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In Latin America, Jesús Martín-Barbero is a pop star and a beloved scholar with thousands of followers captured by his original way of thinking, imagining, and researching the relations between communication, culture, and politics. This essay explains five characteristics of Martín-Barbero's style: (i) his reflections about expressions of popular and mass culture such as music, telenovelas, fairs, and celebrations; (ii) his gaze at and from local territories, identities; (iii) his innovative way of thinking from the Global South while in conversation with Western philosophy; (iv) his proposal for a theory of mediations as a way to understand cultural interactions and the production of social meaning; and (v) an intellectual passion that led him to engage daringly in political issues in society. As one of his students and colleagues, the essay ends with my own notions of what a communication researcher should do/be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the latest transformations of humanitarian communication in recent years has certainly been the growing adoption of the language of animation, especially in online media. Looking at the effects of this new trend, this article intends to reflect on how NGO communication has concretely changed on a visual and discursive level through the use of animation. The corpus analysed, selected from YouTube, consists of a series of examples of animated online videos of NGOs that deal with a recent and influential phenomenon: the refugee crisis. Since 2015, an increasing number of new NGOs have emerged in order to contribute to aid for migrants, as opposed to European policies: what kind of representation of migrants do NGOs convey in their communication campaigns that employ animation? What kind of solidarity discourse is adopted through this audiovisual language? The analysis of these examples will serve as a basis for introducing the theorisation of numerous characteristics specific to animation, which make it an effective medium for the promotion of humanitarian missions and for the transmission of the testimonies of migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the complex operations of the Indian media economy, the phrase 'media markets' requires careful consideration as an analytical concept. As a noun, 'media markets' is typically used to refer to a spread of media businesses and/or consumer sectors. Closer examination reveals that there tend to be multiple markets operating simultaneously within any media business (for products, capital, labour, audience, etc.). This implies an 'economy of markets', transacting both across media formats and with markets situated outside of the media production process. Both 'media exchanges' and 'mediated exchanges' shape the dynamics of the inter-locking markets that constitute the Indian media economy. Thus, at the categorical level, we ask several questions: What are the boundaries of media markets? Who are the key actors? How are these transactional relationships valued? With these questions in mind, this article seeks to identify points of distinction in form and geography along with critical relationships between overlapping markets and underlying interests. We propose a topology of Indian media markets, organised via three levels, with treatment of each taking into consideration the synergistic character of media markets and how interdependency shapes functional norms, rules of exchange, and the embedding of media transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about the role of media and communication in social change are central to our discipline, yet advances in this field are hampered by disciplinary fragmentation, a lack of shared conceptual language and limited understanding of long-term shifts in the field. To address this, we first develop a typology that distinguishes between approaches that foreground the role of media and communication as an agent of change, and approaches that treat media and communication as an environment for change. We then use this typology to identify key trends in the field since 1951, including the sharp downturn in work focusing on economic aspects of change after 1985, the decline of grand narratives of social change since 2000 and the parallel return to media effects. We conclude by outlining the key traits of a processual approach to social change, which has the capacity to offer the basis for shared language in the field. This language can enable us to think of media, communication and social change across its varied temporal and social planes, and link together the processes involved in the reproduction of status quo with fundamental changes to social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having 'disrupted' many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between the spread of social media and the recent surge of populism around the world remains elusive. A global, rather than Western, theory is required to explore this connection. Such a theory would need to pay particular attention to five questions, namely, the roots of populism, ideology and populism, the rise of theocratic populism, social media and non-populist politicians, and the embedding of social media in larger systems of communication. In this essay, I draw from a range of cross-cultural examples to argue that social media are inextricable from a dense web of highly diverse online and offline communicative practices. Like most other forms of political communication, populism is twice hybrid, in that it entails the ceaseless interaction between old and new media as well as between online and offline sites of communication. Populists never operate in a vacuum or indeed in a filter bubble: they share hybridly mediated spaces and arenas with other populists and with non-populists. Over time, these varied political actors have co-evolved media strategies and tactics in full awareness of one another’s existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of control and communication endemic to powered flight have given rise to a range of media forms, which this article proposes to designate aviation media. Today, the maturation and proliferation of unmanned aircraft or drones is reconfiguring the media technologies, infrastructures, and practices on which pilots have previously relied. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with drone pilots and other airspace users in North Dakota, a US state that has courted the unmanned aircraft industry in a bid for economic diversification, this article describes the mundane forms of media labor that underpin the operation of unmanned systems. It also shows how contemporary efforts to achieve an integrated airspace in which both manned and unmanned aircraft can fly depend on the widespread adoption of transmissive media technologies. This demand defines the current media practices of rural airspace users as impediments to progress. By highlighting the politics of aviation media at a moment when drones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, this article reveals how changes in what it means to be a pilot hinge on shifting claims about which media matter most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that development of Communication Sciences in Lusophone geo and cultural region, encourage cooperation between Portuguese-speaking countries, increase the international role of the Portuguese-speaking researchers communities in terms of scientific production, and sponsor the publication of scientific work in Portuguese. It mentions that science communication and language policies decide who has power to define the social reality and the power to impose such representation.

