Photofilmic Art, Part 1. Negotiating Fraught Images in a Contemporary Public Sphere (original) (raw)

'Emergent' media and public communication: Understanding the changing mediascape

Public Communication Review, 2010

Scholars and practitioners are widely agreed that media and public communication are undergoing significant change deserving of close attention and, along with widespread popular media discussion, a body of scholarly research on the changing 21 st century mediascape is emerging. The term "new media" is widely used in the literature to describe interactive online communication forms including blogs, social networks, photo and video sharing sites, microblogging, and virtual worlds enabled by what is referred to as Web 2.0. A number of studies cite so-called "new media" as the "fourth media revolution" and make effusive predictions concerning their effects ranging from the "end of journalism" to the transformation of the public sphere through the birth of e-democracy. This paper critically reviews changes taking place and provides an overview of implications for public communication. It challenges the term "new media", arguing that it is inaccurate and unhistorical, and attempts to look beyond hype and "cyberbole" that often distort discussion to identify substantive changes taking place. It argues these are located in social and cultural practices rather than technology and explores four foundational shifts which have significant implications for media and all areas of public communication practice including journalism, political communication, advertising, public relations and organisational communication.

MISSION, REALITY AND CURRENT CHALLENGES OF THE MASS MEDIA IN THE 21st CENTURY

2013

The mass media plays a significant liaison role of providing the social reality to recipients of the current society. During such commercial period as of today, however, the mass media prefers the entertaining function, while minimizing, or even eliminating, the informative, canvassing, cultural and educative functions, thus fails to realize its public role for the society. Most media, today, from news to advertising, rely on spectacle, simplification and exaggeration to grab and hold audiences. Much of the current media is beset by idealization and demonization in which media manipulators depict themselves and their allies as heroes and saints, and their opponents or targets as villains, fools and disturbed characters, both to create exciting stories and win battles. What is missing is precisely the information, which would discredit the system and result in reforms that would lock out many of those who now work to maintain the system solely for their own benefit.

MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE - FALL 2016 - CU/SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES

Scope of the Course: The effects of media on the social, economic, political and cultural spheres of life have been increasing significantly since the nineteenth century. In fact, there is a curious overlap between the transformation of the public sphere and the rise of mass media. This course will examine the points of juncture between the public sphere and mass media at the intersection of capitalism, liberal democracy and patriarchy. More specifically, this course will investigate the concepts of the public and the private; the social and the intimate as well as the relationship between public morality, private morality and media; the 'public,' 'publicness' and communications; alternative publics and alternative media through the lenses of different theories of the public sphere. In this course, we will read The main questions this course will ask are: 1) What are the junction points between history and theory in the transformation of the public sphere and the rise of the mass media? 2) What are the (non-)normative implications of different theories of the public sphere on the understanding of media? 3) How can one conceptualize alternative mass media and social media in terms of public-private distinction? 4) What is the significance of public sphere in the mediation of human communication? Why? At the end of the term the students will have accumulated knowledge of the theories of public sphere with a historical perspective; acquired theoretical and methodological knowledge, which are required to assess the effect of the mass media in the construction, narrowing down, extension and transformation of the public sphere; and developed a critical perspective on the function of the mass media in the transformation of the distinction between the public and the private in late-capitalist societies. The course also aims to investigate the possibilities for revealing the immediacy of the connections between the " theoretical " and everyday experiences through communication. In this respect, the course will also offer a venue for a collaborative autoethnographic preliminary study that involves cooperative research agendas of the students and the lecturer. The collaborative study, which will center on the question of the differentiations in the way audience/readers understand and communicate through the public-private distinctions will evolve through three lines: 1. The students' and lecturer's daily notes about the weekly discussions on the theoretical approaches, covered in the course with a view to a. their daily experiences b. which media they use most frequently in conveying these experiences and how; 2. The students' and lecturer's interactive readings of and notes on the three films that will be watched throughout Fall 2016; 3. Discussions on cross-cutting reflections of ethnicity, gender, class and age on the way our subjective and cooperative readings on the public-private distinctions.

Mass media communication at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Dimensions of change

Journal of historical pragmatics, 2003

This paper identifies and analyses current dimensions of change in mass media communication and in particular changes in mass media news transmitted via the Internet. In comparison with traditional media such as newspapers, Internet mass media products rely increasingly on a hypertext structure and on the integration of different channels of communication (hypermedia). In addition, they seek to convey the impression of personal, almost private communication. Audiences are carefully targeted, and media products can be customised to the personal needs and preferences of individual consumers. Online news media are also more interactive, requiring choices by users who activate some links and ignore others, and allowing users to "talk back" to the producers and interact with other users. The life span of information is changing as information is published as news in increasingly shorter time spans. Reception patterns are also changing: television and radio broadcasts available on the Internet can be received in a selective and asynchronous manner, like newspapers. Finally, online media differ from their traditional predecessors in their immediate world-wide availability, and in a reduction in the fixity of their texts.

News as Spectacle: The Political Economy and Aesthetics of 24/7 News

2004

On the surface, it would appear that large-scale media spectacles based on celebrities, such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal or the mourning of Princess Diana, have little in common with the 1991 Gulf War or the 2001 September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States. The former are easily dismissed as tabloid excess, while the latter constitute what journalists like to call hard news stories par excellence. It doesn't get more serious than war and terror. Media coverage of illicit sex and tabloid tragedy are widely regarded as the nadir of professional journalism. War and the threat of terror on the other hand, provide the news media with opportunities to redeem themselves and reproduce the legitimising narrative of independent truth-seekers. I wish to complicate this separation. I argue, instead, that the reporting of hard news and the tabloid variety share a commonality: both are constitutive of, and are constructed by, the economic competition among 24-hour news organizati...