Nursing has evolved, yet media representation has arguably failed to keep up. This work explores why representation has been slow in accurately depicting nurses' responsibilities, impacts on public perceptions and professional identity. A critical realist review was employed as this method enables in-depth exploration into why something exists. A multidisciplinary approach was adopted, drawing from feminist, psychological and sociological theories to provide insightful understanding and recommendations. One main feminist lens has been implemented, using Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male-Gaze’ framework for content (...) analysis of three nurse-related advertisements to explore how the profession's female status influences representation, public perception and how this might impact nursing. Nurse representation has important real-world consequences. It is essential to improve unnecessary negative portrayals and contest ingrained stereotypes as there are costs to public opinion and nursing's self-identity. Nursing's female status has an impact within a male-dominated media industry, with a leisurely approach adopted toward changing representation. Media images become societally ingrained, this reiterates the significance of accurate/positive depictions. Social media is an instant method of communication with the public to combat stereotypes and maintain engagement to provide better understanding of what nurses do. (shrink)

There have been different approaches to the study of the relations between mass media on the one hand and science and technological activities on the other. In this article, I summarize consumption approaches, point out some of their limitations, and then show how these limitations can be addressed by drawing on an ethnographic study I conducted of an academic engineering research laboratory. I analyze the discursive practices lab members use to interpret mass media. One practice treats (...) media as reference points that mark a lab member’s growing alignment with the profession of electrical and computer engineering, and this constructs an engineering self by providing an opportunity for lab members to display knowledge of the prevalence and shapes of robots and align themselves with the firsthand knowledge prized in engineering culture. Another practice uses the discourse-in-practice of religion to construct an engineering self by aligning the speaker with things that are valued in engineering culture such as objectivity, science, evolution, and literature reviews. The final practice I analyze involves repurposing media technologies in ways that are helpful for both current and future lab research projects, which constructs selves by giving lab members an opportunity to show they know which features of media are relevant for engineering and how these features can be used to address engineering problems. I conclude with a discussion of how this contributes to studies of engineering identity and the relations between science, technology, and media. (shrink)

We respond to Morgan and Feeley’s critique on our article “Mass Media in Organ Donation: Managing Conflicting Messages and Interests.” We noted that Morgan and Feeley agree with the position that the primary aims of media campaigns are: “to educate the general public about organ donation process” and “help individuals make informed decisions” about organ donation. For those reasons, the educational messages in media campaigns should not be restricted to “information from pilot work or focus groups” (...) but should include evidence-based facts resulting from a comprehensive literature research. We consider the controversial aspects about organ donation to be relevant, if not necessary, educational materials that must be disclosed in media campaigns to comply with the legal and moral requirements of informed consent. With that perspective in mind, we address the validity of Morgan and Feeley’s claim that media campaigns have no need for informing the public about the controversial nature of death determination in organ donation. Scientific evidence has proven that the criteria for death determination are inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act and therefore potentially harmful to donors. The decision by campaign designers to use the statutory definition of death without disclosing the current controversies surrounding that definition does not contribute to improved informed decision making. We argue that if Morgan and Feeley accept the important role of media campaigns to enhance informed decision making, then critical controversies should be disclosed. In support of that premise, we will outline: (1) the wide-spread scientific challenges to brain death as a concept of death; (2) the influence of the donor registry and team-huddling on the medical care of potential donors; (3) the use of authorization rather than informed consent for donor registration; (4) the contemporary religious controversy; and (5) the effects of training desk clerks as organ requestors at the Department of Motor Vehicles offices. We conclude that organ donation is a medical procedure subject to all the ethical obligations that the medical profession must uphold including that of transparency and truthfulness. (shrink)

