French media books—part one

Histoire Des Systèmes De Télécommunications: Avec ou sans Fil, Des Inventions Pour Communiquer / A HISTORY OF TELECOMMUNICATION SYSTEMS: INVENTIONS FOR COMMUNICATION by Claude Nowakowski and Alain Roux (Paris: Technique et documentation, 1994–440 FF, 382 pp.)

AFP, Une Histoire de L'Agence France‐Presse: 1944–1990/AFP: A HISTORY OF AGENCE FRANCE‐PRESSE: 1944–90 by Bernard Ullmann and Jean Huteau (Paris, Laffont, 1992–160 FF, ISBN 2–221–05883–6)

Havas: Les Arcanes du Pouvoir / HAVAS: THE SECRET EXERCISE OF POWER by Antoine Lefebure (Paris: Grasset, 1992–148 FF, no ISBN given, 378 pp.)

Histoire du Journalisme et des Journalistes en France / A HISTORY OF JOURNALISM AND JOURNALISTS IN FRANCE by Christian Delporte (Paris: PUF [Que Sais‐je? No. 2926], 1994–40 FF, no ISBN given, 128 pp.)

Trois Siècles de Publicité en France / THREE CENTURIES OF ADVERTISING IN FRANCE by Marc Martin (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992‐ 180 FF, ISBN 2–7381–0166–6, 430 pp.)

Presse, Radio et Télévision de 1631 à Nos Jours / PRESS, RADIO, AND TELEVISION FROM 1631 TO THE PRESENT by Elisabeth Cazenave and Caroline Ulmann‐Mauriat (Paris: Hachette, 1995–84 FF, ISBN 2–01–019634–1, 253 pp.)

L'invention du Journalisme en France: Naissance de la Presse Moderne à la Fin du 19ème Siècle / INVENTION OF JOURNALISM IN FRANCE: THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN PRESS IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY by Thomas Ferenczi (Paris: Plon, 1993–138 FF, no ISBN given, 278 pp.)

Cinquante Ans de Presse Parisienne / FIFTY YEARS WITH THE PARIS PRESS by Hervé Mille (Paris: La Table ronde, 1992‐price and ISBN not given)

Histoire Générale de la Radio et de la Télévision / A GENERAL HISTORY OF RADIO AND TELEVISION by Christian Brochand (Paris: La Documentation française, 1994‐ 400 FF for each volume: Tome 1 (1921–1944) 692 pp.; Tome 2 (1944–1974) 690 pp., or 700 FF for the two, no ISBN given)

La Télé: Dix Ans D'histoires Secrètes / TELEVISION: TEN YEARS OF SECRET HISTORY by Marie‐Eve Chamard and Philippe Kieffer (Paris: Flammarion, 1992–150 FF, ISBN 2–08–066505–7, 701 pp.)

Haute Fidélité: Pouvoir et Télévision (1935–1994)/ HI‐FIDELITY: POWER AND TELEVISION (1935–94) by Jérôme Bourdon (Paris: Seuil, 1994–145 FF, no ISBN given, 373 pp.)

Le Général Ferrié / GENERAL FERRIÉ by Michel Armondy (Grenoble:, Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1993–150 FF, no ISBN given, 424 pp.)     

From the media of the periphery to peripheral media: The changing priorities of Brazil’s alternative ecology

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a new appraisal of Brazil’s alternative media. By investing in the concept of the periphery, this study draws on past literature, semistructured interviews, and data collected from across the country (n = 50) to propose a repertoire analysis of media producers’ views of the country’s popular notion of the periphery. Evidence shows that they have shown nuanced views of the periphery as a site of purpose, pluralism, and authorship. Despite crisis and turmoil, this study presents some paths that could help reorientate the priorities of alternative media research toward a closer consideration of the periphery as entity that appears much more in line with local realities and expectations than previous international debates.     

Entertaining audiences,ensuring inclusivity,and considering media influence: Sixth graders’ understanding of media producers’ responsibility

Qualitatively analyzing 35 responses from a letter-writing homework in a media literacy education program, this study examines sixth graders’ understandings of producers’ responsibility in creating media content. Responses suggest their understandings about producers’ responsibility are bounded within the context of their media use as consumers, rather than as citizens. Findings focus on the importance of introducing contextual factors of media production as well as the challenges that researchers and educators might face.     

