Becoming Citizens in the Age of Online Social Networks

New media studies have attracted increasing scholarly attention as communication technologies become integrated into our everyday lives. New media provide unique contexts to share, record, and extend civic life and motivate civic commitment in the digital era. This chapter addresses the intersection of new media, culture, and political communication by exploring youths' civic engagement in China and Japan through individual voluntarism, civic participation, and political activism. It interrogates the civic use of social network sites in the digital age so as to increase our understanding of intercultural online interactions. Through the case studies of China and Japan, this research adds to the knowledge of intercultural communication in the networked society, with its potential to promote more democratic forms of engagement between citizens and states in the contexts of new media.

The phenomenon of media culture in the modern world

The purpose of the Article. The urgency of the work is due to the fact that atypical digital phenomena are increasingly integrated into people's lives digital phenomena (in particular, from the Internet), which require compliance with certain standards of behavior. First of all, they are determined by the rules of the information environment and media culture. Given the fact that most of the news, information, data we receive from Internet sources, the issue of research of media culture from various aspects, is undoubtedly relevant. The aim of this paper research functions, tasks, and complex analysis of components of media culture, specifics of their functioning. The methodology involves the use of general and special techniques, in particular, analysis, synthesis, abstraction, specification, descriptive method, partial forecasting. The result of this work is to reveal the development of scientific thought about the place and role of media culture is considered. Approaches to the definition of this concept in the scientific literature are analyzed. The main issues to be solved by a media culture in the future are revealed. The ratio of general, communicative, information and media culture is demonstrated and substantiated. It is established that its architecture includes multifunctional channels, and systematicity and integrity are considered as their basic properties. Particular attention is paid to the functional purpose of media culture and the characteristics of the respective positions. Cautions have been formulated regarding the probable consequences of the digitalization of a certain part of cultural heritage. The topicality is due to the introduction of the author's proposals for the disclosure of the basic concept and components of media culture, as well as outlines a number of global issues that are designed to solve media culture. Scientific Novelty. The practical significance of the study is justified by the possibility of applying its results in lectures and seminars on journalism, philosophy, sociology, cybersecurity, and other educational areas. Conclusions. Based on the results of our work, let us summarize that contemporary media culture represents a new form of intellectual response. Each next stage of cultural development will be less bookish, tactile than the previous one. This is justified, on the one hand, by the rapid digitalization of all cultural institutions, and, on the other hand, by the desire of the very recipients to simplify data processing in such an array of information. It is established that a unified approach to the interpretation of “media culture” has the maximum to reflect the main characteristics of culture as a generalized concept. Thus, under the media culture is proposed to understand the part of the general culture, the main type of culture of the information society, on the one hand - reflects its general level of development, and on the other - forms the overall effect and intellectual influence, usually from the new media (television, online press, social networks, radio, film) on public opinion, preferences, and values. Prospects for further research we see in analyzing ways of introducing media literacy into the modern educational system. Keywords: digitalization, media culture, bricolage media sphere, latest media, convergent media, infographics.

Values Influencing the Practice of Investigative Journalism in Malaysia: Media Practitioners’ Perspectives

Investigative journalism has been an American phenomenon, heavily embedded with their values. Scholars mentioned individualism and press freedom as two founding values of investigative journalism practice in the West. This study attempts to explore values influencing the practice of investigative journalism from a different viewpoint, by investigating Malaysia as a democratic country, but having a controlled media environment. Malaysia is also an interesting research subject because it is a developing country with strong Eastern values. Using local yardsticks, this study explores values influencing the practice of investigative journalism in Malaysia from local media practitioners’ perspectives. This research aims to explore more than just the differences between Western and Eastern culture, but also to understand how those different values influence the practice. In-depth interviews were used to explore the perspectives of 16 media practitioners from various backgrounds including editors and journalists who work in mainstream and alternative media in Malaysia. Vast data generated from the interviews pointing to a different viewpoint from current literature. The data, which was thematically analysed, revealed interesting findings which differentiate between Malaysian and Western practices of investigative journalism. The Eastern perspective was found to be dominant, especially in terms of collectivism culture, value of press freedom, and religious teachings influence. This study also highlighted the importance of considering the cultural factor in evaluating any journalism practice in the world. The study concludes that local values and culture must be included as research elements to understand a country’s journalism practice. Keywords: Investigative journalism, media culture, guiding values, press freedom, Malaysia.