This article explores a framework for analyses of what has variously been termed the ‘implied’, ‘imagined’, ‘virtual’ or ‘putative’ reader/addressee – the effect by which ostensibly ‘monologic’ texts, such as news media commentary, political pronouncements and academic essays project particular attitudes, beliefs and expectations on to the reader/addressee. The framework is demonstrated in being applied to an examination of the construal of putative addressee positioning in a selection of mass media texts concerned with the Israeli military’s invasion (...) of Gaza in 2014. The framework is novel in the way in which it mobilises the account of the options for dialogistic positioning offered by the appraisal-framework literature, combined with some insights from Toulmin’s notion of the argumentative ‘warrant’. Conclusions are offered as to how such analyses of the readers being ‘written into the text’ can extend insights into the rhetorical workings of such texts and their ideological functionality in naturalising particular value positions. (shrink)

Literaturkritikerinnen und -kritiker, die das Neue der Gegenwartsliteratur beobachten und filtern, sind im Vergleich zur Zeit der,Kritikerpäpste‘ mit einem deutlichen Relevanzverlust konfrontiert. Beobachter sprechen ihnen die Unabhängigkeit ihres Urteils ab, und das betrifft nicht nur die Legitimität ihrer literarischen Kriterien, sondern auch ihre Souveränität über ihre medialen Plattformen. Die Frage, was den Blick der Literaturkritik lenkt, ist deswegen auch eine nach ihren ökonomischen und systemischen Bedingungen. Die haben sich im vergangenen Jahrzehnt vor allem durch die Digitalisierung fundamental verändert. Feuilletons und (...) Kritiken, die in der herkömmlichen Landschaft der Massenmedien ihren Ort,unter dem Strich` auf den Zeitungsseiten hatten, finden sich jetzt im Feed, im konstanten Nachrichtenstrom, in Konkurrenz zu Ereignissen und Angeboten höchst unterschiedlicher Dimension wieder. Wie können sie sich behaupten? (shrink)

In recent years, the growing academic field called “Data Science” has made many promises. On closer inspection, relatively few of these promises have come to fruition. A critique of Data Science from the phenomenological tradition can take many forms. This paper addresses the promise of “participation” in Data Science, taking inspiration from Paul Majkut’s 2000 work in Glimpse, “Empathy’s Impostor: Interactivity and Intersubjectivity,” and some insights from Heidegger’s "The Question Concerning Technology." The description of Data Science provided in the scholarly (...) literature includes “the study of the generalizable extraction of knowledge from data” (Dhar 2013, 64), “data stewardship and data sharing…access to data at higher volumes and more quickly, and the potential for replication and augmentation of existing research” (Hartter et al., 2013, 1), and “personal information, health status, daily activities and shopping preferences that are recorded and used to give us instant feedback and recommendations based on previous online behavior.” (Shin 2013) United States universities have begun to offer graduate programs in “data science”, anticipating the growth of this field for marketing, national security, and health industries. These universities include New York University, Columbia University, Stanford, Northwestern, and Syracuse. (shrink)

Firm–employee relationships are dependent on the wider societal context and on the role business plays in society. Changes in institutional arrangements in society affect the perceived responsibilities of firms to their personnel. In this study, we examine mass media discussions about firm–employee relationships from a social responsibility perspective via a longitudinal study in Romanian society. Our analysis indicates how the expected responsibilities of firms towards employees have altered with the changing role of firms in society since the early (...) 1990s. These transformations correspond to the ideological developments, from communist to market-based thinking, which have taken place in post-communist Eastern Europe. More specifically, our study shows how the diminishing expectations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are linked in mass media to increasingly important talk of human resource management (HRM). HRM is a modern business approach believed to address personnel needs and organisational objectives simultaneously. The congruency of goals in HRM may mistakenly lead to the conclusion that organisations are inherently responsible toward their personnel. We argue that this may not necessarily be the case. HRM, matching well the new free-market ideology in post-communist Eastern Europe, was eagerly embraced in that it defined firm–personnel relationships. In this study, we question whether this was an adequate theoretical perspective for Romanian firms to adopt as it lacks sufficient ethical grounding. We also call for a higher awareness concerning the role of mass media in the management literature, since its current role in constructing the ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ in firm–personnel relationships is hardly considered. (shrink)

