National Radio in the Reform Era

2021 ◽  
pp. 108-132
Author(s):  
Lonán Ó Briain

After unification, the mission of Vietnamese state media was rewritten to incorporate southern voices. Broadcasters assimilated the technical and administrative apparatus of the former Republic of Vietnam and adapted their programming to appeal to new audiences. Since the early reform era (1986 onwards), broadcasters have had to become more responsive to listener demands by establishing phone-in shows and playing requests, and they now consciously engage listeners online in the diaspora. Chapter 4 examines how the VOV’s broadcasting and musical wings were restructured after unification and again following economic reforms. The research investigates the spaces allocated to southern and minority content from the late 1970s onwards, including a consideration of the styles of broadcasting in minority languages. The chapter also examines the history and contemporary role of the VOV’s sound archives to understand how the categorization of musical style in the Socialist Republic has shaped perceptions of place and locality. Request letters and audience surveys illustrate how listeners took greater ownership over content just as a proliferation of commercial media alternatives were being made accessible in the socialist-oriented market economy. The chapter concludes by examining the diversification of musical styles on air to understand how the public are engaging with popular culture beyond the communist bloc more intensely since the 1990s.

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-305
Author(s):  
Natalie Hicks

AbstractThis article explores the role of district government in agricultural development in Vietnam's Long An province from 1954 to the present. It argues that it is only in the reform era that the district has begun to realise its potential as a 'transmission belt' between the higher authorities and the grassroots. Under the South Vietnamese regime and in the pre-reform era of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, local initiative was stifled as policy was dictated from on high by central government, with disastrous consequences. In the reform era, district officials have been joined by 'associates of the state', such as agricultural extension officers, to develop innovative 'local' approaches to agricultural development. This has led to increased prosperity but also rising inequality. While the central government has been more willing to allow local experimentation under reform, its influence and interests are still felt, even at the district level. Most scholars emphasise a sharp break between pre-1975 and post-1975 Vietnam. By contrast, this article highlights the way in which there are important elements of continuity both between regimes and between the pre-reform and post-reform eras.


Author(s):  
Cecilia Tossounian

Chapter 2 studies how the flapper, the archetypical modern girl, was construed by popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Mass media was engaged in a debate about the defining traits of the American flapper and her Argentine counterpart. While the flapper inhabited a distant land, the joven moderna combined popular fashions and mannerisms both foreign and domestic. Portrayed as an upper-class character, she went beyond the traditional female role of the devoted daughter. An oversimplified media construction, the Argentine flapper alerted the public of the dangerous effects of international consumer capitalism and Americanization on gender and national identity.


AI & Society ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Kelly

AbstractThis article conceptualises the role of audience agency in the performance of American conservative identities within a hybridised outrage media ecology. Audience agency has been under-theorised in the study of outrage media through an emphasis on outrage as a rhetorical strategy of commercial media institutions. Relatively little has been said about the outrage discourse of audiences. This coincides with a tendency to consider online political talk as transparent and "earnest," thereby failing to recognise the multi-vocality, dynamism, and ambivalence—i.e., performativity—of online user-generated discourse. I argue the concept of recontextualisation offers a means of addressing these shortcomings. I demonstrate this by analysing how the users of the American right-wing partisan media website TheBlaze.com publicly negotiated support for Donald Trump in a below-the-line comment field during the 2016 US presidential election. These processes are situated with respect to the contested, dynamic, and creative construction of partisan identities in the contemporary United States.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Pintor Iranzo

Based on its relationship to comic books, this article proposes an iconographic study of the public figure of Federico Fellini in terms of the Hermes archetype. With the aim of explaining how Fellini’s image has been interpreted from different visual perspectives, I consider two basic questions: what relationship does Fellini have to the images of himself and of Italian culture? And why have images in Fellini’s films and his own public image been the object of constant reinterpretations in film, advertising and on social networks? Focusing on the rereading of Fellini’s image in the comics of Milo Manara, this article explores a phenomenon that distinguishes Fellini’s filmmaking: his role as a circulator of images of classical and popular culture out of the past and into the future. The figure of Hermes, the god of mediation, constitutes the archetype through which we can understand this central role of Fellini.


2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-59
Author(s):  
Jure Gašparič

In 1986, on the eve of the dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation, the Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia was a rather boring authority, restricted to the bureaucratic and formalist framework. It consisted of non‑professional delegates without significant social influence, elected in a specific indirect manner. However, it was this very Assembly that passed several key decisions a few years later, leading to the introduction of a multi‑party system and elements of market economy, as well as strengthening the position of the republic. It seems that at the time this Assembly became the primary factor of transition and that it was this very institution that destabilised the Yugoslav federation. However, such an evaluation has nevertheless not asserted itself. The role of the socialist Assembly appears vague. Consequently the author, in his contribution, seeks to answer the following question: What sort of an authority body was the socialist Assembly? Initially the author presents the genesis of the Yugoslav Assembly system and its basic characteristics, and then he explores the three different levels or possible outlooks on the Assembly: legal level, perceptual level (how people saw the Assembly), and the level of internal mechanisms (how the parliamentary discussions changed).


