The Middle East is an area of great importance globally, yet misperceptions abound. Events have made it a region of special interest to the West and so the search for understanding gains momentum. This publication is intended to clarify the region’s complex history and issues. In developing this project, the contributors’ set out to explore seven significant themes that are usually not found in other sources. While many books focus on political history and conflicts, this two-volume work deals specifically with culture, religion, women, economics, governance, and media, as well as the role that the region’s modern history has played in shaping its society and worldview.
Here is a wonderful Baedeker to down-and-dirty politics--more than six hundred slang terms straight from the smoke-filled rooms of American political speech. Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang illuminates a rich and colorful segment of our language. Readers will find informative entries on slang terms such as Beltway bandit and boondoggle, angry white male and leg treasurer, juice bill and Joe Citizen, banana superpower and the Big Fix. We find not only the meaning and history of familiar terms such as gerrymander, but also of lesser-known terms such as cracking (splitting a bloc of like-minded voters by redistricting) and fair-fight district (which refers to areas redistricted to favor no political party). Each entry includes the definition of the word, its historical background, and illuminating citations, some going back more than 200 years. (We learn, for instance, that a term as seemingly current as political football actually dates back to before the Civil War.) Selected entries will have extended encyclopedic notes. The book also features sidebar essays on topics such as political words in Blogistan; a short history of "big cheese"; all about chads and the 2000 election; the suffix "-gate" and all the related Watergate terms; and the naming of legislation. Political junkies, policy wonks, journalists, and word lovers will find this book addictive reading as well as a reliable guide to one of the more colorful corners of American English.
The Mirror and the Veil offers a unique perspective on the phenomenon of online personal diaries and blogs. Blending insights from literary criticism, from psychoanalytical theory and from social sciences, Viviane Serfaty identifies the historical roots of self-representational writing in America and studies the original features it has developed on the Internet. She perceptively analyzes the motivations of bloggers and the repercussions their writings may have on themselves and on American society at large. This book will be of interest to specialists in American Studies, to students in literature, communication, psychology and sociology, as well as to anyone endeavoring to understand the new set of practises created by Internet users in America.
The protests unleashed by Iran's disputed presidential election in June 2009 brought the Islamic Republic's vigorous cyber culture to the world's attention. Iran has an estimated 700,000 bloggers, and new media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were thought to have played a key role in spreading news of the protests. The internet is often celebrated as an agent of social change in countries like Iran, but most literature on the subject has struggled to grasp what this new phenomenon actually means. How is it different from print culture? Is it really a new public sphere? Will the Iranian blogosphere create a culture of dissidence, which eventually overpowers the Islamist regime? In this groundbreaking work, the authors give a flavour of contemporary internet culture in Iran and analyse how this new form of communication is affecting the social and political life of the country. Although they warn against stereotyping bloggers as dissidents, they argue that the internet is changing things in ways which neither the government nor the democracy movement could have anticipated. "Blogistan" offers both a new reading of Iranian politics and a new conceptual framework for understanding the politics of the internet, with implications for the wider Middle East, China and beyond.
Censorship pervades all aspects of political, social and cultural life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Faced with strict state control of cultural output, Iranian authors and writers have had to adapt their work to avoid falling foul of the censors. In this pioneering study, Alireza Abiz offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of how censorship and the political order of Iran have influenced contemporary Persian literature, both in terms of content and tone. As censorship is unrecorded and not officially acknowledged in Iran, the author has examined newspaper records and conducted first-hand interviews with Iranian poets and writers. looking into the ways in which poets and writers attempt to subvert the codes of censorship by using symbolism and figurative language to hide their more controversial messages. A ground-breaking analysis, this book will be vital reading for anyone interested in contemporary cultural politics and literature in Iran.
Successive Iranian leaders have struggled to navigate the fraught political-cultural space of media in the Islamic Republic–skirting the line between embracing Western communications technologies and rejecting them, between condemning social networking sites as foreign treachery and promoting themselves on Facebook. How does a regime that originally derived its hegemony from the ability to mass communicate its ideology protect its ideological dominance in a media environment defined by hybridity, hyper-connectivity, and near constant change? More broadly, what is the role of media in the construction and maintenance of power in Iran? This book addresses these questions by examining the institutions, policies, and discourses of two political regimes over the course of nearly eight decades. Drawing from over 3,000 primary source documents and digital artifacts in Persian and English, including formerly classified material hidden deep in the archives, this book offers a history of media in Iran across political regimes and media paradigms– from the public's first encounter with mass communication in the 1940s, to the dawn of digital media in the 1990s, to internet and mobile telephony today. At the same time, the book trains a keen eye on contemporary politics. With foundations in sociology and political science, Media and Power in Modern Iran offers trenchant insight into the present ruling establishment– a political regime born from what has become known as the "first televised revolution."
There is a great deal at stake for everyone in the future of Arab television. Political and social upheavals in this central but unsettled region are increasingly played out on television screens and in the tussles over programming that take place behind them. "Al-Jazeera" is of course only one player among a still-growing throng of satellite channels, which now include private terrestrial stations in some Arab states. It is an industry urgently needing to be made sense of; this book does exactly this in a very readable and authoritative way, through exploring and explaining the evolving structures and content choices in both entertainment and news of contemporary Arab television. It shows how owners, investors, journalists, presenters, production companies, advertisers, regulators and media freedom advocates influence each other in a geolinguistic marketplace that encompasses the Arab region itself and communities abroad. Probing internal and external interventions in the Arab television landscape, the book offers a timely and compelling sequel to Naomi Sakr's "Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East", which won the Middle Eastern Studies Book Prize in 2003.
In recent years, the Middle East's information and communications landscape has changed dramatically. Increasingly, states, businesses, and citizens are capitalizing on the opportunities offered by new information technologies, the fast pace of digitization, and enhanced connectivity. These changes are far from turning Middle Eastern nations into network societies, but their impact is significant. The growing adoption of a wide variety of information technologies and new media platforms in everyday life has given rise to complex dynamics that beg for a better understanding. Digital Middle East sheds a critical light on continuing changes that are closely intertwined with the adoption of information and communication technologies in the region. Drawing on case studies from throughout the Middle East, the contributors explore how these digital transformations are playing out in the social, cultural, political, and economic spheres, exposing the various disjunctions and discordances that have marked the advent of the digital Middle East.
Social Media in Iran is the first book to tell the complex story of how and why the Iranian people—including women, homosexuals, dissidents, artists, and even state actors—use social media technology, and in doing so create a contentious environment wherein new identities and realities are constructed. Drawing together emerging and established scholars in communication, culture, and media studies, this volume considers the role of social media in Iranian society, particularly the time during and after the controversial 2009 presidential election, a watershed moment in the postrevolutionary history of Iran. While regional specialists may find studies on specific themes useful, the aim of this volume is to provide broad narratives of actor-based conceptions of media technology, an approach that focuses on the experiential and social networking processes of digital practices in the information era extended beyond cultural specificities. Students and scholars of regional and media studies will find this volume rich with empirical and theoretical insights on the subject of how technologies shape political and everyday life.
In Transcultural Communication, Andreas Hepp provides an accessible and engaging introduction to the exciting possibilities and inevitable challenges presented by the proliferation of transcultural communication in our mediatized world. Includes examples of mediatization and transcultural communication from a variety of cultural contexts Covers an array of different types of media, including mass media and digital media Incorporates discussion of transcultural communication in media regulation, media production, media products and platforms, and media appropriation