Over recent years leading independent television production companies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe have become prime targets for corporate activity, and many have been subject to takeover, often by US media groups. Why is it that nurturing the development of television production companies which achieve scale but, at the same time, remain independent appears to be so challenging? This article considers which factors are crucial to the success of television production businesses and argues that, besides the ability to make compelling content, two key variables which strongly affect commercial success and sustainability in this sector are, first, effective management and exploitation of intellect property rights (IPRs) and, second, scale and configuration of activities. Focusing primarily on the latter, it analyses how changing technological and market conditions are affecting the advantages conferred by size and by adopting differing cross-ownership configurations thus, in turn, fuelling current processes of industrial re-structuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role that community media play in the translocal negotiation of local culture in Latin America. Translocal is a concept that captures the way that local cultural producers engage with national and transnational forces in shaping everyday cultural practices. This study focuses on community radio station Ecos de Manantlán in Zapotitlán de Vadillo, Mexico (Radio Zapotitlán), during the years 2006–2012. Radio Zapotitlán is officially categorized as a campesino or agricultural laborer/peasant station and presents its campesino identity through radio and Internet content. Analyses of that content, along with interviews with station associates and listeners, reveal the complex cultural mediations between local media producers, national regulators, and transnational donors. This study investigates the local production of a transnationally funded radionovela, or radio soap opera, as a window onto the station’s role as a cultural mediator. This article argues that station participants used the radionovela to express local values and meanings and to marginalize the educational goals of the transnational agency funding the project. Radio Zapotitlán offers a concrete case of cultural negotiation in which local interests engage with – and transform – donor-funded content aimed at the local community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dayan and Katz’s book Media Events was so crucial because it challenged the dominance of quantitative communications research focused on measurable discrete ‘media effects’. But meanwhile new challenges have emerged which we called ‘deep mediatization’ – datafication, deeper fragmentation of the audience, and over the longer-term threats to the underlying economic viability of the large-scale integrated media producers that could put on ‘media events’. This makes it necessary to rethink the original definition of media events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of this work is to apply thoughts from Georg Lukács’ final book, the Ontology of Social Being, for the theoretical analysis of cultural and digital labour. It discusses Lukács’ concepts of work and communication and relates them to the analysis of cultural and digital work. It also analyses his conception of the relation of labour and ideology and points out how we can make use of it for critically understanding social media ideologies. Lukács opposes the dualist separation of the realms of work and ideas. He introduces in this context the notion of teleological positing that allows us to better understand cultural and digital labour as well as associated ideologies, such as the engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology, today. The analysis shows that Lukács’ Ontology is in the age of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, still a very relevant book, although it has thus far not received the attention that it deserves. This article also introduces the Ontology’s main ideas on work and culture, which is important because large parts of the book have not been translated from the German original into English. Lukács’ notion of teleological positing is crucial for understanding the common features of the economy and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores unintended effects of recent growth in India's mobile phone network. Using a case study of the Indian Premier League (IPL) - a popular cricket league that has encouraged mobile phone usage among fans - this article argues that India's large and inclusive mobile phone networks have enabled significant new gambling and corruption. The spatial possibilities of mobile networks have led to new organizational forms in gambling and corruption, with small-scale local activity increasingly supplanted by organized syndicates located in Mumbai and Dubai. Based on interviews with mobile phone users and participants in betting rings, this article shows that the IPL mobile network enables second-order networks of criminal activity by making it easier to administer illegal action and easier to escape detection. This article emphasizes three ways that mobile networks facilitate gambling. First, their functionality, portability, and near-universality allow for new flows of information and capital. Second, mobile networks allow for new scale and new organizational forms, allowing a shift from local bookies to national and international syndicates. Third, mobile networks have dramatically enlarged the gambling sector in India. These changes have helped turn cricket gambling into a global industry with India at its center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel 'at home' in a past that is not 'theirs'? What might such a reconstitution of nostalgia tell us about practices of interpretation, recollection, and identification among media audiences? Addressing these questions, this article investigates the responses of Israeli television viewers to a purportedly nostalgic US drama series, Mad Men. In the process, it reemphasizes nostalgia's spatial axis, while reframing nostalgia as a construct of viewer engagement rather than as a feature of media texts. Ultimately, it proposes that contemporary transnational nostalgia possesses a double structure: it is selective, acting as an emotional and cognitive resource consciously used by audiences to examine their present personal and socio-political realities; that very use, however, depends on a 'banal cosmopolitanism' in which the mediated pasts of distant societies are seamlessly