This article connects the previously isolated literatures on corporate citizenship and corporate political activity to explain how firms construct political influence in the public sphere. The public engagement of firms as political actors is explored empirically through a discursive analysis of a public debate between the mining industry and the Australian government over a proposed tax. The findings show how the mining industry acted as a corporate citizen concerned about the common good. This, in turn, legitimized corporate political activity, which (...) undermined deliberation about the common good. The findings explain how the public sphere is refeudalized through corporate manipulation of deliberative processes via what we term corporate citizenspeak—simultaneously speaking as corporate citizens and for individual citizens. Corporate citizenspeak illustrates the duplicitous engagement of firms as political actors, claiming political legitimacy while subverting deliberative norms. This contributes to the theoretical development of corporations as political actors by explaining how corporate interests are aggregated to represent the common good and how corporate political activity is employed to dominate the public sphere. This has important implications for understanding how corporations undermine democratic principles. (shrink)

Any act of communication is a drama with three characters: a transmitter, a receiver and the world which is their subject. Someone speaks of something to someone. The messages sent during this drama usually have three functions that are easily shown to be assured by specific meaningful forms: “expression” by the transmitter. “representation” by the world, “involvement” or “concern” by the receiver. It is this last property that interests us here, the one that those familiar with the literature of (...) linguistics find under various names: appeal, conative, injunctive, imperative function… through which “language is used as a means to lead others to adopt a certain behavior”. (shrink)

Analyzes twentieth-century media and cultural theories as they relate to changes in political economy, communication technology, popular culture and collective consciousness in the United States. It argues that much of contemporary media environment is operating as Western capitalist media have for more than a century, making these theories more relevant than ever.

Blanchot often evoked the silence required for literary writing, a silence which he says must “be imposed” on a pre-existing and indistinct murmur of language. Likewise, he evokes this murmur itself as an originary ground of all speech, including literary speech. Less often recognized are the ways in which he also locates this murmur in the realm of public speech and everyday language, the rumor of speech spoken by no one and by everyone, a realm which he in turn links (...) with the exigencies of publication and publicity that bear on the literary work within modern societies marked by mass media and technically mediated communication. Blanchot himself thus points to an unexpected convergence, in these sonic images of impersonal murmuring flows of language, between literary language per se, and a language that is traditionally considered inauthentic, empty, superficial, a chattering nullity. This essay attempts to press on this border by showing Blanchot’s anxious, and probably futile, attempts to maintain the distinction he so profoundly and rigorously effaces. As literature is threatened by the indistinction of language from which it originates, it reveals an unexpected convergence with the leveling modes of language marked by mass media and by technicity in general. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the potential influence of mass-media on public’s opinions and attitudes towards economic liberalism. It shows that, without relying to the assumption that journalists pursue such a purpose, the nature of the media system leads them to give a rather negative image of how the market economy works and doesn’t give the same place to liberal thesis with respect to others. Our argument is founded on a critique of the economic (...) model of spatial competition currently used in this field, on the crucial role that norms inherent to the profession of journalist play and the characteristics of the demand which media face. L’objet de cet article est d’examiner la question de l’influence éventuelle des médias de masse sur les opinions et attitudes du public à l’égard du libéralisme économique. On y montre que, sans recourir à l’hypothèse que les journalistes poursuivent consciemment un tel objectif, la nature du système médiatique les conduit à donner une image plutôt négative du fonctionnement de l’économie de marché et à ne pas donner une place équilibrée à l’exposé des thèses libérales par rapport aux autres. L’argumentation suivie repose sur la critique du modèle économique de la concurrence spatiale habituellement utilisé à ce sujet, sur le rôle déterminant que jouent les normes propres à la profession de journaliste et les caractéristiques de la demande s’adressant aux médias. (shrink)

The mass media promotes terrorism by stressing fear and an uncertain future. Major changes in US foreign and domestic policy essentially went unreported and unchallenged by the dominant news organizations. Notwithstanding the long relationship in the United States between fear and crime, the role of the mass media in promoting fear has become more pronounced since the United States `discovered' international terrorism on 11 September 2001. Extensive qualitative media analysis shows that political decision-makers quickly adjusted (...) propaganda passages, prepared as part of the Project for the New American Century, to emphasize domestic support for the new US role in leading the world. These messages were folded into the previous crime-related discourse of fear, which may be defined as the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. Politicians marshaled critical symbols and icons joining terrorism with Iraq, the Muslim faith, and a vast number of non-western nations to strategically promote fear and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk and fear in order to achieve certain goals, including expanding domestic social control. (shrink)

