scholarly journals The making of a (dog) movie star: The effect of the portrayal of dogs in movies on breed registrations in the United States

PLoS ONE ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. e0261916
Author(s):  
Sarah Weir ◽  
Sharon E. Kessler

The media is a powerful force that can affect the welfare of the domiciled dog population. Dogs have long been in human stories and their depictions can create demand for the breeds shown. While previous research has found that this effect can last for up to ten years after the release of a movie, how this phenomenon occurs is unknown. This paper examines if how a dog is portrayed in a movie is associated with a subsequent change in American Kennel Club breed registrations for that breed. Following a systematic literature review, four key themes were identified in how dogs are portrayed in the media; dogs portrayed as heroes, as anthropomorphised, as embodying the ideals of Western societies (Whiteness and heteronormativity) and as boundaries between wilderness and human society. Forty movies from between 1930 to 2004 were analysed, resulting in 95 dog characters scored, and hierarchical multiple linear regression was run. Movies with dogs portrayed as heroes were followed by significant increases in the number of American Kennel Club breed registrations for the breed shown, while anthropomorphised dogs were followed by significant decreases in the number of dogs registered for up to five years after a movie’s release. These results indicate that how dogs are portrayed may be an important driver of demand for breeds. Future work should investigate whether these portrayals may have negative welfare implications for real dogs by leading to owners having unrealistic expectations for dogs or increasing demand for dogs with in-breeding related disorders.

Author(s):  
Chris Coffman

By reading written and visual artefacts of Gertrude Stein’s life, Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity reframes earlier scholarship to argue that her gender was transmasculine and that her masculinity was positive rather than a self-hating form of false consciousness. This book considers ways Stein’s masculinity was formed through her relationship with her feminine partner, Alice B. Toklas, and her masculine homosocial bonds with other modernists in her network. This broadens out Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of “male homosocial bonding” to include all masculine persons, opening up the possibility of examining Stein’s relationship to Toklas; masculine women such as Jane Heap; and men such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten. The Introduction and first four chapters focus on surfacings of Stein’s masculinity within the visual and the textual: in others’ paintings and photographs of her person; her hermetic writings from the first three decades of the twentieth century; and her self-packaging for mass consumption in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Whereas the chapter on The Autobiography underscores Toklas’s role in the formation of Stein’s masculinity and success as a modernist, the final three register the vicissitudes of the homosocial bonds at play in her friendships with Picasso, Hemingway, and Van Vechten. The Coda, which cross-reads Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) with the media attention two museum exhibits about her attracted between 2011 and 2012, points to possibilities for future work on the implications of her masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.


2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Gallagher

Public opinion in the United States and elsewhere celebrated the liberation of Afghan women following the defeat of the Taliban government. The United States promised to stay in Afghanistan and foster security, economic development, and human rights for all, especially women. After years of funding various anti- Soviet Mujahidin warlords, the United States had agreed to help reconstruct the country once before in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell, but had lost interest when the warlords began to fight among themselves. This time, however, it was going to be different. To date, however, conditions have not improved for most Afghan women and reconstruction has barely begun. How did this happen? This article explores media presentations of Afghan women and then compares them with recent reports from human rights organizations and other eyewitness accounts. It argues that the media depictions were built on earlier conceptions of Muslim societies and allowed us to adopt a romantic view that disguised or covered up the more complex historical context of Afghan history and American involvement in it. We allowed ourselves to believe that Afghans were exotic characters who were modernizing or progressing toward a western way of life, despite the temporary setback imposed by the Taliban government. In Afghanistan, however, there was a new trope: the feminist Afghan woman activist. Images of prominent Afghan women sans burqa were much favored by the mass media and American policymakers. The result, however, was not a new focus on funding feminist political organizations or making women’s rights a foreign policy priority; rather, it was an unwillingness to fulfill obligations incurred during decades of American-funded mujahidin warfare, to face the existence of deteriorating conditions for women, resumed opium cultivation, and a resurgent Taliban, or to commit to a multilateral approach that would bring in the funds and expertise needed to sustain a long-term process of reconstruction.


Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts

This chapter presents the book’s macrolevel findings about the architecture of political communication and the news media ecosystem in the United States from 2015 to 2018. Two million stories published during the 2016 presidential election campaign are analyzed, along with another 1.9 million stories about Donald Trump’s presidency during his first year. The chapter examines patterns of interlinking between online media sources to understand the relations of authority and credibility among publishers, as well as the media sharing practices of Twitter and Facebook users to elucidate social media attention patterns. The data and mapping reveal not only a profoundly polarized media landscape but stark asymmetry: the right is more insular, skewed towards the extreme, and set apart from the more integrated media ecosystem of the center, center-left, and left.


Author(s):  
K.E. Goldschmitt

Bossa Mundo chronicles how Brazilian music has been central to Brazil’s national brand in the United States and the United Kingdom since the late 1950s. Scholarly texts on Brazilian popular music generally focus on questions of music and national identity, and when they discuss the music’s international popularity, they keep the artists, recordings, and live performances as the focus, ignoring the process of transnational mediation. This book fills a major gap in Brazilian music studies by analyzing the consequences of moments when Brazilian music was popular in Anglophone markets, with a focus on the media industries. With subject matter as varied as jazz, film music, dance fads, DJ/remix culture, and new models of musical distribution, the book demonstrates how the mediation of Brazilian music in an increasingly crowded transnational marketplace has had lasting consequences for the creative output celebrated by Brazil as part of its national brand. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music in chronologically organized chapters, the book shifts the scholarly focus on the music’s transnational popularity from the scholarly framework of representing Otherness to broader considerations of a media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have differing priorities. The book provides a new model for studying music from culturally rich countries in the Global South where local governments often leverage stereotypes in their national branding project.


Author(s):  
Michael X. Delli Carpini ◽  
Bruce A. Williams

The media landscape of countries across the globe is changing in profound ways that are of relevance to the study and practice of political campaigns and elections. This chapter uses the concept of media regimes to put these changes in historical context and describe the major drivers that lead to a regime’s formation, institutionalization, and dissolution. It then turns to a more detailed examination of the causes and qualities of what is arguably a new media regime that has formed in the United States; the extent to which this phenomenon has or is occurring (albeit in different ways) elsewhere; and how the conduct of campaigns and elections are changing as a result. The chapter concludes with thoughts on the implications of the changing media landscape for the study and practice of campaigns and elections specifically, and democratic politics more generally.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-402
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Macpherson

At the end of the 2015 Academy Award-winning film The Big Short, which explores the origins of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a caption notes that the Wall Street investor protagonist of the film who predicted the collapse of the United States (US) housing market would now be ‘focused on one commodity: water’. Water is sometimes described in popular culture as ‘the new oil’ or ‘more valuable than gold’. It is predicted to be the subject of increasing uncertainty, competition, conflict, and even war, as increasing demand from a growing human population and development meets reduced supply as a result of poor management, overuse, and climate change.


Book Reviews: Women and Politics in New Zealand, Voters' Vengeance: The 1990 Election in New Zealand and the Fate of the Fourth Labour Government, The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy, The Politics of the Training Market: From Manpower Services Commission to Training and Enterprise Councils, Public Policy and the Nature of the New Right, Managing the United Kingdom: An Introduction to its Political Economy and Public Policy, Citizenship and Employment: Investigating Post-Industrial Options, Government by the Market? The Politics of Public Choice, Responsive Regulation: Transcending the Deregulation Debate, Regulatory Politics in Transition, The Politics of Regulation: A Comparative Perspective, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945, Welfare States and Working Mothers, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, Japan and the United States: Global Dimensions of Economic Power, Political Dynamics in Contemporary Japan, Japan's Foreign Policy after the Cold War: Coping with Change, Soviet Studies Guide, Directory of Russian MPs, Mikhail Gorbachev and the End of Soviet Power, Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics, Six Years that Shook the World: Perestroika — The Impossible Project, The Politics of Transition: Shaping a Post-Soviet Future, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, Probabilistic Voting Theory, Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing, Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power

1994 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 717-730
Author(s):  
Preston King ◽  
Marco Cesa ◽  
Martin Rhodes ◽  
Stephen Wilks ◽  
Christopher Tremewan ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Pedro Lázaro-Rodríguez