experienced as a part of viewers' proximate lifeworlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadcast television faces new challenges in the rapidly changing media environment. This article proposes 'para-interactivity' as a concept that identifies the ways television addresses its audiences in the digital age. Para-interactivity is a term that brings together several salient elements in contemporary television texts as well as positing a contemporary context for established and familiar television strategies. It identifies elements embraced by television, which echo interactive communication processes and are characteristic of digital media and participatory culture, but when employed by and adapted to television, they do not usually construct communication that is actually interactive. This article focuses on one of these para-interactive strategies: unvelling television's apparatus on screen. This strategy implies an inclusive viewing experience and a seemingly more equal and reciprocal relationship between television and its viewers. However, I argue that what is presented to the viewers is nothing but a 'staged backstage', while television industry surrounds itself in real and legal fences. Drawing on Israeli commercial television texts, this article contributes to the understanding of contemporary transformations in television as a medium and as a cultural industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short article, I analyse Hall’s neglected early work on media and its account of how ideology is reproduced through the everyday workings of media institutions. I trace the importance of that work through later work on the mythical aspects of media institutions (Couldry) and more recent work on the culture of connectivity (Van Dijck) and its appropriation of the social in the form of social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking our bearings from Stuart Hall’s essay from 1982, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’, we argue in this discussion piece for the need to pick up the tools of ideology critique once again. Quite simply, the contemporary moment where accelerating inequality is masked by blame of the poor and of migrants demands it. The case is made first through a critique of ideological responses to the economic crisis after 2008. Then in the final section we examine advocacy of ‘social mobility’ in the public sphere, an ideological project if ever there was one. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent proliferation and impact of protest events in the Middle East, northern Africa, and the development of a worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement have ignited inquiry into the people, social structures and technologies that have helped give these social movements form. Three cases are described here which add to this discussion and lead to a pruning of the analytical landscape in this subject area. By looking to the use of Twitter as a tool for political protest in Iran in 2009, Moldova in 2009 and the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh in 2009, the complexity of the intertwined social and technological strands that have given rise to these new political protests is acknowledged. By realizing that this distinction is salient yet fuzzy, it becomes possible to make new observations, ask new questions and begin to understand the nature of recent political tussles and the communication tools used in them. For instance, this article posits that by seeing the particular use of a new communication tool – a socio-technical assemblage – as an artifact, analysts can learn something new about the motivations of those sitting at the negotiating table. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African geographical mobilities should be understood in terms of their increasingly global development over the last two decades, and as an interplay of scales of mobility between continents and between African regions or nations. The relationship between these various times and scales of mobility shape mobile communities as a daily reality for many Africans. African family histories and personal lives are full of connecting with those who have left. In recent years, these daily practices have been radically altered by improvements in communication technology – with travel, radio messages and letter writing being replaced by mobile telephony as the main connecting technology. This article explores how the development of connecting technology has changed the social dynamics of African mobile communities and focuses on the changes in (old and new) social hierarchies that are related to possibilities of accessing mobility and connecting technologies. It is based on a qualitative case study of a mobile community in Africa, which is part of the Mobile Africa Revisited programme that is investigating the relationship between new ICTs, mobility, marginality and social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Development is meant to alleviate problems in the interests of the public good, yet the growing dominance of private donors problematizes this conceptualization. Working through a political-economic analysis of development, we see global communications as an industry that channels wealth from citizens into the hands of few corporate moguls, who then have the resources to assert their agendas in a global development context. We begin by conceptualizing development and social change within communication studies, paying attention to the privatization of aid within global capitalism. Next, we contextualize our case study, describing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and ONE, promoted by Bono, as the funding and management settings of the Living Proof campaign. We analyze the initiative’s construction of development problems, its articulation of how communication is expected to work toward social change, and its conceptualizations of success. The dominant theme of Living Proof program is that “real people” have achieved development success, which can be shared as “proof” with website consumers. We conclude by considering how such a framing serves the agenda of privatized development within a neoliberal project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author explores the state of communication and media studies during the 21st century. It states that external and internal factors affect media studies such as humanistic and social scientific approaches to research. The author looks at the development communication in the U.S. in he 1950s as well as cultural imperialism in the 1970s.