Do the mass media deliver what contemporary democracies require? This fundamental research question has been discussed for many decades and the body of literature is firmly rooted in the debate following from the Hutchins Commission 1947. In more recent years, monitoring of the relations between democracy and the mass media has concentrated on new or democracies in transition. Fewer monitoring efforts have been undertaken in mature democracies. The following text develops a social science based monitoring (...) instrument for established democracies, the Media for Democracy Monitor. It has been developed at the University of Zurich and tested in five European countries. (shrink)

The process of merging the political, economic and media power in Italy and the role of the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi are discussed. “La Repubblica” and “L’Unita” publications are investigated (2009–2010) and compared via the famous European media as “The Financial Times”, “The Times”, “The Independent”, ”Le Monde”, “La Liberation”, “Le Nouvel Obstrvateur”, “El Pais” and “Der Spigel”. In particular the author pays the attention to polemics devoted to the information freedom protection. The existence of media (...) empires in modern mass media hinders one of the main functions of the press, namely the spreading of objective and full information on all sides of the society life directed by plurality in informational and analytical material. At the same moment in time the mass media influence on the fates of the leading political figures, Silvio Berlusconi in particular. A topical problem of complex relations of modern press and different political, social and power structures is analyzed on the Italian example. (shrink)

This book presents a critical analysis of sense-making practices through an exploration of acoustic, creative, and artistic spaces. It studies how local cultures of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are impacted by global discourses and media, such as television, popular music, digital media, and literature. The authors look at sense-making practices and spatial discourses through an interconnected discussion on thought and experience that seeks to present a multidimensional cartography of the global, the local, and the glocal, (...) to closely analyze the phenomenon of globalization. The volume is an investigation of the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, biopolitical worldview that challenges the disparity of its fragments while speculating on their synesthetic conditionality. A unique contribution, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, media studies, cultural studies, literary cultures, post-colonial studies, globalization studies, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, and social anthropology. (shrink)

In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

Theoretical substantiations and practical recommendations on media educational contain against gender stereotypes in the Ukrainian mass media are given in the work. Attention is paid to the pathogenic factor of the use of gender-sensitive content. The work is based on propedeutic theoretic studies of cultural and psychosocial background of Ukraine. We also used a content analysis of news and advertising materials of heterogenic media; sociologic methods ; modelling of educational situations and forecasting of expected results. That (...) was an end-to-end method of generalization that covered theoretical and practical stages of the study. It is proved that despite the weakening of gender divisions in the socio-cultural sphere in the world, in developing countries gender stereotypes remain a powerful tool for affective approach of media and advertising to the consumer. Author's ways to increase the level of media literacy and critical thinking with the help of gender-sensitive experiments, mini-projects, filling the media space with "mirror" about sexist content and creating a personal media field are proposed. (shrink)

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. By Seth Jacobowitz. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 387. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 299. $39.95.

The literature on mass communication is now dominated by "objective sociological "approaches. What makes the work of Stephenson so unusual is his starting points: his frank willingness to adopt a "subjective "and "psychological "approach to the study of mass communication. In short, this is an internal analysis of how communication processes are absorbed by individuals. The theory of play is not a doctrine of frivolity, but rather a way in which Stephenson gets at such sensitive areas of (...) communication theory as what is screened out and why. Without a notion of the play element in communication one would be led to imagine that every televised docudrama would be immediately lived out by every adolescent. Clearly, this is not the case. People can distinguish quite well between imaginary and real events in mass communication contexts. "The Play Theory of Mass Communication "is a work that studies subjective play, how communication serves the cause of self-enhancement and personal pleasure, and the role of entertainment as an end in itself. In short, for those who are tired of cliche-ridden volumes on the political hidden messages and meanings of communication, or the economic management of media decisions, this volume will come as a refreshment, a piece of entertainment as well as instruction. But with all the emphasis "on "aspects, Stephenson's volume is shrewdly political. He takes up themes ranging from the reduction! of international tensions to the happily alienated worker to such pedestrian events as the reporting of foreign Soviet dignitaries in their visits to democratic cultures. This is, in short, an urbane, wise book--sophisticated in its methodology and critical in its theorizing. (shrink)

