Drawing on a wide range of social and psychological theories, Castells presents original research on political processes and social movements. He applies this analysis to numerous recent events - the misinformation of the American public on the Iraq War,the global environmental movement to preventclimate change, the control of information in China and Russia, Barak Obama's internet-based presidential campaigns, and (in this new edition) responses to recent political and economic crises such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. On the basis of these case studies he proposes a newtheory of power in the information age based on the management of communication networks.

Media and Power addresses three key questions about the relationship between media and society. *How much power do the media have? *Who really controls the media? *What is the relationship between media and power in society? In this major new book, James Curran reviews the different answers which have been given, before advancing original interpretations in a series of ground-breaking essays. This book also provides a guided tour of the major debates in media studies. What part did the media play in the making of modern society? How did 'new media' change society in the past? Will radical media research recover from its mid-life crisis? Is public service television the dying product of the nation in an age of globalization? Media and Power provides both a clear introduction to media research and an innovative analysis of media power.

Health is a contested concept that has been defined in numerous ways. The media is extremely powerful in promoting health beliefs and in creating role models for contemporary people. The ways in which health is defined or understood can have wide-ranging implications and can have an impact on issues such as health promotion or health literacy. Health presentation in the media has a significant social impact because this type of message is important in changing people's beliefs, attitudes and behaviours relating to health and in promoting health-related knowledge among the target audience. The present volume provides an interdisciplinary and multicultural contemporary approach to the controversial link between medicine and media. The authors that have contributed to this volume analyse the media and medicine from different perspectives and different countries (USA, UK, Portugal, Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico, Estonia, Romania), thus offering a re-positioning of the study of media and medicine. The new perspectives offered by this volume will be of interest to any health communication or media studies student or academic since they bring to light new ideas, new methodologies and new results.

Indonesia is undergoing a process of rapid change, with an affluent middle class due to hit 141 million people by 2020. While official statistics suggest that internet penetration is low, over 70 million Indonesians have a Facebook account, the fourth highest group in the world. Jakarta is the Twitter capital of the world with more tweets per minute than any other city around the globe. In the past ten years digitalisation of media content has enabled extensive concentration and conglomeration of the industry, and media owners are wealthier and more politically powerful than ever before. Digital media is a prominent place of contestation between large, powerful oligarchs, and citizens looking to bring about rapid and meaningful change. This book examines how the political agencies of both oligarchs and ‘netizens’ are enhanced by digitalisation, and how an increasingly divergent society is being formed. In doing so, this book enters this debate about the transformations of society and power in the digital age.

This book addresses, as few books in English have, a broad range of topics pertaining to China's expanding media and telecommunications systems. American and Chinese experts in journalism, communication, government, and political science use fieldwork, including participant observations, surveys, and in-depth interviews conducted within media organizations, to provide richly detailed analyses of the issues and of the changing face of media in China.

The communication potential of contemporary mass media is immense. It can communicate with us about the entire world and it can stimulate and inspire us with entertainment. The realisation of this potential has been frustrated by interrelated networks of people who have controlled major media over the last century. Those interests see media as a means to control and manipulate people rather than as a means to inform and inspire people. The approach in this book moves beyond the abstractions and systems approaches often used in criticisms of media to an analysis focused on the concrete groups that dominate media. These groups do constitute a system, but one that must be understood in its terms of all of its historical features -- economic, political, and social.

In this text, Sue Curry Jansen brings a different perspective to contemporary communication inquiry. She engages two questions at the heart of critical politics of communication: what do we know? And how do we know it?

Filling in a key chapter in communications history, Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike offer an in-depth examination of the rise of the “global media” between 1860 and 1930. They analyze the connections between the development of a global communication infrastructure, the creation of national telegraph and wireless systems, and news agencies and the content they provided. Conventional histories suggest that the growth of global communications correlated with imperial expansion: an increasing number of cables were laid as colonial powers competed for control of resources. Winseck and Pike argue that the role of the imperial contest, while significant, has been exaggerated. They emphasize how much of the global media system was in place before the high tide of imperialism in the early twentieth century, and they point to other factors that drove the proliferation of global media links, including economic booms and busts, initial steps toward multilateralism and international law, and the formation of corporate cartels. Drawing on extensive research in corporate and government archives, Winseck and Pike illuminate the actions of companies and cartels during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, in many different parts of the globe, including Africa, Asia, and Central and South America as well as Europe and North America. The complex history they relate shows how cable companies exploited or transcended national policies in the creation of the global cable network, how private corporations and government agencies interacted, and how individual reformers fought to eliminate cartels and harmonize the regulation of world communications. In Communication and Empire, the multinational conglomerates, regulations, and the politics of imperialism and anti-imperialism as well as the cries for reform of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth emerge as the obvious forerunners of today’s global media.

Politics is above all a contest, and the news media are the central arena for viewing that competition. One of the central concerns of political communication has to do with the myriad ways in which politics has an impact on the news media and the equally diverse ways in which the media influences politics. Both of these aspects in turn weigh heavily on the effects such political communication has on mass citizens. In Making Sense of Media and Politics, Gadi Wolfsfeld introduces readers to the most important concepts that serve as a framework for examining the interrelationship of media and politics: political power can usually be translated into power over the news media when authorities lose control over the political environment they also lose control over the news there is no such thing as objective journalism (nor can there be) the media are dedicated more than anything else to telling a good story the most important effects of the news media on citizens tend to be unintentional and unnoticed. By identifying these five key principles of political communication, the author examines those who package and send political messages, those who transform political messages into news, and the effect all this has on citizens. The result is a brief, engaging guide to help make sense of the wider world of media and politics and an essential companion to more in-depths studies of the field.

Geographies of Media and Communication From the invention of the telegraph to the emergence of the Internet, communications technologies have transformed the ways that people and places relate to each other. Geographies of Media and Communication is the first textbook to treat all aspects of geography’s variegated encounter with communication. Connecting geographical ideas with communication theories such as intertextuality, audience-centered theory, and semiotics, Paul C. Adams explores media representations of places, the spatial diffusion of communication technologies, and the power of communication technologies to transform places, and to dictate who does and does not belong in them.