiences born after the 1960s because movies and television programs are the most accessible visual medium for observing the decade's social movements. Hoerl indicates that a variety of television programs, such as Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and Law and Order, along with Hollywood films, including Forrest Gump, have reinforced images of the ""bad sixties."" These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy. These warped messages contribute to ""selective amnesia,"" a term that stresses how popular media renders radical ideas and political projects null or nonexistent. Selective amnesia removes the spectacular events and figures that define the late-1960s from their motives and context, flattening their meaning into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular television and film, Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still offers a potent resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to achieve social justice and equality.

With Voices, learners use English as a tool for global communication and are encouraged to celebrate connections among people from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds. Carefully sequenced activities featuring real world content fully prepare learners for interaction and guide them to develop their voice in English. Voices is a seven-level, integrated-skills program for adults and young adults that enables instructors to teach with confidence in all classrooms. Supported by a common-sense lesson progression and a Virtual Voices Toolkit featuring professional development resources, teachers have the learning and teaching materials they need to deliver engaging courses both online and in person.

Southern rhetoric is communication's oldest regional study. During its initial invention, the discipline was founded to justify the study of rhetoric in a field of white male scholars analyzing significant speeches by other white men, yielding research that added to myths of Lost Cause ideology and a uniquely oratorical culture. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric takes on the much-overdue task of reconstructing the way southern rhetoric has been viewed and critiqued within the communication discipline. The collection reveals that southern rhetoric is fluid and migrates beyond geography, is constructed in weak counterpublic formation against legitimated power, creates a region that is not monolithic, and warrants activism and healing. Contributors to the volume examine such topics as political campaign strategies, memorial and museum experiences, television and music influences, commemoration protests, and ethnographic experiences in the South. The essays cohesively illustrate southern identity as manifested in various contexts and ways, considering what it means to be a part of a region riddled with slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other expressions of racial and cultural hierarchy. Ultimately, the volume initiates a new conversation, asking what would southern rhetorical critique be like if it included the richness of the southern culture from which it came? Contributions by Whitney Jordan Adams, Wendy Atkins-Sayre, Jason Edward Black, Patricia G. Davis, Cassidy D. Ellis, Megan Fitzmaurice, Michael L. Forst, Jeremy R. Grossman, Cynthia P. King, Julia M. Medhurst, Ryan Neville-Shepard, Jonathan M. Smith, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Dave Tell, and Carolyn Walcott.