Reviewed work: Geoffrey Cantor; Sally Shuttleworth . Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth‐Century Periodicals. 351 pp., illus., index. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. $40 .; Louise Henson; Geoffrey Cantor; Gowan Dawson; Richard Noakes; Sally Shuttleworth; Jonathan R. Topham . Culture and Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Media. xxv + 296 pp., illus., index. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. $84.95 .; Geoffrey Cantor; Gowan Dawson; Graeme Gooday; Richard Noakes; Sally Shuttleworth; Jonathan R. Topham. Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Periodical: Reading (...) the Magazine of Nature. xi + 329 pp., illus., bibl., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75. (shrink)

see, a quarterly journal published by The Friends of Photography, presents striking photography and fine writing that explore the impact of lens-based images on contemporary culture. see places the medium of photography within the broad discourse of visual culture, including art, advertising, mass media, and literature. Unlike conventional photography-related journals, see lets photographers speak for themselves about their work and gives writers the freedom to address visual issues across a broad spectrum of concerns. Photographs ranging from contemporary (...) to historical, as well as images from lens-based media amd new electronic environments, are featured in tandem with fiction, poetry, essays, and critical commentary that respond to our image-dominated surroundings. In addition to beautifully reproduced portfolios of photographs and insightful, provocative writings, each volume of see includes a section of artist's pages, reviews of current exhibitions, books, and multimedia titles; and regular columns that address the formative and functional aspects of visual culture. (shrink)

In the digital era, big data can strengthen the awareness of corporate social responsibility and make CSR more transparent to consumers. While big data continues to deepen the business transformation of enterprises, it is also a process of constantly understanding consumption and public expectations. In this process, the cognitive structure of enterprises is constantly adjusted, no longer simply pursuing performance but constantly realizing the expectations of users and society in order to maintain performance. Through mass media, corporate (...) class='Hi'>media, and other platforms, CSR is easier to affect consumers’ emotions. By reviewing the theory of emotional marketing and related research, this paper focuses on the different emotional ties between CSR and consumers and their different effects on consumers. This paper further emphasizes the profound significance of emotional marketing theory for understanding CSR in the era of big data. In addition, this paper also calls for more research based on big data technology, broken down by consumer needs – more specific attention to the different impacts of CSR on different consumers. (shrink)

In the article, the author analyses the impact of the tragic experiences during the Holocaust on contemporary ethics and literature. Such considerations coincide with yet another anniversary – the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, celebrated globally as Holocaust Memorial Day. The article also considers the reasons why testimonies from Holocaust survivors have not had an adequate impact on society. The author argues that trivialisation of the Holocaust tragedy occurred in modern science and it is related to the fact (...) that traditional ethics has not been able to convincingly explain why the Holocaust occurred in the most civilised nations. Thus, Holocaust testimonies should be constantly popularised in society for the good of all mankind. Literature seems to be the best form of mass media for this task and it is also a recorder of human emotions. According to the author, it is essential that humanity is protected this way against the possibility of a similar tragedy occurring in the future. (shrink)

The main thesis of my article is that the viability of the European Union does not depend so much on its political structure as on its being anchored in a culture-based public sphere and on the establishment of a cultural European citizenship. The public sphere could be defined as an unique world, characterized by consensus and cooperation, in which only public goods can be sought and acquired, or as an unique world, characterized by rivalry and competition, in which everyone could (...) pursue their private interests, but only if there is a consensus regarding an objective and fair procedure. In any way, we cannot speak of a pluralism of public spheres - like the black public sphere, the LGBT public sphere, etc. - but (at the most) a plurality of interests represented in the public sphere, under the reserve of respecting a fair procedure, which allows the expression of axiological judgments. The EU needs a progressive citizenship, from civil citizenship to cultural citizenship, depending on the acquired skills, behavior and virtues. One deserves cultural citizenship and have the right (or, perhaps the privilege) to manifest - in the public sphere - a way of life and a cultural identity only if promote authentic values: virtues, rationality, free will etc. The problematic aspects of the European media sphere are obstacles on the way to establishing an authentic European cultural citizenship. They can be kept under control by assuming a healthy reactionary attitude and associating every element of change and contingent progress (speed, reductive simplicity, user's solitude, pictoriality, lateralness, data overload, immediacy, segmentation, social amnesia, etc.) with an element of moderation and equilibrium. Only thus can the media contribute in the making of a viable union of the European peoples, grounded on a well articulated European cultural citizenship. (shrink)