Making do with media: teachers,technology, and tactics of media use in American classrooms, 1919–1946

In the last century, teachers have come under pressure to incorporate new media technologies into their lessons. Comparing educational research, press coverage, and teachers' firsthand accounts of mediated instruction between 1919 and 1946, this article highlights a historic discrepancy between anticipated and actual uses of media in classrooms. Drawing on de Certeau's theory of “making do,” the author argues that teachers' efforts to balance high technologies with simpler, more do-it-yourself varieties of media in their lessons constituted critical forms of participation in educational media culture and small acts of resistance against industrial, top-down efforts to streamline, modernize, and technologize their work.     

“It’s kind of like an assault,you know”: media resisters’ meta-decoding practices of media culture

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/decoding” essay sparked an on-going focus in media studies on reception and audience studies that remains theoretically robust today. Hall’s insight that audience members decode media content in multiple ways, some in line with the dominant cultural ideology and some resistant to that ideology, illuminates the phenomenon of media resistance. Media resisters significantly limit their media consumption and they do so based on their decodings of media culture—decodings, or readings, that resist normative messages about commercialism and consumption, about the natural diffusion and inherent benefits of mobile technologies and social media, and about the political landscape depicted and generated by news media. Hall’s encoding/decoding model is expanded here to include not only audiences’ decodings of specific content, but of media culture broadly. Concerns about media culture in the aggregate lead to media resisters’ practices of limiting media engagement, practices themselves that are counter hegemonic.     

Pranking rhetoric: “culture jamming” as media activism

This essay explores the practice of “culture jamming” as a strategy of rhetorical protest. Specifically, “pranksters” deploy the tools of the mass media and marketing in order to take advantage of the resources and venues they afford. Through the concept of “pranking,” this essay suggests that the most promising forms of media activism may resist less through negation and opposition than by playfully appropriating commercial rhetoric both by folding it over on itself and exaggerating its tropes.     

Spreading the word? European Union agencies and social media attention

Public agencies need to distribute information to their manifold audience quickly and directly. The emergence of social media platforms has sparked positive projections about future government-public interactions via the internet and almost every EU agency has created social media presences on the leading social media platforms. However, social media accounts of agencies receive strongly varying amounts of public attention and therefore display varying degrees of usefulness to connect with the public. This research examines which factors influence how much long-standing and temporal attention social media accounts of EU agencies receive. Using an extensive Twitter dataset of EU agencies and a new methodology that employs supervised text classification through the novel BERT language model to classify agency tweets, possible explanations of social media attention are tested. Results show that long-standing social media attention (i.e., size of the followership) is mostly explained by salience in traditional news, account age, and tweeting frequency, whilst a more interactive communication style tends to yield more temporal attention (i.e., number of retweets). The findings underline previous assumptions that employing a more interactive communication style maximizes public organizations' potential to connect with their audiences on social media.     

Hong Kong media system in transition: A socio‐cultural analysis

This paper examines the media system of Hong Kong from a socio‐cultural perspective. It proposes to analyse five major factors that determine a media system, namely, political structure, economic structure, media proprietors’ culture, media practitioners’ culture, and audience's culture. Interactions of these five factors result in four ideal‐type media systems. They are: Type I, Free System; Type II, Relatively Free System; Type III, Relatively Repressive System; and Type IV, Repressive System. Analysed in this context, the present media situation in Hong Kong can be considered to be a relatively free system. However, it is also observed that the media system in Hong Kong is likely to become a relatively repressive system after 1997. The paper further suggests that the socio‐cultural model developed here can be used for cross‐cultural comparison.     

Cross‐media response to digital manipulation of still and moving images

This investigation provides survey data for a cross‐media comparison between newspaper photo editors and television news directors to assess the ethical response to digital image processing and enhancement technology. The results indicate that television news directors tend toward less strict ethical standards in application of the technology. However, the television people showed more sensitivity to aspects of the technology that relate to long‐standing themes of TV critics.     

Alone in Berlin? Israeli media and the German resistance to Nazism

The commercially successful Hebrew translation of Alone in Berlin (Fallada, 2010) stirred a conversation regarding the German resistance to Nazism, until then a rarely discussed phenomenon in Israel. The analysis of media items dealing with the book revealed that different memory frameworks shaped the discussion about it. Thus, this study contributes to contemporary discussion about the role of “old” and “new” media in the reconstruction of society’s memory.     

Social media monitoring: Responsive governance in the shadow of surveillance?

