Are the values of students and their teachers threatened each time they enter the unchartered waters of the Internet's popular culture content? The Internet has indeed "come of age," and as was the case with traditional mass media, the Internet has been increasingly examined for its positive and negative effects, particularly on children. What triggered the present study was a newspaper article that described a ban on computers and the Internet imposed in October 1999 on its followers by the Belz Hasidic, an Israeli Ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) religious sect. This edict was also endorsed by 30 leading Ultra-Orthodox rabbis from various other religious communities in Israel. Explaining that this original prohibition against computers and the Internet was later revised to permit computer use but continue the ban on Internet access, the article noted, the Belz Hasidic sect determined that, "computers have proved valuable in teaching the Bible and in running businesses." The Internet, however, was declared "out of bounds," largely because the information it exposed conflicted with Ultra-Orthodox principles rejecting modernity, popular culture and especially "its proliferation of links to pornographic sites." This study examines the convergence of religion, elementary education, Internet technology, and popular culture messages within Jewish elementary school classrooms in Israel. This research examines the methods used by Israeli computer coordinators to manage the convergence of Jewish (or humanistic) values with potentially conflicting Internet generated popular culture messages. It asks what values, whether Jewish values or human values at the core of the Jewish educator's belief system are important to transmit to their students? It questions what types of popular culture messages carried by the Internet conflict with these values? More importantly, this study surveys how educators and students evaluate these conflicting messages in relation to the values they hold, and the manner in which these conflicts are managed. This is an important book for those in communication, education, Jewish studies, and sociology of religion.

Professor Junhao Hong provides the first systematic study of China's television, the largest and one of the most complicated television systems in the world. China's television represents a highly complicated communication system, a powerful ideological machine, and a unique social manifestation. As Professor Hong illustrates, during the past 20 years, since the country's reform, television has experienced tremendous changes. While many studies of media globalization attribute the phenomenon mainly to external factors--new technologies, global capital flows, and quality production of Western programming--Hong argues that in many countries internal factors, such as government policy and the evolution of society, play decisive roles for change. Based on firsthand data and interviews with China's high-ranking officials and policymakers this study will be of considerable value to scholars and researchers dealing with mass media/television issues in the developing world and with contemporary China.

This book systematically and comprehensively studies on alternative media in Taiwan, using a historical approach and primary data and first hand collected materials to examine how political openness and social movement in the 1980s through the 1990s in Taiwan enabled the rapid growth and wide development of Taiwan’s alternative media, what impact the alternative media in Taiwan had on its socio-political transformation, and what implications Taiwan’s case of alternative media has for other societies, especially for other Asian societies. This book would be a good reading for intellectuals, media professionals, government analysts, and the general public as well, who are interested in this topic.

China in the Era of Social Media discusses how social media is changing the world in an unprecedented way through speed, scope, and depth. In the last decade or so, social media in China has witnessed the most explosive growth in the world. Being the most populous nation in the world, it has the most social media users in the world as well. This book examines the current situation and unique characteristics of Chinese social media, the significance of social media in the country's social transformation, and particularly its influences on political change in the nation. The main goal of this book is to explore how social media has been affecting and thus changing China's political system, the ruling communist ideology, and the state-run media, as well as its public discourse and public opinions. Scholars of Asian studies, political science, and communications will find this book particularly interesting.