The interrelationschip of culture, nation and communication is one of the key themes in the study of collective identities and nationalism. In this opening article to this special issue this interrelationship is being assessed. The article aims to contribute to a discussion ofthe assumptions on which the above interrelationship is built.It is argued that nationhood is at the point of intersection with a plurality of discourses related to geography, history, culture, polities, ideology, ethnicity, religion, matriality, economics, and the social. The (...) discourse of nationhood can best be understood in relation to boundedness, continuities and discontinuities, unnity and plurality, the authority of the past, and the imperative of the present.Contributions of a number of contemporary thinkers are incorporated in this article in order to underline the complex and contested discursive terrain that nationhood undoubtedly is. It is concluded that various cultures also manifest different and fragmented identities. (shrink)

This article focuses on how leaders of new right-wing populist parties are portrayed in the mass media. More so than their established counterparts, new parties depend on the media for their electoral breakthrough. From a theoretical perspective, we expect prominence, populism, and authoritativeness of the party leaders' media appearance to be essential for their electoral fortunes. We used systematic content analyses of 17 Dutch media outlets during the eight weeks prior to the 2006 national elections (...) and compared the appearances of four right-wing populist and seven mainstream party leaders. This article makes two contributions to the existing literature: First, we develop valid and reliable indicators of authoritativeness and populism and apply them to a systematic content analysis. Second, we show that more successful right-wing populist leaders were more prominent during the election campaign and that the most successful right-wing populist leader also appears more authoritative in the news. (shrink)

This paper analyses mass media exposure and its effect on family planning in Bangladesh using data from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 1993s place of residence, education, economic status, geographical region and number of living children appeared to be the most important variable determining mass media exposure to family planning. Multivariate analysis shows that both radio and TV exposure to family planning messages and ownership of a radio and TV have a significant effect on (...) current use of family planning methods. These factors remain significant determinants of contraceptive use, even after controlling socioeconomic and demographic factors. The study reveals that both socioeconomic development policies and family planning programmes with a special emphasis on mass media, especially radio, may have a significant effect on contraceptive use in Bangladesh. The principal policy challenge is to design communications strategies that will reach the less privileged, rural and illiterate people who are by far the majority in Bangladesh. (shrink)

When an employee’s off-duty conduct generates mass social media outrage, managers commonly respond by firing the employee. This, I argue, can be a mistake. The thesis I defend is the following: the fact that a firing would occur in a mass social media outrage context brought about by the employee’s off-duty conduct generates a strong ethical reason weighing against the act. In particular, it contributes to the firing constituting an inappropriate act of blame. Scholars who caution (...) against firing an employee for off-duty conduct have thus far focused primarily on due process related issues or legal concerns pertaining to free speech, lifestyle discrimination, and employment at-will. However, these concerns amount to only a partial, and contingent, diagnosis of what is at issue. I argue that even when due process considerations are met, firings in these contexts can be unjustified. Moreover, even if a business is not concerned with the unethical conduct per se, but is rather strictly concerned with PR, the argument I advance nevertheless provides one important ethical reason that counts against firings in mass social media outrage contexts. Given that managers are often under significant pressure to respond swiftly in cases where an employee is at the center of mass social media outrage, it is especially important that scholars begin to clarify the normative issues. This article builds on the burgeoning philosophical literature on the ethics of blame and provides a novel account of a distinctive ethical concern that arises with firings in mass social media outrage contexts. (shrink)