A study of digital news on public libraries is presented through media mapping and a thematic and consumption analysis based on Facebook interactions. A total of 7,629 digital news items published in 2019 have been considered. The media mapping includes the evolution of the volume of news publications, the most prominent media outlets and journalists, and the sections in which most news items are published. For the thematic and consumption analysis, the top 250 news items with the highest number of Facebook interactions are considered, defining 15 thematic categories. The most published topics include: new libraries and spaces, collections, and libraries from a historical perspective. The topics that generate the most interactions are the value of libraries (social, human, and cultural capital), libraries from other countries, and new libraries and spaces. The value and originality of the current study lie in the measurement of the consumption of news and digital media through Facebook interactions. The methods used and results obtained also provide new knowledge for the disciplines of Communication and Media Studies by developing the idea of media mapping for its application to other topics and media in future work, as well as for Librarianship, particularly the information obtained on public libraries. Resumen Se presenta un estudio de noticias digitales sobre bibliotecas públicas en España mediante un mapeo de medios y un análisis temático y de consumo basado en las interacciones en Facebook. Se han considerado 7.629 noticias publicadas en 2019. El mapeo de medios incluye la evolución del volumen de la publicación de noticias, los medios y periodistas más prominentes, y las secciones en las que más se publica. Para el análisis temático y de consumo se consideran las 250 noticias con mayores interacciones en Facebook definiendo 15 categorías temáticas. Los temas sobre los que más se publica son: nuevas bibliotecas y espacios, la colección y las bibliotecas desde la perspectiva de su historia. Los que más interacciones y consumo generan son: el valor de las bibliotecas (capital social, humano y cultural), bibliotecas de otros países y las nuevas bibliotecas y espacios. El valor y la originalidad del estudio consisten en considerar las interacciones en Facebook como medida del consumo de noticias y medios digitales. Los métodos y resultados alcanzados aportan además nuevo conocimiento para dos disciplinas: la comunicación y los medios de comunicación, por el desarrollo de la idea del mapeo de medios que puede aplicarse a otros temas y medios en futuros trabajos; y para la biblioteconomía y la documentación, por la información alcanzada sobre las bibliotecas públicas.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-454
Author(s):  

Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid and brooding. Examples abound... Television, the one-eyed beast blamed for scourges ranging from immorality to declining college-admission test scores, has probably helped bring home boredom to America. It has done so by offering us a splendidly wrongheaded view of how one goes about living the good life... Boredom, at the very least, helps breed some of America's uglier social trends. The rate of teenage suicide has more than tripled in the United States since 1955, and psychiatrists across the country lay part of the blame to boredom born of unrealistic expectations and frustration. Divorce condemns nearly half of all marriages, and marriage counselors report boredom as a major cause. Drug and alcohol abuse—which has increased more rapidly in the past decade among middle and upper-class teenagers than among the less wealthy—is caused, in part, by the need to kill time.


2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohua Dai ◽  
Anandita Arora ◽  
Jianbin Shen ◽  
Hong Jiang ◽  
Li Li

Introduction Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a complex vascular disease that causes more than 10,000 deaths each year in the United States. Extensive studies have been performed in search of pharmaceutical treatment but surgical repair still remains the most effective treatment. TGF-β signaling is an important mechanism in the pathogenesis of aneurysms; however, there is debate as to whether its role is protective or destructive. Smad3 is a major intracellular mediator of the canonical pathway of TGF-β signaling. Hypothesis We hypothesize that Smad3-mediated TGF-β signal pathway plays important roles in the pathogenesis of AAA. Methods To test this hypothesis, we analyze the effects of loss of Smad3 on aneurysm formation in the calcium chloride induced AAA model using Smad3 knockout mice. Results Three weeks after calcium chloride treatment, the abdominal aorta displayed increased dilation, forming aneurysms. Histology and immunohistochemistry analyses show increased cell proliferation and enhanced inflammatory cell infiltration in the media and adventitia of the vessel wall. This was accompanied by elastic fibers degradation, increased MMPs expression and reduced expression of smooth muscle markers. Further analysis showed that the expression and nuclear localization of Smad2 and Smad4 was significantly increased. Conclusions These results demonstrate that Smad3-mediated TGF-β signaling plays a protective role in the pathogenesis of AAA and Smad2/Smad4 upregulation is not sufficient to compensate for the loss of Smad3 in this experimental model.


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