Conclusion

Author(s):  
Peter Lurie

This book concludes by relating its discussion of visualizing history to the media and the public response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It shows their overly mediated depiction to have a precedent in Civil War photography, and it avers the shared impulse to visualize attending each of these epochal historical events. The Conclusion reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved as offering a salutary “forgetful remembrance” of history in the novel’s model of “rememory” and as an alternative to historicist criticism, as well as to U.S. culture’s visual archiving of a supposedly accessible and remediable past. The discussion also links Morrison’s work to post-9/11 poetry and to contemporary and recent African-American cinema, which, like Beloved, shows the occasion and the need for a willful look forward for both racialized subjects and for the U.S. polity generally in a postdigital age.

Author(s):  
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann

In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. This book sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. The book shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. This book rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the “underclass” could be managed only through coercion and force. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, the book offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.


2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292110297
Author(s):  
Tyler Hughes ◽  
Gregory Koger

Both Congressional parties compete to promote their own reputations while damaging the opposition party’s brand. This behavior affects both policy-making agendas and the party members’ communications with the media and constituents. While there has been ample study of partisan influence on legislative agenda-setting and roll call voting behavior, much less is known about the parties’ efforts to shape the public debate. This paper analyzes two strategic decisions of parties: the timing of collective efforts to influence the public policy debate and the substantive content of these “party messaging” events. These dynamics are analyzed using a unique dataset of 50,195 one-minute speeches delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 to 2016. We find a pattern of strategic matching—both parties are more likely to engage in concurrent messaging efforts, often on the same issue.


Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 275
Author(s):  
Peter Cihon ◽  
Jonas Schuett ◽  
Seth D. Baum

Corporations play a major role in artificial intelligence (AI) research, development, and deployment, with profound consequences for society. This paper surveys opportunities to improve how corporations govern their AI activities so as to better advance the public interest. The paper focuses on the roles of and opportunities for a wide range of actors inside the corporation—managers, workers, and investors—and outside the corporation—corporate partners and competitors, industry consortia, nonprofit organizations, the public, the media, and governments. Whereas prior work on multistakeholder AI governance has proposed dedicated institutions to bring together diverse actors and stakeholders, this paper explores the opportunities they have even in the absence of dedicated multistakeholder institutions. The paper illustrates these opportunities with many cases, including the participation of Google in the U.S. Department of Defense Project Maven; the publication of potentially harmful AI research by OpenAI, with input from the Partnership on AI; and the sale of facial recognition technology to law enforcement by corporations including Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. These and other cases demonstrate the wide range of mechanisms to advance AI corporate governance in the public interest, especially when diverse actors work together.


Author(s):  
David F. Ericson

Ericson traces the efforts of the American Colonization Society to gain the financial support of the U.S. government and the public-private partnership that ensued. He maintains that this partnership was not only one of the first of its kind on the federal level, but that it was also the most enduring prior to the Civil War. He concludes that without federal support, the society probably would never have founded Liberia and that the support was crucial to the colony’s survival.


Author(s):  
Gill Lowe

The gendered maxim ‘men must work and women must weep’ comes from Charles Kingsley's 1851 ballad 'The Three Fishers'. Virginia Woolf appropriated 'Women Must Weep' for early version of Three Guineas, serialised in The Atlantic Monthly (1938). This chapter argues that the public nature of Woolf’s polemical anti-fascist essay may, concurrently, be read as a more intimate document about personal grief and grievance. For Woolf her sister, Vanessa Bell, was the weeping woman, devastated by the tragic death in 1937 of Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War. Duncan Grant drafted posters (reproduced here) to raise money for refugee Spanish children, employing the trope of mothers cradling babies. Woolf’s contemporary, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, a mother bereaved twice by war, repeated the poignant pietà image in numerous anti-war pieces. Picasso, inspired by Dora Maar whom he regarded privately as ‘the weeping woman’, created sixty mater dolorosa works in preparation for his immense elegiac public work, ‘Guernica’ (1937). The chapter traces the powerful aesthetic of the sorrowful mother as a European anti-war figure. It concludes by considering how this iconography has been used cross-culturally and trans-historically. The pietà has been gender-flipped, adapted and plagiarised in war photography, murals, comic books, manga, fashion, film and video.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (1) ◽  
pp. 300295
Author(s):  
Doug Helton ◽  
Vicki Loe

NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) provides scientific expertise to support incident response and initiates natural resource damage assessment both in the U.S. and internationally. Although OR&R has responded to every major spill in the U.S. over the past 35 years, OR&R continues to face challenges in communicating realistic expectations of response outcomes, in having technical products interpreted correctly by the public, and communicating the degree of uncertainty surrounding such events. Unlike hurricanes, and because large spills are rare and generally man-made, the public expects rapid, complete, and accurate information on the fate and effects, even as the spill event is still unfolding and the response is on-going. An example of a product that is frequently confusing to the public is the OR&R trajectory map, the modeling tool used to predict the possible route of an oil spill. These maps are frequently misinterpreted as the footprint of the spill as opposed to where the oil might go. Another common misconception concerns how much oil can be recovered following a spill. Given the limitations of mechanical recovery, and the rapidity with which oil spreads, evaporates, and disperses at sea, it is impossible to recover all of the spilled oil. Furthermore, oil may be left in environmentally sensitive areas because the attempt to recover the oil could cause irreparable damage. As a result, mechanical recovery generally accounts for less than 5-20% of the overall oil budget, yet the public has an expectation that the goal of a response is to remove all of the oil from the environment. Public pressure, based on these expectations, may result is response decisions that cause more harm than good. This poster will detail a project that will give recommendations on how to manage public expectations on spill response and communicate technical information through the media and elsewhere. The goal of this project, which will be detailed on our poster, is to make OR&R a reliable and comprehensive source of information on ongoing or past spill events and close the disconnect caused by differing expectations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariam F Alkazemi ◽  
Shahira Fahmy ◽  
Wayne Wanta

U.S. President Barack Obama's much-anticipated address in Egypt in 2009 promised a new beginning between the U.S. government and the Arab world but only a few years later there were many criticisms that the U.S. President did not live up to his promises, driving Arab attitudes toward the United States to their lowest point in years. Five years later, we analyzed Arabic-language twitter messages involving President Obama to examine cognitive and affective attributes. Results show that tweets by members of the media differed greatly from tweets by members of the public. The public tweets held more negative attitudes towards the U.S. President than tweets by news organizations. Members of the public also were more likely to link the President to a wider range of countries, suggesting a greater diversity of attributes, while primarily fixating on the Palestinian issue.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 1713-1722
Author(s):  
Gojko Milivojjevic ◽  
Daryan Boykov

Media management is at the crossroads of communications and economics, not only because of the public response from the functioning of the media, but also because of the interdisciplinary intertwining of strict economic principles and fundamental knowledge of communication science. It is a complex array of accumulated knowledge in various social sciences, confirmed by empirical research. To this, globalization is added as a relatively new phenomenon, so the field of media research is becoming even more attractive and interesting. As the media transports values, attitudes, feelings and ideas to the world, acting as mediators in the distribution of information from one to many points in its classical version and interactive, stimulating dialogue, the "new media" version of this article is also considered analyze the parameters and characteristics of the media society as a systemic entity whose structures are outlined by themselves and where the coexistence of people is influenced by them.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Eid

Terrorism today is one of the most frequent global severe stress situations. The advanced and widespread new media and information technologies as well as modern tactics of terrorism make the public of any nation in exposure, directly and indirectly, to uncertain potential acts of terrorism. The relationship between terrorists and media personnel has grown widely influential, and has been described recently by the term terroredia, in which the public is the main target of both terrorism and the media. Both responsibility and rationality are fundamental weights for the effectiveness of risk communication during times of terrorism. This paper critically analyzes how policymakers in several Western countries have communicated to the public, through the media, the risk of terrorist attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against their individuals and societies. The study uncovers that rationality and responsibility are lacking in Western media decision-making regarding the risk of ISIL's potential activities.


2016 ◽  
pp. 616-631 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Eid

Terrorism today is one of the most frequent global severe stress situations. The advanced and widespread new media and information technologies as well as modern tactics of terrorism make the public of any nation in exposure, directly and indirectly, to uncertain potential acts of terrorism. The relationship between terrorists and media personnel has grown widely influential, and has been described recently by the term terroredia, in which the public is the main target of both terrorism and the media. Both responsibility and rationality are fundamental weights for the effectiveness of risk communication during times of terrorism. This paper critically analyzes how policymakers in several Western countries have communicated to the public, through the media, the risk of terrorist attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against their individuals and societies. The study uncovers that rationality and responsibility are lacking in Western media decision-making regarding the risk of ISIL's potential activities.


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