Topical Issues in Communications and Media ResearchThe field of communication and media has never been more exciting, and the vigorous activity in this area over the past three decades bears testimony to this. The excitement is due to a number of developments in the vast and sometimes very different areas that fall under the common rubric of communication and media studies. This book seeks to interrogate a number of concerns and issues in communications and media research. This volume documents some of the current trends and developments, challenges, and future prospects of communication and media research. In doing so it presents a broad basis for understanding the issues, technologies, theories, applications, opportunities, and challenges faced by communication researchers and scholars in the new media environment of the 21st century. |
Contents
1 | |
9 | |
Cultural Literacy the Media and the Public Sphere Implication for Communication Research | 25 |
Prospects for AgendaSetting Research in the 21st Century | 35 |
New Information Technologies and Research Ethics A Critical Appraisal | 61 |
Action Research in the Design of New Media and ICT Systems | 79 |
Processual Media Theory and the Study of New Media Towards a New Research Approach | 95 |
An Eclectic Feminist Framework for Critically Evaluating Women and Communication Technology Projects | 117 |
Phenomenology Economic History and Mass Communication Research Lessons from the Australian Music Industry | 143 |
Focus Group Research Towards an Applicable Model for Africa | 167 |
Index | 191 |
Common terms and phrases
action research African agenda agenda-setting research approach argues audience Australian music chapter communication and media communication research communication technologies concept context critical critical discourse analysis cultural literacy deconstruction discourse analysis economic effects empirical empiricism empowerment enables ethnography example field focus group discussions focus groups gender Ghana Hearn ICT projects implications important industry interaction Internet research Internet research ethics involved issues knowledge Kwamena Kwansah-Aidoo London mainstream media mass communication mass media McCombs meaning media and communication media environment media research media studies media theory methods music technology music technology manufacturing needs networks Nova Science Publishers organisations participants participatory feminist evaluation perspective phenomenological political poststructuralist power relations practices Press production qualitative Queensland radio research ethics research process Rural Women Schirato Second-order cybernetics setting social semiotics society spiral of silence stakeholders subjects television texts theory traditional understanding University Vissandjée Women and ICTs
Popular passages
Page 96 - As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.
Page 14 - By system of formation, then, I mean a complex group of relations that function as a rule: it lays down what must be related, in a particular discursive practice, for such and such an enunciation to be made, for such and such a concept to be used, for such and such a strategy to be organized.
Page 130 - The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself...
Page 46 - To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described, (p.
Page 95 - Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production.
Page 49 - Society threatens deviant individuals with isolation. • Individuals experience fear of isolation continuously. • This fear of isolation causes individuals to try to assess the climate of opinion at all times. • The results of this estimate affect their behaviour in public, especially their willingness or not to express opinions openly.
Page 128 - Against this irreducible humanist essence of subjectivity, poststructuralism proposes a subjectivity which is precarious, contradictory and in process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we think or speak.
Page 10 - A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs.
Page 4 - The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards - each is important in its own way.