The article reports on the development and challenges related to global media studies. It examines the consequences of the change in global power away from advanced countries such as the U.S. The author also explores the effect of technical change in the media in the advanced countries in the Northern region of the world.

The article discusses the debates concerning the focus of media studies on the public sphere. It states that such studies view the public sphere as a globalizing network society. According to the author, this research offers a look at the effect of mass Internet access on the increasing interest of people in studying public sphere.

This article examines the curious interplay between media sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Recent media research is increasingly drawn to STS, while STS analysts are increasingly drawn to research media technologies. While it is routine practice in STS to stress the ‘materiality’ of the objects under investigation, media technologies pose a challenge to this. Their ‘materiality’ is difficult to distinguish from their communicative/symbolic dimensions, the latter often being misframed as ideal/immaterial. By contrast, media research traditions have thought through these issues in terms of the concept of articulation and the related conceptual legacy of aesthetic modernism. While far more attentive to the specificity of ‘the symbolic’, these frameworks have been only partly informed by macro-social theoretical reflection. Here we advocate Calhoun’s placement of communications within his ‘infrastructure of modernity’ as the most suitable overarching framework for discussion of this border communication. However, Calhoun’s framework itself can benefit from re-invigoration by the socio-technical insights of both traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author examines mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the communications sector between 1990 and 2008 to reflect on the history and practice of convergence in communication. He analyzes the failure of big media deals and discusses why and how communications companies have pursued de-convergence by using split-off and spin-off strategies as their business models. He also examines whether de-convergence could become a solid trend which would replace convergence in the early 21st century.

The authors explores the conceptualization of online communication in the global community. They contend that to dichotomize the concept of the internet into either a known or an unknown territory may limit the understanding of this new form of communication. They propose that those engaged in this field consider some foundational ideas of communication and explore other ideas. The authors argue that online communication should be approached as a collaborative system.

