Other People's Problems: Missing Women, Murderers, and the Media

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Violent Crimes ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Aboriginal Women ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Missing Women ◽  
Robert Pickton

There are over 600 missing and murdered aboriginal women across Canada. A long history of systemic racism has made these women extremely vulnerable to violent crimes. Most of their fates remain a mystery, but some murderers have been caught who are responsible for their deaths. I examined the news articles that cover the crimes of convicted murderers Robert Pickton and John Martin Crawford. Of the two, only Pickton is very well known. However, while the media covered his crimes extensively, much of the coverage is misleading. The aboriginality of the victims is downplayed, and other tactics are used to blame the victims and focus on the killer. The coverage surrounding John Martin Crawford uses similar misleading strategies, although there is significantly less of it. I argue that because the aboriginality of the victims was emphasized instead of downplayed in the coverage of Crawford’s murders, there was less interest in the cases. Most people will read about crimes when they can identify with the victims. While most of Pickton’s victims were aboriginal, the number of victims was so enormous and the details of the case were so grisly, that the aboriginality was downplayed to attract the attention that these other aspects gave the case. Crawford’s victims were all aboriginal women, but he killed fewer and was not seen as a threat. The media influences how people think about society. If the media continues to treat these types of crimes in this way, the ideas that fuel these crimes will also continue.

Selfi es

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ramon Reichert
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Role Expectations ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Human Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Front Stage

The history of the human face is the history of its social coding and the media- conditions of its appearance. The best way to explain the »selfie«-practices of today’s digital culture is to understand such practices as both participative and commercialized cultural techniques that allow their users to fashion their selves in ways they consider relevant for their identities as individuals. Whereas they may put their image of themselves front stage with their selfies, such images for being socially shared have to match determinate role-expectations, body-norms and ideals of beauty. Against this backdrop, collectively shared repertoires of images of normalized subjectivity have developed and leave their mark on the culture of digital communication. In the critical and reflexive discourses that surround the exigencies of auto-medial self-thematization we find reactions that are critical of self-representation as such, and we find strategies of de-subjectification with reflexive awareness of their media conditions. Both strands of critical reactions however remain ambivalent as reactions of protest. The final part of the present article focuses on inter-discourses, in particular discourses that construe the phenomenon of selfies thoroughly as an expression of juvenile narcissism. The author shows how this commonly accepted reading which has precedents in the history of pictorial art reproduces resentment against women and tends to stylize adolescent persons into a homogenous »generation« lost in self-love

Methods of Communicative Intention Explication of the Phraseological Unit with Biblical Expression «Forbidden Fruit» (Diachronic Section)

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Olga Lomakina ◽  
Oksana Shkuran
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Communicative Intention ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Media Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Good And Evil

The article analyzes methods of explication of the traditional and widely used stable biblical expression «forbidden fruit». The study is based on a diachronic section – from the interpretation of the biblical text to the communicative intention of dialogue participants in the media space illustrating nuclear and peripheral meanings. The analysis includes biblical texts that realize the archetypal meaning of the biblical expression «forbidden fruit» in which it is called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The secularized interest in the kind of tree, on which forbidden fruits grew, is motivated by a realistic presentation of a sad history of the first people’s fall in the Book of Genesis. Scientific hypotheses have their origins since the Middle Ages, when artists recreated the author’s story of eating the forbidden fruit. For religion, the variety of the fruit is not of fundamental importance, however, visualization in the works of art has become an incentive for the further use of the biblical expression with a new semantic segment. Modern media texts actively represent the transformation of the biblical expression«forbidden fruit» for different purposes: in advertising texts for pragmatic one, in informative, educational, ideological texts for cognitive one, in entertaining textsfor communicative one, lowering the spiritual and semantic value register of the modern language. Therefore, the process of desemantization and profanization of the biblical expression results in the destruction of national stereotypes in Russian people’s worldview.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

How Scientists Communicate

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
Scientific Publication ◽  
Good Communication ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Conference Presentations ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Broad Overview

What is scientific research? It is the process by which we learn about the world. For this research to have an impact, and positively contribute to society, it needs to be communicated to those who need to understand its outcomes and significance for them. Any piece of research is not complete until it has been recorded and passed on to those who need to know about it. So, good communication skills are a key attribute for researchers, and scientists today need to be able to communicate through a wide range of media, from formal scientific papers to presentations and social media, and to a range of audiences, from expert peers to stakeholders to the general public. In this book, the goals and nature of scientific communication are explored, from the history of scientific publication; through the stages of how papers are written, evaluated, and published; to what happens after publication, using examples from landmark historical papers. In addition, ethical issues relating to publication, and the damage caused by cases of fabrication and falsification, are explored. Other forms of scientific communication such as conference presentations are also considered, with a particular focus on presenting and writing for nonspecialist audiences, the media, and other stakeholders. Overall, this book provides a broad overview of the whole range of scientific communication and should be of interest to researchers and also those more broadly interested in the process how what scientists do every day translates into outcomes that contribute to society.