2004 ◽  
Vol 56 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 189-220
Author(s):  
Ivan Jankovic

At the beginning, the author points out that rent-seeking economy is a distinctive phenomenon for majority of the contemporary market economies. It is reflected in the aspirations of the well organised interest groups to capture public choice and politicians as a tool to gain non-market benefits for themselves, or to take activities to gain income by non-market redistributions instead to do it on the market. According to the author examples of rent-seeking economy are antitrust, arbitrary export-import restrictions, subsidies for various sectors of economy, unions' practices of closed shop or collective bargaining. The author notes that there are legitimate public goods and services (such as military and police services or infrastructure) and therefore legitimate taxing and spending for providing of such public necessities. In his opinion, however, rent-seeking economy results from the growing government intervention in economy based upon widening of its role and responsibility to handle a wide spectrum of illegitimate ??social?? issues, rather than rest upon better providing of classical government services. Rent-seeking economy is a result of abandoning the strict market economy with no or little income gained by the extra market redistribution. The social environment where it is permissible and desirable to remove as great as possible economic activities from the free, non-regulated markets to the public sector or to the sector of the highly regulated economy which is cartelised by coercion, leads entrepreneurs to change their orientation. They do not perceive the regular competition as the best way to make success, but by lobbying with the political bodies. The basic rule of rent-seeking is that when there is a chance to gain rent, there will be someone who will try to get it. Therefore, in the author's opinion the government and the public inclining towards state interventionism are the main to blame for the rise of rent-seeking. This is because they make chances to gain rents since the general social and political environment enables it, as well as because there is an insufficiency of detailed legislative and constitutional restrictions on the role of the government in economy. Therefore, the basic condition for elimination or at least reduction of the scope of rent-seeking economy, in the opinion of the author, is to drastically diminish the role of the government in economic affairs. In that way the economy would be strictly separated form the politics, and entrepreneurs would be sent a signal that the reallocation of resources from productive to lobbying activities for gaining privileges is not an appropriate way to gain income. Within this context, the author points to consideration of the achievements of the James Buchanan's public choice theory that deals with the defects of political decision-making. He also points to the fact that the essence of the liberal constitutional reform that could diminish the scope of rent-seeking could be best perceived in the words stated by Friedrich Hayek the Nobel prize winner, saying that the government should be prohibited to employ ??coercive discriminatory acts??. This means that the government should not employ its monopoly of physical force to award economic privileges to anyone, but it should adopt laws of general use to be applied to the unknown number of cases in the future, concludes the author.


Author(s):  
Judith G. Coffin

This chapter mentions Alfred C. Kinsey's 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was one of the most prominent research on sexuality that François Mauriac associated with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. It analyses Kinsey and his team of American scientists' investigation of sexual acts, practices, inclinations, and tastes they had discovered among their fellow citizens. It also talks about critics who were deeply invested in the role of literature, and the responsibility of the writer who warned that The Second Sex and the Kinsey report debased the public. The chapter likens The Second Sex and the Kinsey report to the “erotic jungle” of American popular culture and fashion magazines, and to a world of commerce, sensationalism, and prurience. It explores the scholarly study of sexuality and the public's fixation on the subject that situates The Second Sex in the larger history of contemporary culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 975-989
Author(s):  
Yurii V. Latysh ◽  

The article deals with the main trends and debatable issues in the Ukrainian historiography of Perestroika. The author establishes a connection between the prevailing ideas about the place of Soviet statehood in the history of Ukraine and the role of Perestroika in it. The totalitarian paradigm dominant in Ukrainian historiography is analyzed, according to which: 1) the reforms were unable to correct the Soviet communism whose collapse was imminent; 2) as a result of the collapse of the Soviet empire the peoples were given the opportunity to create national states and return to the “road of civilization” — to a market economy based on private property. The concepts of the system crisis of the Soviet model of socialism and the transformation of perestroika as a “revolution from above” into the national revolution during the Ukrainian national revival are considered. The article pays a particular attention to the coverage of the role of Ukraine in the disintegration of the USSR in the historiography since the position of the situational union of sovereign communists and nationalists at the time of the conclusion of the Belovezhsky agreements rested on the will of the people — the AllUkrainian referendum. Russia and Belarus did not conduct referendums on independence. It has been established that Ukrainian historians have concentrated on studying certain aspects of Perestroika, mainly related to Ukraine. They concern the Ukrainian national, linguistic, cultural and ecclesiastical revival, the activities of the national-democratic opposition. Many aspects of Perestroika (economic reforms, foreign policy, social history, the history of everyday life) in Ukraine are almost not researched at all.


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