iMRobot: an innovative approach for new media and communication

Author(s):  
Vicky Hanqi Lu ◽  
Ray Y. Zhong
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Herrera

Youth are coming of age in a digital era and learning and exercising citizenship in fundamentally different ways compared to previous generations. Around the globe, a monumental generational rupture is taking place that is being facilitated—not driven in some inevitable and teleological process—by new media and communication technologies. The bulk of research and theorizing on generations in the digital age has come out of North America and Europe; but to fully understand the rise of an active generation requires a more inclusive global lens, one that reaches to societies where high proportions of educated youth live under conditions of political repression and economic exclusion. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA), characterized by authoritarian regimes, surging youth populations, and escalating rates of both youth connectivity and unemployment, provides an ideal vantage point to understand generations and power in the digital age. Building toward this larger perspective, this article probes how Egyptian youth have been learning citizenship, forming a generational consciousness, and actively engaging in politics in the digital age. Author Linda Herrera asks how members of this generation who have been able to trigger revolt might collectively shape the kind of sustained democratic societies to which they aspire. This inquiry is informed theoretically by the sociology of generations and methodologically by biographical research with Egyptian youth.


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 121-141
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Tarkowska

One of the most substantial interdisciplinary topics in the study of contemporary culture is change in social time, which is expressed in the compression of time (and space) and changing relationships between the past, present, and future. Research and analysis situate the present in an exceptional position in contemporary culture, providing us with the term ‘culture of the present.’ At the same time, however, we are dealing with a phenomenon labeled the ‘explosion of memory’—an astounding multidirectional and multifaceted rise in interest in the past. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate the structures and mechanisms of collective memory, as well as how the past is defined in contemporary culture, from the perspective of time as a social and cultural phenomenon. Questions should be asked regarding the mechanisms that unite the dominance of the present in culture with a rising interest in the past. The perspective of social time reveals that the ‘culture of the present,’ the current dominating forms of memory intensification, and the heightened awareness of the past, are influenced by the same or similar factors. These include new media and communication technologies, as well as consumption and popular culture, which change the structure of time, condense the time horizon, alter the manner in which the past is experienced, and modify the mechanisms of collective memory.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 443-465
Author(s):  
Neal Caren ◽  
Kenneth T. Andrews ◽  
Todd Lu

Media are central to the dynamics of protest and social movements. Contemporary social movements face a shifting environment composed of new media technologies and platforms that enable new identities, organizational forms, and practices. We review recent research focusing on the ways in which movements shape and are shaped by the media environment and the ways in which changes in the media environment have reshaped participation, mobilization, and impacts of activism. We conclude with the following recommendations for scholarship in this burgeoning area: move toward a broader conception of media in movements; expand engagement with scholarship in neighboring disciplines that study politics, media, and communication; develop new methodological and analytical skills for emerging forms of media; and investigate the ways in which media are enhancing, altering, or undermining the ability of movements to mobilize support, shape broader identities and attitudes, and secure new advantages from targets and authorities.


Author(s):  
Manuel Menke ◽  
Christian Schwarzenegger

It is an old, yet, accurate observation that the ‘newness’ of media is and most probably will continue to be a catalyst for research in media and communication studies. At the same time, there are numerous academic voices who stress that studying media change demands an awareness of the complexities at play interweaving the new with the old and the changes with the continuities. Over the last decades, compelling theoretical approaches and conceptualizations were introduced that aimed at grasping what defines old and new media under the conditions of complex, disruptive media change. Drawing from this theoretical work, we propose an empirical approach that departs from the perception of media users and how they make sense of media in their everyday affairs. The article argues that an inquiry of media change has to ground the construction of media as old or new in the context of lifeworlds in which media deeply affect users on a daily basis from early on. The concept of media ideology (Gershon, 2010a, 2010b) is used to investigate notions of ‘oldness’ and ‘newness’ people develop when they renegotiate the meaning of media for themselves or collectively with others. Based on empirical data from 35 in-depth interviews, distinct ways how the relativity but also relationality of old and new media are shaped against each other are identified. In the analysis, the article focuses on the aspects of rhetoric, everyday experiences, and emotions as well as on media generations, all of which inform media ideologies and thereby influence how media users define old and new media.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Rahima Aissani ◽  

