Digital technologies have fundamentally altered the nature and function of media in our society, reinventing age-old practices of public communication and at times circumventing traditional media and challenging its privileged role as gatekeepers of news and entertainment. Some critics believe these technologies keep the public involved in an informed discourse on matters of public importance, but it isn't clear this is happening on a large scale. Propaganda disguised as news is flourishing, and though interaction with the digital domain teaches children valuable skills, it can also expose them to grave risks. John V. Pavlik critically examines our current digital innovations blogs, podcasting, peer-to-peer file sharing, on-demand entertainment, and the digitization of television, radio, and satellites and their positive and negative implications. He focuses on present developments, but he also peers into the future, foreseeing a media landscape dominated by a highly fragmented, though active audience, intense media competition, and scarce advertising dollars. By embracing new technologies, however, Pavlik shows how professional journalism and media can hold on to their role as a vital information lifeline and continue to operate as the tool of a successful democracy.

This book explores the phenomenon of online social networking in the contexts of a global multicultural society caught in the turmoil of the information and communication revolution. This volume responds to the fast-moving nature of social media networks to provide academics and practitioners insights on related topics from an interdisciplinary perspective. It offers readers an up-to-date overview of the field and pushes the area into new understandings of the topic within a multidimensional space.

Presents an invitation to informed and critical participation in the current debate on the role of digital technology in education and a comprehensive introduction to the most relevant issues in this debate. This book offers conceptual tools, ideas and insights for further research.

Social Networking: Redefining Communication in the Digital Age fulfills a pressing demand in social network literature by bringing together international experts from the fields of communication, new media technologies, marketing and advertising, public relations and journalism, business, and education. In this volume contributors traces online social networking practices across national borders, cultural confines, and geographic limits. The book delves into the socioeconomic, political, cultural, and professional dimensions of social networking around the globe, and explores the similarities, distinctions, and specific characteristics of social media networks in diverse settings. The chapters offer an important contribution to the scholarly research on the uses and applications of online social networking around the world and pertain to a broad range of academic fields. Overall, the volume addresses a subject matter of keen interest to academics and practitioners alike and provides a much-needed forum for sharing innovative research practices and exchanging new ideas.

Written by two of the field's most eminent experts, this exciting new introduction to mass media makes connections between communication research and the reality of the media industry. Understanding Media in the Digital Age shows readers how to navigate the world of traditional and new media while fostering an understanding of mass communication theory, history, active research findings, and professional experience.

This collection brings the broad discussion about digital humanities into focus through Shakespeare in research, teaching, publishing and performance.

This second edition of a collection of essays reports on how new media-fax machines, satellite television and the Internet - and the new uses of older media-cassettes, pulp fiction, the cinema, the telephone and the press - shape belief, authority and community in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chapters dealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities in the United States and elsewhere. The book suggests new ways of looking at the social organization of communications and the shifting links among media of various kinds in local and transnational contexts. The extent to which today's new media have transcended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understanding of gender, authority, social justice, identities and politics in Muslim societies emerges from this work.

The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, smartphones have redefined and expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture? Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device's newness and usability—even its "lickability"—and its "biographical" story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived "crisis of choice"; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone's technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of digital journalism studies and the increasingly blurred boundaries of journalism, there is a need within the field of journalism studies to widen the scope of theoretical perspectives and approaches. Theories of Journalism in a Digital Age discusses new avenues in theorising journalism, and reassesses established theories. Contributors to this volume describe fresh concepts such as de-differentiation, circulation, news networks, and spatiality to explain journalism in a digital age, and provide concepts which further theorise technology as a fundamental part of journalism, such as actants and materiality. Several chapters discuss the latitude of user positions in the digitalised domain of journalism, exploring maximal–minimal participation, routines–interpretation–agency, and mobility–cross-mediality–participation. Finally, the book provides theoretical tools with which to understand, in different social and cultural contexts, the evolving practices of journalism, including innovation, dispersed gatekeeping, and mediatized interdependency. The chapters in this book were originally published in special issues of Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice.