For more than five decades, we've been told by pundits, commentators, advertisers, scholars, and politicians that television is both a window on the world and a mirror reflecting our culture. We've been led to believe that it shows us the world's events through news programs and, through entertainment programs, reflects the preferences, values, beliefs, and understandings shared by most Americans. We're told that if you don't like what you see on TV, don't blame the industry, blame yourself. This book dispels the myth that the television industry is just giving viewers the programming they...

This book is a primer on media governance at a global level and the key influencing forces and organizations, such as ITU, WTO, UNESCO, WIPO, and ICANN. Governance oversees regulation, and questions addressed here include: Why do we regulate the various media at all? What currently are the major forms of global regulation, and how do they work? Who participates in, and who benefits from, media regulatory and governance structures? And what are the trends? Anyone interested in the media and its progressively rising influence over so many dimensions of society will sooner or later find...

Raymond Williams--a Welsh media critic and one of the founding thinkers behind the popular field of cultural studies--believed that the traditional focus of biographies on individuals isolated these people from their communities. For this reason, Alan O'Connor looks at Williams and his time period, one of social change and crisis in Wales and England. Williams, the son of a railway worker, would have pursued university studies, an atypical act for a working-class boy, had the Second World War not disrupted his plans. So the unorthodox intellectual executed his work outside the university...

Over the past few years, coverage of terror attacks has featured prominently in numerous media outlets. Drawing on both popular and academic articles, the essays in Media, Terrorism, and Theory: A Reader analyze the larger issues surrounding media's portrayal of terrorism, including terrorism as a media event, war and media, nationalism and media, public responsibility, and journalistic accountability. Renowned contributors from around the world explore these issues as they relate to a global community. From such diverse fields as cultural studies, political science, media studies,...

This concise, well-written book will help readers understand the ongoing fascination with do-it-yourself media. Ellie Rennie explains how community media has, since its beginning, challenged the theoretical and industrial frameworks of the mainstream. A clear and useful guide for students, Community Media lays out the difficult theoretical terrain that community media theory and advocacy has located itself in, including the ideals of participation, community, and social change.

Netporn delves into the aesthetics and politics of sexuality in the era of do-it-yourself (DIY) Internet pornography. Katrien Jacobs, drawing on digital media theory and interviews with Web porn producers and consumers, offers an unprecedented critical analysis of Web culture as digital artistry and of the corresponding heightened government surveillance and censorship of the Internet. Netporn features Web users who question the goals of global commercial porn industries-whether they are engaged in Usenet fringes, video blogging, peer-to-peer distribution, porn art collectives, or decadent...

This classic book, Harold A. Innis's last, returns to print with a new introduction by James W. Carey. An elaboration of Innis's earlier theories, Changing Concepts of Time looks at then-new technological changes in communication and considers the different ways in which space and time are perceived. Innis explores military implications of the U.S. Constitution, freedom of the press, communication monopolies, culture, and press support of presidential candidates, among other interesting and diverse topics.

Globalizing Politics explores American-style political consulting and its spread to countries throughout the world, emphasizing the roles of communication and technology. Sussman challenges the common belief that American influence abroad is due strictly to the professionalization of politics and is instead affected by economics, industry, and the organizational power of new communication technology.

With the rising popularity of online music, the nature of the music industry and the role of the Internet are rapidly changing. Rather than buying records, tapes, or CDs--in other words, full-length collections of music--music shoppers can, as they have in earlier decades, purchase just one song at a time. It's akin to putting a coin into a diner jukebox--except the jukebox is in the sky, or, more accurately, out in cyberspace. But has increasing copyright protection gone too far in keeping the music from the masses? Digital Music Wars explores these transformations and the far-reaching...

A Violent World analyzes images on global CNN, Israeli IBA, and Palestinian PATV that contribute to how the current violence in the Middle East is framed. Nitzan Ben-Shaul draws from critical media theory and approaches out of cinema studies to examine how dominant ideologies are embedded in mainstream TV news. He focuses on the American elites' global ideology and the conflicting dominant national-peripheral ideologies of Israeli-Palestinian elites, and his in-depth study further offers a new model of analysis for contemporary television news.