The study deals with an analytical reading (from an information and communication perspective) of the Law "Combating Information Technology Crimes" in the UAE. The law was passed in 2012 by Decree Law No: 5/2012, which was published in the Official Gazette No: 540, attached to the 42nd year, on 26/8/2012, and included amendments to the provisions of the law Federal No: (2) for the year 2006 establishing the Law "Combating Information Technology Crimes". The study adopts the method of content analysis of the materials covered by the law, based on two categories of analysis: • Form Category: for the detection of the legal materials governing the use of information technology, which included the following units of analysis: the number of articles and their contents, and the type of penalties imposed by law. • Content Category: and its evidence of the ethics of new media and communication in the UAE. The study reached the following results: 1. The UAE legislation on "Combating Information Technology Crimes" included 51 articles of law, and was widely separated in cybercrime and its penalties. 2. Most of the legal formulations in the "Combating Information Technology Crimes" system come in ways that push the user to commit to ethical and social responsibility while dealing with new media, and communication tools, or other information technology. 3. The Analytical reading of the articles of the "Combating Information Technology Crimes" Law in the United Arab Emirates has revealed three basic ethics for the use of these techniques from the media perspective: respect the intellectual property, respect the privacy and dignity of people, and respect the community values.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Goldberg

A descriptive exploration of the impact on contemporary Québécois performing arts by new media and communication technologies, this thesis provides a historical and critical evaluation of "multimedia theatre" in Quebec. Drawing on Turner's theories of performative ritual and Armour & Trott's writing on culture and the Canadian mind, as well as the work of Benjamin, Ellul, Grant, Heidegger, Innis, and McLuhan on technology and cultural production, and the issues of time and space raised by the work of Gilles Maheu, Josette Féral, Patrice Pavis, and Robert Lepage, among others, this thesis argues that while prior research has located Quebec's arts culture in provincial drives for sovereignty and cultural recognition, it might better be understood as a narrative of a people in search of self-identification, offering new perspectives by which to understand an interlinked development of technology and artistic endeavour that has long been in need of critical examination.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110491
Author(s):  
Phillip Mpofu

Storytelling is ordinarily trivialised as an antiquated oramedia genre, and of less significance in Zimbabwean mainstream media and communication studies, hence it is understudied. Recent studies largely take a literary gaze on storytelling, and do not theorise it from an indigenous media viewpoint or appreciate its convergence with social media. Drawing on concepts of media convergence and the digital public sphere, this netnographic study examines the adaptation of storytelling on Twitter, SoundCloud and YouTube, focusing on patterns of production, delivery, participation, language forms, reception and audiences. The article shows inventive re-embodiment and adaptation of storytelling on online spaces, that is, the endurance and remaking of indigenous media in the context of new media and communication technologies. The manifestation of the folktale narrative style on social media exhibits the rise of a secondary form of orality recreated, reproduced and applied in the digital form and on social media. While digital and social media are perceived as threatening the continued existence of indigenous media, this article attests social media as breathing spaces for indigenous media.


Author(s):  
Vincent R. Manzerolle ◽  
Atle Mikkola Kjøsen

This paper argues that questions concerning the circulation of capital are central to the study of contemporary and future media under capitalism. Moreover, it argues that such questions have been central to Marx’s analysis of the reproduction of capital vis-à-vis the realization of value and the reduction of circulation time. Marx’s concepts of both the circuit and circulation of capital implies a theory of communication. Thus the purpose of our paper is to outline the logistical mechanisms that underlie a Marxist theory of media and communication and thereby foregrounding the role new media plays in reducing circulation time. We argue that the necessity of theorizing communication from a circuit and circulation-centric point of view stems from the emergence of a number of new technological phenomena that intensify, but sometimes undermine, the capitalist logic of acceleration. For the purposes of understanding the evolution of digital technologies, ostensibly employed to accelerate the circulation of capital—or put differently, to reduce circulation time—we need to pay attention to volume 2 of Capital, and key sections in the Grundrisse.


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