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COVID-19 pandemic is the first truly global crisis in the digital age. With death count worldwide reaching 586,000 merely 7 months after its first outbreak in China in late December 2019 and 13.6 million cases reported in 188 countries and territories as of July 2020, this ongoing pandemic has spread far beyond domain of world health problem to become an unprecedented challenge facing humanity at every level. In addition to causing social and economic disruptions on a scale unseen before, it has turned the world into a site of biopolitical agon where science and reason are forced to betray their impotence against cultish thinking in the planetary endgame depicted in so many dystopian science fictions. It is in this context that this forum offers a set of modest reflections on the current impacts incurred by the COVID-19 virus. Blending ethnographic observations with theory-driven reflections, the five authors address issues made manifest by the crisis across different regions, while keeping their sight on the sociopolitical problems plaguing our life both individually and collectively. Taken together, they provide a grounded documentary for the archive that the COVID-19 virus is making us to construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00282.x Byline: Briankle G. Chang (1), Garnet C. Butchart (2) Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 (2)Cultural Studies Program, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, K9H 7P4, Canada

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00283.x Byline: Briankle G. Chang (1) Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003

This article discusses the concept of "gift of memory." Memories give; they give themselves in that they come to people whether they are ready to receive them or not. In fact, they give themselves most paradigmatically as they truly are when people least expect them. The coming of memories thus constitutes an event in the time of being, their arrival, unexpected, surprising, and often cruel, falling upon people in the free fall of their own rising. Though coming from the past, memories are in truth about the future. Freedom, generosity, or gratuity thus define the gift, turning an object into a present beyond counterpoise, even beyond justice, that is, into something tendered without any consideration of return and without any measure of balance. A gift is nothing if it is not free; it must be freely given and given for free. To keep memory alive is to take measure of its coming, its ongoing passing in time; it is to bear out the suffering of time itself, its coming and going en souffrance as it manifests itself. At the same time, one should not forget, if something is coming, if it comes only through its coming, it does not and cannot arrive, for what has arrived must have ceased to come, and what has stopped coming necessarily falls short of arrival, and one expectedly stops expecting it.

The article provides information on the usefulness of audience in mass communication research in the U.S. It aims to show why the idea of audience as people, as an individual psychological entities' collection, needed to be rejected. It calls for a focus of an anthropocentric audience as it has been functional in mass communication research in the U.S. in media and general effects research. It advocates audience reconceptualization that situates it as an essential moment susceptible to all kinds of extra-media influences in the structural whole of cultural production, consumption and distribution of messages/meanings.

The transportation of Continental thought to the U.S. has always been greeted with distrust. In the field of humanities and social sciences, ambivalent feelings toward recent European invasions, beginning with phenomenology and structuralism to the latest rewritings of poststructuralism, are particularly acute. In communication studies, however, the situation is not so encouraging. Communication scholars, for the most part, have tended to ignore many powerful works on media research and on social critical theory of communication in general carried out in the Continental style. This blindness or lack of interest may in part be due to the presence of a strong tradition of mass communication research rooted in an empirico-positivist legacy that, enamoured by statistics and survey techniques, finds certain modes of reflection on similar subject matters alien and uncongenial, that is, speculative and unscientific. One point of departure for such a rapprochement can be found in the work of sociologist Jean Baudrillard because he provides a radically alternative view of mass communication as it irrevocably transforms the Western capitalism by expanding the regime of the sign. Baudrillard's work can be understood as a response to the inadequacy of Marxist and semiotic analysis of social structuration in general and of the media in particular. It shows how both "revolutionary" discourses end up reaffirming.