The objective of this study is to understand key aspects of contemporary discourse surrounding telecommunications development in Aotearoa New Zealand after the privatization of telecommunications in the late 1980s. We identify various characteristics of discourse on competition and telecommunication and trace how competition discourse was rhetorically positioned in attempts to produce economic, political and cultural outcomes. In particular, we argue that a race metaphor underpinned discussions about competition in broadband development. The race metaphor itself was raced inasmuch as it tapped into national anxieties about Aotearoa New Zealand’s place in the ‘developed’ world in order to motivate action on broadband policy. We also found that competition discourse in relation to broadband policy exhibited inherent contradictions in promoting control, in the form of increased regulation, while simultaneously promoting freedom, in the form of ‘unbundling’. Implications for understanding broadband growth as well as competition discourse itself are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The contemporary dynamics of mass communication necessitate a reassessment of the received notions of audience labor. To that end this article revisits Dallas Smythe’s seminal audience commodity theory through the lens of a two-sided class analysis. A number of his key conceptualizations are critiqued including audience power, audience measurement, media content as a free lunch, audiences as a non-durable producer’s good, the disappearance of labor power, and the revisionist history of capitalist development . At each point in the critique the contributions of various political economists who have revised and extended Smythe’s work are highlighted. The critique serves to underscore the contributions and limitations of the theory as its extension into the new media landscape is reconsidered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to accomplish more multi-dimensional analyses of media logic one needs to study how journalists grapple with news issues in their expanding development, such as the revolutionary development of the climate issue in the news. The present analysis is based on interviews with 14 Swedish environmental journalists from various news media, who have been part of editorial concentrations on climate news. The results consist of three ways of conceptualizing the climate issue among the journalists: as inside, outside, and beyond media logic. These conceptualizations give rise to three conflicting types of journalistic creativity, more precisely, the ability to effectively insert the climate issue ‘into’ media logic; the ability to go as far ‘outside’ media logic as possible while remaining credible by arraying the climate issue in ‘scientific language’; and finally, the ability to think beyond the media-logic ‘box’ and do something about it (to change journalism). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a discursive space for the voices of three Sudanese women singers who have different life experiences and have different agencies regarding their subject positions as ghanayaat/fananaat (performers) and as women. The article explores how the fananaat negotiate their position as female singers through highlighting their perceptions of the songs they perform which are referred to in Sudan as Aghanii al-Banaat (girls’ songs). Aghanii al-Banaat are songs that are usually performed in women’s gatherings in Central Sudan such as weddings, naming parties, and other gatherings. Moreover, the article will also dwell on the artistic experiences of the three women performers: the ‘other’), and through highlighting their artistic experiences as fananaat. In addition, the article discusses the relationship of the three fananaat with institutions (such as the media and record production companies). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author ponders on the role of mass media in everyday life. He believes the growing invisibility of media is exemplified by their disappearing from consciousness. He claims that the main bias of media technologies lies on the sense of reality. He explores the media life perspective and its association with media studies.

The article discusses the key role of the relation between television programming and merchandising in the commercialization of the children's media and communications despite the existence of regulatory policies in Europe. It highlights the measures used by public broadcasters NRK and its television channel for children, NRK Super, in applying the strategy. It illustrates the differences between Disney Channel and NRK Super. It explains the landscape of the television industry in Europe in the absence of directive and program quotas.

In this article, the author discusses the mass communication and the roles of audience in the media environment. The author states that the approach to mass communication can be expressed in a strong conceptualization of the idea of the mass, wherein the mass refers to the senders and receivers of information. He says that the communication dynamics which were shown in Web 2.0 applications including YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter highlights an approach to mass communication.

The article discusses various ways for using intraprofessional broadcast talk in broadcast journalism. It states that the recorded single-turn uses pre-recorded single utterance and assumes a live airing set of talk. It says that live single-turn is used as follow-up in news presentation and is done via pseudodialogical way. Moreover, it adds that live two-way via link, provide questions to journalist in a multi-question and answer exchange set, and thus creates link for news site and studio.