Social media monitoring is gradually becoming a common practice in public organizations in the Netherlands. The main purposes of social media monitoring are strategic control and responsiveness. Social media monitoring poses normative questions in terms of transparency, accountability and privacy. We investigate practices of social media monitoring in four Dutch public organizations. Policy departments seem to be more strongly orientated towards monitoring, whereas organizations involved in policy implementation seem to be more inclined to progress to webcare. The paper argues for more transparency on social media monitoring.     

How does duplicate tweeting boost social media exposure to scholarly articles?

Duplicate tweeting is a kind of behavior that a user posts the same or substantially similar original tweets to one or several topics multiple times in a row, which is commonly used to boost social media exposure to online information. However, how this behavior boosts social media exposure to online information, especially to scientific publications, is still unclear. In this study, we use the number of retweets an article received as a proxy for social media exposure to the article. Based on the duplicate tweeting records of 12,263 users on Twitter from 2011 to 2017, we find that social media exposure to scholarly articles has a significant marginal effect as the number of duplicate tweeting (k) increases. It ramps up a peak value when k is between 2 and 4 and goes down when k takes a greater value. We also find that a longer posting interval can sharply reduce social media exposure to scholarly articles, and posting non-duplicate content can significantly improve the exposure. Our findings not only help scientists and journal publishers effectively improve the social impact of their research outputs but also advance the understanding of the diffusion processes of scholarly articles.     

Under the Dome: “Chinese” smog as a viral media event

Under the Dome, a video about smog in China produced by author and former television anchor Chai Jing, garnered 200 million views within 48 hours before disappearing from major Chinese websites. This essay examines the video’s aesthetics, distribution and reception with a particular attention to its relation to time. I argue that a focus on temporality allows us to discern the ideological conditions that delimit how we talk about Under the Dome and indeed China’s pollution in the context of neoliberal globalization. The celebration of the video’s digitally enabled instantaneity not only privileges technological solutions and consumer agency but also obscures the unequal relation of power to which the Chinese state and the workers within the global electronics supply chain have long been subject. What these discourses eclipse is an opportunity to rethink the accidental event as opening an alternative dialogue about the geological deep time of media culture.     

Gender,media, and myth-making: constructing China’s leftover women

In the last 10 years, the term ‘leftover women’ (剩女)—educated, unmarried women over the age of 27—has emerged as a visible stereotype in popular consciousness in China. Despite the surplus of men that is a result of China’s One Child Policy, women are blamed for marriage market challenges through sexist narratives and terminology. While some scholarship treats ‘leftover women’ as an accepted demographic phenomenon with clear causes and impacts, it can also be viewed as an artificial construct created through socially generated gender stereotypes and furthered through media messaging. This article examines and compares sociological research on Chinese marriage patterns, presentations of ‘leftover women’ in contemporary Chinese media, and independent interview findings to understand the role of media in the construction of gender discourse and the perpetuation of gender stereotypes. These rigid concepts of gender roles and ideal womanhood have far-flung consequences, both for women who internalize these misperceptions and for the social hierarchies supported by antiquated gender constructs.     

Mass media,elective politics and multi‐party democracy in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has practised elective politics of varying degrees for almost a century, and with adult universal franchise since 1930. During this period the mass media have played their role, at times controversial, in trying to influence elective politics. With multi‐party democracy, the tempo of elective politics has intensified, and it has been matched by greater proliferation, sophistication, and broader ownership of the media, TV in particular. The emergence of the independent weeklies or tabloids has added a new dimension to the scene.

This article attempts to place in a historical and critical perspective the nature and the complexities of the nexus between the mass media and the electoral process in Sri Lanka, with a focus on the elections in 1994.     

The bigger,the better? Measuring the financial health of media firms

Abstract

This study examined the degrees of product diversification of media conglomerates since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and tested the impact of product diversification of the firms on their financial health. The strategy of related product diversification enables firms to gain market power and synergy effect, then improves financial performance. Based on that assumption, for a sample of 26 media firms from 1996 to 2002, this study conducted a regression analysis to test the hypotheses. The results showed two contradictory curvilinear models. First, revenue, EBITDA and sales growth rates revealed a U‐shaped relationship with diversification. That is, performance decreased as firms shifted from concentrated business strategies to related diversification, but performance increased as firms changed from related diversification to unrelated diversification. On the other hand, financial efficiency variables measuring management effectiveness or profitability (ROS, ROA and ROE) and stock market evaluation (earnings per share) showed an inverted U‐shape relationship. Thus, the unrelated diversification led to a decrease in financial efficiency.