Transdiscourse as a Concept of Digital Worlds

The paper presents the current transformations of media culture in the conditions of crucial digitalization of society. Everyday life is fundamentally mediatized and this process is beyond the control and understanding, both by an individual, and by the professional community and society as a whole. Rather, we observe a general disturbing sense of violation of the usual boundaries of definitions and norms. In response to the crisis of comprehension and understanding, philosophy of language and communication turns back to the idea of discursivity of human civilization and proposes to adapt and rethink the concept of possible worlds and its descriptions in the aim to renew social strategies and communications. The increasing demand for methodological support of communication activities indicates the growing significance of cabinet philosophy, in particular philosophy of language and communication. This strategy of the scientific approach will allow us to build a research relevant to the subject-transdisciplinary. Based on an analysis of history of ideas and modern Russian methodology of transdisciplinarity, the authors put forward a hypothesis in terms of the philosophy of language on the development of digital mediated discourse in a transdimensional unity and the generation of different discourses.

Postwar Industrial Media Culture in Sweden, 1945-1960

During the 1950s, companies aiming for international markets demanded new theories and methods of communication. Ideas regarding cybernetics, systems analysis, new accounting practices, and budgetary principles as well as theories of information, communication, marketing, public relations, and organization were discussed at conferences, seminars, and courses, and in articles and books. At the same time, new technologies changed corporate communication, from a loose-leaf accounting system to mechanical and electronic business machines, from written texts and oral presentations to slide shows, audio tapes, films, television, and flannelgraphs. By looking at a vast array of objects and relations related to uses of media technologies in Swedish industry from the end of World War II to the breakthrough of television, this book shows what happened in the glitches between mass communication and interaction, and how Swedish postwar industry worked to disrupt established understandings of communication.

Planetary Cinema

The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning the media and film culture of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Panoramas, giant globes, world exhibitions, photography and stereography: all promoted and hinged on the idea of a world made whole and newly visible. When it emerged, cinema did not simply contribute to this effervescent globalism so much as become its most significant and enduring manifestation. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of that media culture can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.

Media Culture as the Information Age Phenomenon

The article raises the issues of scientific reception of such a phenomenon as media culture. The authors offer their interpretation of media culture as a special type of culture of the information society in the broadest understanding of this phenomenon. The authors consider the concepts of media and culture and establishes their functional corresponddence. The contemporary stage of media development is characterized by a combination of communication and information intentions: classical media and mass communication media, including new media, blogs, social networks, as well as digital copies of non-network artifacts and their network modifications. The result of these media communications is a media text in the broadest interpretation of this concept. According to the authors concept, contemporary media culture realizes itself in two main aspects. In the applied sense, a media culture is a form of representation and digitalization of classical and network cultural units. In the global sense, media culture is understood as an aesthetic and axiological sphere of societys life, in which culture combines the value and artistic heritage, using the information and communication channels of the media for its representation in politics, education, and culture itself.

The Society of the Selfie: Social Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

This book explores how the Internet is connected to the global crisis of liberal democracy. Today, self-promotion is at the heart of many human relationships. The selfie is not just a social media gesture people love to hate. It is also a symbol of social reality in the age of the Internet. Through social media people have new ways of rating and judging themselves and one another, via metrics such as likes, shares, followers and friends. There are new thirsts for authenticity, outlets for verbal aggression, and social problems. Social media culture and neoliberalism dovetail and amplify one another, feeding social estrangement. With neoliberalism, psychosocial wounds are agitated and authoritarianism is provoked. Yet this new sociality also inspires resistance and political mobilisation. Illustrating ideas and trends with examples from news and popular culture, the book outlines and applies theories from Debord, Foucault, Fromm, Goffman, and Giddens, among others. Topics covered include the global history of communication technologies, personal branding, echo chamber effects, alienation and fear of abnormality. Information technologies provide channels for public engagement where extreme ideas reach farther and faster than ever before, and political differences are widened and inflamed. They also provide new opportunities for protest and resistance.