The article examines the dynamics involved in the mediation of a global event by (local) news media. Using the case study of the WTO conference held in Hong Kong in December 2005, it critiques the discursive practice of 'indigenization' in local news coverage. Specifically, it argues that mediated violence is justified in the framing of a global event. Mediatized conflict is also seen as a process that potentially co-opts conflicting parties in the global event, and as an example of the fluid expansive space between the global and the local. The article also discusses the representation of Korean farmers as the violent 'foreign' other. This 'framing' of the Korean protesters, however, was disrupted by experienced Korean protesters, who forced unwary reporters to change their ritualistic representation of the whole event. This scenario epitomizes one of the problematics involved in the hegemonic interplay between local news media, social movements and politics in the increasingly intensified local/global nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing radio's role in a broader early 20th-century American music appreciation movement, this article examines a push for inclusion of classical content on broadcast schedules of the 1920s and 1930s and documents critical objections to programming strategies pursued by commercial broadcasters during this period. While music appreciation advocates embraced radio's potential for cultural uplift, they also criticized broadcasters for giving the classics inadequate representation, violating the structural integrity of these works, and offering listeners explanations of this music that encouraged inappropriate modes of aesthetic engagement. If radio promised to spread classical music throughout all quarters of American society, critics during this period also expressed concerns that strategies used to popularize these works would degrade them and subvert the taste culture whose dominance they might otherwise assert. For classical music lovers, radio thus presented the biggest boon and greatest threat to music appreciation that the nation had ever known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By combining ethnographic methods with textual analysis, this article sets out to answer the question of how a scripted event on live television is infused with a sense of 'liveness' in order to balance the requirements of control and spontaneity in a broadcast interview. The management of this seemingly paradoxical desire is, in this analysis, linked to the ways in which professionals work at maintaining the identity of public service while competing in a commercial media market. In relation to this general inquiry, the script's status in the production of a broadcast interview will also be analysed, an area which is something of a blind spot in media research. In doing so, the conventional division between scripted and unscripted broadcast talk is called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates on media concentration and the appropriate way to handle it are not coming to an end. This article stresses the dual character of media goods, the underlying ideological ideals, and the attendant institutional setting as sources of value conflict in communications policy making. It discusses this value conflict and gives examples of where it surfaces and how it is confronted. It is particularly evident in cases of media concentration. Newly introduced communications laws and policies within Europe and the US aim to reduce (ownership) regulation, promote competition and cope with the challenges posed by convergence. This quest is coupled in part with protections of media pluralism through custom-developed indices for measuring concentration in media markets and tests for assessing media plurality in merger cases. The article describes and discusses these new methods and instruments as novel but imperfect attempts by policy makers to respond to the various challenges in communications such as value conflict, convergence, the need for empirical proof and claims for non-economic ways of assessing media diversity. It concludes by stressing the need to re-emphasize normative claims as essential guiding elements of communications policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently within media research, there has been an intensified discussion on the notion of ritual and the relationship between ritual and the mass media. This article offers a comparative historical perspective to this debate. We look at events that have been publicly signalled as 'national tragedies' within movie newsreels and public broadcaster's news from the 1950s to the 2000s, to see how media reporting of mourning rituals has changed. We ask how have the mourning rituals reported in the media been involved in 'joining us together' and what kind of 'sacred centres of society' have been constructed through the reporting of mourning rituals? Our study suggests that the media constructs mourning rituals, whether religious, civic or national, as inclusive and affirmative, constituting the church and the state as well as itself as key centres of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication systems are now converging, but communication policy has evolved to treat different media differently. Most solutions for a post-convergence communication policy are adjustments to inherited regulatory categories. Instead, this article revisits the underlying goals of policy-making across all media. First, the article presents a conceptual model for the communication policy process as one of inertia punctuated by crisis. Second, it applies this model to a very brief history of policy in the US, considering print, post, telephony, broadcasting and the internet. Third, from this analysis it suggests useful approaches in a converged environment, distinguishing three underlying goals for policy: the right to public dissemination, the right to private exchange and the right to design communication platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to the article "Simon Cottle on Mediatized Rituals: A Response," by N. Couldry and E. Rothenbuhler. According to the author, the concept of mediatized rituals does have more analytical purchase on a range of high-profile media phenomena than his critics suggest. The author claims that what is baffling is the repeated charge that his discussion and conceptualization of mediatized rituals is functionalist and pinpointed as emanating from sociology 50 years ago.

A key paradox at the heart of media phenomenology is that media are experienced as 'at once central and marginal to our lives', as Raymond Williams wrote. While Paddy Scannell, drawing on Heidegger, argues that broadcast media in particular invite ordi- nary people into a 'universe of discourse', Alain Touraine counters that there is no longer a public space into which to be invited. This article, through a reconsideration of Heidegger's writings on broadcast media, develops the complexities and ambiguities of nearness and distance which media produce. In particular, it draws on the qualitative and quantitative data of a recently completed UK project to explore how individuals experience and negotiate their relation (or lack thereof) to a public world and the role media play in sustaining or undermining this relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents an analysis of Simon Cottle's concept of ritual. The concepts of ritual Cottle presents is derived from Habermas, Benjamin and Baudrillard, not scholars who actually study ritual and media. The prominence of ritual in modern societies has been a primary topic of the ritual studies literature. Cottle cites Couldry, Rothenbuhler and Silverstone as examples of the study of ritual in the media presentation and everyday media consumption. The author states that Cottle's concept of rituals in media is far from new and, as presented, largely without content or clarity.

This article presents an analysis of people's reactions to popular American movies and television series about politics. The analysis is based on the context of enduring questions in political communication. It examines the effects of mass media on people's interest, attitude, knowledge, and behavior with respect to politics. It also discusses that popular television and film concerning politics produce a potential resource that is a combination of media discourse, popular wisdom and experiential knowledge.