Mass media campaigns are widely and successfully used to change health decisions and behaviors for better or for worse in society. In the United States, media campaigns have been launched at local offices of the states’ department of motor vehicles to promote citizens’ willingness to organ donation and donor registration. We analyze interventional studies of multimedia communication campaigns to encourage organ-donor registration at local offices of states’ department of motor vehicles. The media campaigns include the use (...) of multifaceted communication tools and provide training to desk clerks in the use of scripted messages for the purpose of optimizing enrollment in organ-donor registries. Scripted messages are communicated to customers through mass audiovisual entertainment media, print materials and interpersonal interaction at the offices of departments of motor vehicles. These campaigns give rise to three serious concerns: (1) bias in communicating information with scripted messages without verification of the scientific accuracy of information, (2) the provision of misinformation to future donors that may result in them suffering unintended consequences from consenting to medical procedures before death (e.g, organ preservation and suitability for transplantation), and (3) the unmanaged conflict of interests for organizations charged with implementing these campaigns, (i.e, dual advocacy for transplant recipients and donors). We conclude the following: (1) media campaigns about healthcare should communicate accurate information to the general public and disclose factual materials with the least amount of bias; (2) conflicting interests in media campaigns should be managed with full public transparency; (3) media campaigns should disclose the practical implications of procurement as well as acknowledge the medical, legal, and religious controversies of determining death in organ donation; (4) organ-donor registration must satisfy the criteria of informed consent; (5) media campaigns should serve as a means of public education about organ donation and should not be a form of propaganda. (shrink)

Traces the depiction of biological science in mass media and how it has shaped public perceptions.

This literature review of professionalism was prepared by San Jose State University graduate student Marianne Allison as a research committee project of the Mass Communication and Society Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The project was prepared under the guidance of Professor Diana Stover Tillinghast. It reviews the literature on two approaches to professionalism in general and of the professionalism of journalists in particular: the ?structural?functionalist approach?; and the ?power approach.?; Traditional and recent (...) discussions of the nature of professionalism in occupational sociology are presented. Studies of the professionalism of journalists both in the United States and cross?culturally are critiqued. The paper suggests several areas of fruitful research, and contains an extensive bibliography. (shrink)

Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj Žižek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that point (...) beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. _After the Red Army Faction_ maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's _Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof_, and the blockbuster exhibition _Regarding Terror_ at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success _The Baader-Meinhof Complex_. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:René Girard and the Rhetoric of ConsumptionKathleen M. Vandenberg (bio)The work of René Girard, so productively applied in so many different fields—in theology, in anthropology, in literature, to name a few—has yet to be recognized or applied in the field of rhetorical studies. Yet there exists, I argue, a need precisely for Girard's theories as the over 2000 year-old discipline enters the twenty-first century.Girard's theory of mimetic or (...) triangular desire can be used as a model for understanding persuasion, because it is, among other things, an "expression of a basic set of ideas on... the dynamics of the self and human relations" (1996, vii). Girard's concern is with human relationships and, in a sense, with how individuals in these relationships act rhetorically upon themselves and others. Girard's mimetic theory hinges on the dynamics of imitation and explains how individuals relate through both the conscious and the unconscious sharing of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs in certain situations. These situations are clearly rhetorical, as can be seen by examining the definition of the "rhetorical situation" set forth by Lloyd Bitzer, in his seminal 1968 article, "The Rhetorical Situation." Bitzer proposes three conditions that must be met for a rhetorical situation to exist: an exigency or imperfection marked by urgency; a rhetorical audience or an audience that can act; and constraints, or elements that have the power to constrain the decision and action needed to modify the exigency (7). In mass-mediated modern rhetoric, I argue that the exigencies exist externally (in the culture) and internally, the audience is both others and self, and the constraints are the alienation, mystification, and desire generated by hierarchies. Twentieth-century rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke advises that "we must often think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reënforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill" (1950, 26). Such is the case with this particular form of rhetoric, which is generated and propagated by mimetic contagion and thus is best more narrowly defined as sociological propaganda, a type of propaganda [End Page 259] theorized by Jacques Ellul in Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1975).Ellul, the first to distinguish between political propaganda and sociological propaganda, proposes that the latter encompasses social behaviors "much more vast and less certain" than those of political propaganda (1975, 62). These social behaviors permit the penetration of an ideology in a society, a penetration that is achieved through the active participation of the masses. Sociological propaganda, as Ellul describes it, works from within; it is dependent on the individual's willingness and ability to persuade him- or herself and others. Sociological propaganda, Ellul posits, is created when members of a group behave in such a way as to influence the attitudes, actions, and lifestyles of others; often this behavior is unconscious, unintentional, and spontaneous.In these ways, the rhetoric of sociological propaganda operates in a markedly different fashion than more "traditional" rhetoric, which is largely understood to operate as a unilateral transaction in which an individual orator actively, openly, and orally works to move a relatively passive but physically present audience to act in accordance with the orator's own beliefs through a formally delivered speech. In its reliance on the interaction and cooperation of the many rather than the centrality and dominance of one speaker, in its acceptance of unintentional, spontaneous, and unconscious persuasion, in its dependence on the modern mass media, and in the limitless and nebulous nature of its boundaries in time and space, sociological propaganda constitutes a type of rhetoric heretofore insufficiently addressed by rhetorical studies. Although existing perspectives in rhetorical criticism have certainly addressed some aspects of this rhetoric, sociological propaganda is not easily explained with the terminology of traditional rhetorical criticism or easily approached from traditional rhetorical perspectives.This article asserts that the best way to approach and understand such propaganda is through the perspective of René Girard. Approaching this propaganda from a Girardian perspective permits us to look beyond the symbols of sociological propaganda and analyze our own responsibility in rhetorical... (shrink)

