From oral culture, through the advent of literacy, to the introduction of printing, to the development of electronic media, communication structures have radically altered culture in profound ways. As the first book to take a critical realist approach to culture, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism examines theatre and its history through the interaction of society s structures, agents, and discourses. Tobin Nellhaus shows that communication structure - a culture s use and development of speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics - explains much about why, when, and how theatre has transformed.
Providing a comprehensive introduction to the culture, technologies, history and theories of new media, this book considers the ways in which they really are new, assesses whether a media and technological revolution is under way and formulates ways for media studies to respond to new technologies.
An evaluative examination that challenges the media to rise above the systematic racism and sexism that persists across all channels, despite efforts to integrate. The Internet and social networks have opened up new avenues of communication for women and people of color, but the mainstream news is still not adequately including minority communities in the conversation. Part of the Racism in America series, How Racism and Sexism Killed the Traditional Media: Why the Future of Journalism Depends on Women and People of Color reveals the lack of diversity that persists in the communication industry. Uncovering and analyzing the racial bias in the media and in many newsrooms, this book reveals the lesser-known side of the media—newsrooms and outlets that are often fraught with underlying racist and sexist tension. Written by a veteran journalist of color, this title brings an insider's perspective combined with interviews from industry experts. The book analyzes the traditional media's efforts to integrate both women and people of color into legacy newsrooms, highlighting their defeats and minor successes. The author examines the future of women and people of color in the mainstream media.
How small-scale drones, satellites, kites, and balloons are used by social movements for the greater good. Drones are famous for doing bad things: weaponized, they implement remote-control war; used for surveillance, they threaten civil liberties and violate privacy. In The Good Drone, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick examines a different range of uses: the deployment of drones for the greater good. Choi-Fitzpatrick analyzes the way small-scale drones--as well as satellites, kites, and balloons--are used for a great many things, including documenting human rights abuses, estimating demonstration crowd size, supporting anti-poaching advocacy, and advancing climate change research. In fact, he finds, small drones are used disproportionately for good; nonviolent prosocial uses predominate.
In the present-day Tower of Babylon—the all-encompassing virtual world built of image layered upon image—children are the most vulnerable users. If we permit them unfettered access to media that promotes corporate and consumer values, while suppressing their cognitive development and creative imagination, then an ‘imaginationless generation’ may be our grim and inevitable future. This book takes the reader, whether an academic, a parent or an educator, through a startling journey from the harms lurking in the virtual worlds—to children’s health and well-being, to how they deal with representations of violence and sexuality, as well as exposure to cyberbullying, advertising, Internet Addiction Disorder, and even exploitation. The most dangerous harm is unseen, and affects the innermost realm of a child’s psyche: the imagination. The authors discuss the current global regulatory framework that makes the protection of children ever more challenging. They discuss lessons learned from the ways that courts have negotiated free speech issues, as well as the research on parental mediation of children’s Internet use in the home. Finally, they move towards a bold new attempt at understanding regulation, by drawing lessons for new media from ancient culture. In The Imagionationless Generation, the authors pioneer an attempt to address the real harms that children face in virtual realities by presenting a new and paradigm shifting theory—the Media Engagement. They follow the theory’s insights and predictions to offer a new perspective on a burning question of our time—how to protect children online. This multidisciplinary intellectual voyage and its insights are only possible by standing on the shoulders of scholars who have gone before, such as Ellul, Baudrillard, McLuhan, Postman and Piaget, to name a few. As academics, parents and concerned human beings, the authors present here the results of more than twenty years of research in a way that should appeal to a wide variety of readers, as they stretch our understanding of the human-machine interface beyond right and wrong. This book shapes our understanding of media in the digital age in much the same way that McLuhan’s Understanding Media did for a previous generation.
A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond “The book might be described as prophetic. . . . At least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition.”—New York NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED • LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today’s social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.
New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law and Policy, by Lyombe S. Eko, is a collection of novel theoretical perspectives and case studies which illustrate how different communication law regimes conceptualize and apply universal ideals of human rights and freedom of expression to media controversies in real space and cyberspace. Eko’s investigation includes such controversial communication policy topics as North African regimes’ failed use of telecommunications to suppress the social change of the Arab Spring, the Mohammad cartoon controversy in Denmark and France, French and American policy of development and diffusion of the Minitel and the Internet, American and Russian regulation of internet surveillance, the problem of managing pedopornography in cyberspace and real space, and other current communication policy cases. This study will aid readers not only to understand different national and cultural perspectives of thorny communication issues, but also show that though freedom of expression is a pluralistic concept, the actions of all political regimes at the national, transnational, and international levels must be held up to the universal standards of freedom of expression set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New Media, Old Regimes provides essential scholarship on comparative communication law and policy in a world of new media.
Exploring the theme of the putative transformation of political modernity under the impact of "new" media, this book adopts a questioning approach to the ways in which cultural and technological factors are affecting the temper of political life, and reflects the variety of normative thinking about and empirical research on the changing character of politics in mediatized cultures. New Media and Politics examines: the extent to which commercial populism now dominates electoral and other political discourses; the ways in which the functions of leadership, government and political parties are modified by different forms of both old and new media; the democratic or undemocratic import of such changes; and the ways in which the dominant territorial paradigm of politics is challenged by the space and time devouring capacities of electronic media.
The main aim of this volume is as a contribution to the development of a framework for analysing the relationship between news sources and news media in contemporary liberal democratic, capitalist societies.