Research on media use in authoritarian political systems supports the thesis that media offerings in such systems suffer from a low factor of credibility, leading to declining political interest within society, continuous retreat into the private sphere and heavy use of foreign media offerings in the search of trustworthy information. The literature indicates that both the political and centrally controlled media system have an impact on the communication needs of citizens. These findings are at odds with audience research into democratic societies, which has emphasized entertain- ment as the most important variable for media use, whereas only a few segments of the audience are interested in genuinely political items. This article argues that the above assumptions concerning media use in countries governed by authoritarian regimes have failed to recognize the role of daily life in media selection and recep- tion. It points out that communication science has ignored citizens' predominant desire for entertainment and over-estimated their need for information. The typology of East German media consumers presented in this article shows that, rather than being formed by the political system and a specific media landscape, people's com- munication needs are primarily shaped by the routines and patterns of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persuasion has been extensively examined in broadcast contexts such as political speeches/debates and advertisements. In contrast, it has only been tangentially considered in relation to the increasingly popular lifestyle media. This is despite both scholarly consensus that these programmes actively promote certain lifestyles as desirable over others and that general views of these programmes being nothing more than trivial, mindless entertainment belie their influence on viewer patterns of living and spending time and money. In view of this, I examine the resources and strategies that the lifestyle media deploy in order to persuade viewers to pursue specific lifestyles, drawing upon a corpus of 45 episodes of British primetime television property shows. Textual analysis of this corpus reveals the shows' promotion of ready-made lifestyle packages which interlock material, lifestyle and identity choices and use ease and aesthetics as incentives. The analysis also focuses upon the shows' persuasive combination of two participation frameworks: diluted didactics and melodrama. This article therefore contributes to the current debate on the purchase of lifestyles in contemporary, mass-mediated societies by critically examining a broadcast genre in which lifestyles are not only showcased but persuasively offered to viewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From his first reflections on advertising as a ‘magical institution’ in 1952 to his last writings on ‘The Brain and Media’ in 1978, Marshall McLuhan was reproached for his utopian view of media technologies as the ‘extensions of man’ and for his failure to understand the new, more formidable rhetorical powers of the electric mass media. These criticisms are not entirely unjust. At times McLuhan does seem to view media machines as vehicles of flight into a ‘cosmic harmony’ that ‘transcends space and time’. But for all his ‘delirious tribal optimism’ (Baudrillard), McLuhan also understood that the global village or ‘global theatre’ has become a theatre of war, a staging area for ‘colossal violence’ and ‘maximal conflict’. In order to shed new light on this darker, more radical vision of the mass media set forth by McLuhan, this article explores his decisive — but largely unacknowledged — contribution to radical media studies today, especially to the work of Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler and others concerned with the alliance of war, media and information in modern society. After some reflections on McLuhan's ‘mosaic’ approach to the media ecology and his view of media as the extensions of man, I examine three modulations of his most infamous aphorism: the medium is the message; the medium is the massage; and the medium is the massage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the influence of popular culture on children's social identities. The first influence is sport, including the activity itself, the associated brands and logos, and the styling of popular sports stars, and the second is pop music, its stars, their videos, their outfits, overall image and lifestyles, and their own clothing lines. These influences are further related to cultural intermediaries such as television and print media, all providing key sources of information for children about the role of fashion and the consumption image. The author also concludes that the concept of fashion and its portrayal within certain aspects of popular culture, play a key role in defining children's social identities.

The article comments on the relationship between journalism and politics in Great Britain. The author argues the impact of the increasing interconnectedness of media and politics on the public and on the functioning of the wider political culture. The author also discusses the problem of traditional forms of journalism in attracting the Internet generation. This paper is also an attempt to develop a formal approach to comparative research on media and politics. It also offers information about the action taken by the government to address the media-political crisis.

The article examines the initial engagement by the National Assembly for Wales with questions of broadcasting policy. According to former BBC Wales Controller Geraint Talfan Davies, the National Assembly would create a more open environment for the discussion of broadcasting policy. The development of broadcasting policy post-devolution is still its infancy. If devolution is a process, not an event, then some harder thinking on these issues is required by all parties. The policy cycle on the Communication Bill was arguably too far advanced as the devolved institutions began their operations for broad issues of principle such as this to be addressed.