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Digital technology has transformed the way that we visualise the natural world, the art we create and the stories we tell about our environments. Exploring contemporary digital art and literature through an ecocritical lens, Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (1968-2018) demonstrates the many ways in which critical ideas of the sublime, the pastoral and the picturesque have been renewed and shaped (...) in digital media, from electronic literature to music and the visual arts. The book goes on to explore the ecological implications of these new forms of cultural representation in the digital age and in so doing makes a profound contribution to our understanding of digital art practice in the 21st century. (shrink)

The new mass media technologies now make information processing and distribution more accessible to people globally. Marshall Mcluhan’s “global village” has given birth to a “global palour”. However, perpetrators of crimes now bask on the philosophy of communication media practitioners that people have the right to know what is happening within and outside their environment. This stance is rapidly dismantling, in an amazing fashion, the hitherto accorded respect for media ethics. Neil Postman, a New York (...) class='Hi'>media analyst, describes the creator of technology as the list judge of its consequences, especially with regards to the technology of the media. True, every communication medium is potent with the possibility of occasioning other consequences not directly intended by it. This paper, therefore, attempts to bring to the fore the way communication media are inadvertently promoting crimes and terrorist activities globally. It is the stand of this paper that a global overhaul of mass communication media is needed for balance reportage that would bring about global and meaningful developments of human and material resources under an atmosphere of peace and mutual tolerance. (shrink)

John Rawls's ?veil of ignorance? approach to ethical decision making is a staple in mass media ethics literature, but Rawls's overarching theory of distributive justice receives less consideration in public relations ethics than in other communication disciplines. Public relations ethicists who describe the veil often divorce it from Rawls's original intention. This paper describes Rawls's theory; its uses and misuses in contemporary discussions of public relations ethics; six reasons why the veil seems to be a difficult fit (...) for public relations practitioners; and Rawlsian considerations in the context of three commonly accepted public relations models. (shrink)

Between Summits I and II, media ethics established its legitimacy, summarized into recommendations for the field's future fluorescence. This history points to the challenges through which media ethics moves to another order of magnitude. A historical map of media ethics scholarship since 1980 divides into 5 domains, and each is introduced: theory, social philosophy, religious ethics, technology, and truth. From this content analysis of the literature, an agenda emerges for research and academic study that can raise (...) media ethics to a higher level. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page (...) opens to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. (shrink)