Readers' Liberation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Freedom Of Information ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Investigative Journalism ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Right ◽  
Promotion Campaigns

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. For the Internet and digitial generation, the most basic human right is the freedom to read. The Web has indeed brought about a rapid and far-reaching revolution in reading, making a limitless global pool of literature and information available to anyone with a computer. At the same time, however, the threats of censorship, surveillance, and mass manipulation through the media have grown apace. Some of the most important political battles of the twenty-first century have been fought--and will be fought--over the right to read. Will it be adequately protected by constitutional guarantees and freedom of information laws? Or will it be restricted by very wealthy individuals and very powerful institutions? And given increasingly sophisticated methods of publicity and propaganda, how much of what we read can we believe? This book surveys the history of independent sceptical reading, from antiquity to the present. It tells the stories of heroic efforts at self-education by disadvantaged people in all parts of the world. It analyzes successful reading promotion campaigns throughout history (concluding with Oprah Winfrey) and explains why they succeeded. It also explores some disturbing current trends, such as the reported decay of attentive reading, the disappearance of investigative journalism, 'fake news', the growth of censorship, and the pervasive influence of advertisers and publicists on the media--even on scientific publishing. For anyone who uses libraries and Internet to find out what the hell is going on, this book is a guide, an inspiration, and a warning.

Political and Economic History of Land-Grabs in India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peer Ghulam Nabi Suhail
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
The State ◽  
Developmental Approach ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

This chapter begins with tracing the roots of colonialism in India, followed by understanding its various structures and processes of resource-grabbing. It argues, that India has largely followed the colonial approach towards land appropriation. After independence, although the Indian state followed a nationalistic path of development, the developmental approach of the state was far from being pro-peasant and/or pro-ecology. In a similar fashion, hydroelectricity projects in Kashmir, developed by NHPC from 1970s, have been displacing thousands of peasants from their lands and houses. Despite this, they are yet to become a major debate in the media, in the policy circles, or in academia in India.

The Role of Religious Force in the Wukan Incident

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hou Yuxin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Social Management ◽  
The Village

Abstract The Wukan Incident attracted extensive attention both in China and around the world, and has been interpreted from many different perspectives. In both the media and academia, the focus has very much been on the temporal level of the Incident. The political and legal dimensions, as well as the implications of the Incident in terms of human rights have all been pored over. However, what all of these discussions have overlooked is the role played by religious force during the Incident. The village of Wukan has a history of over four hundred years, and is deeply influenced by the religious beliefs of its people. Within both the system of religious beliefs and in everyday life in the village, the divine immortal Zhenxiu Xianweng and the religious rite of casting shengbei have a powerful influence. In times of peace, Xianweng and casting shengbei work to bestow good fortune, wealth and longevity on both the village itself, and the individuals who live there. During the Wukan Incident, they had a harmonizing influence, and helped to unify and protect the people. Looking at the specific roles played by religion throughout the Wukan Incident will not only enable us to develop a more meaningful understanding of the cultural nature and the complexity of the Incident itself, it will also enrich our understanding, on a divine level, of innovations in social management.

scholarly journals Remix in the age of ubiquitous remix

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652199445
Author(s):  
Abby S. Waysdorf
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
Accepted Part ◽  
The Media ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Way

What is remix today? No longer a controversy, no longer a buzzword, remix is both everywhere and nowhere in contemporary media. This article examines this situation, looking at what remix now means when it is, for the most part, just an accepted part of the media landscape. I argue that remix should be looked at from an ethnographic point of view, focused on how and why remixes are used. To that end, this article identifies three ways of conceptualizing remix, based on intention rather than content: the aesthetic, communicative, and conceptual forms. It explores the history of (talking about) remix, looking at the tension between seeing remix as a form of art and remix as a mode of ‘talking back’ to the media, and how those tensions can be resolved in looking at the different ways remix originated. Finally, it addresses what ubiquitous remix might mean for the way we think about archival material, and the challenges this brings for archives themselves. In this way, this article updates the study of remix for a time when remix is everywhere.

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