Comunicación y cultura

Advances in Intergroup Communication is a timely contribution to the field. It reflects developments in older, more established intergroup settings (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, organizations) whilst introducing newer studies such as the military and political parties. It also pays attention to emerging trends in new media and social networks and considers the developing field of neuroscience of communication.
The volume brings together authors from different geographical areas (North America, Europe, and Australia) and from different disciplines (particularly communication, linguistics, and psychology). Contributions are organized around five themes, corresponding to the five sections of the book: defining features and constraints; tools of intergroup communication; social groups in their context; intergroup communication in organizations; and future directions.

Since the first book was signed almost ten years ago, the Mediated Youth series has published nearly two dozen volumes, with more in process or production. This milestone provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on how the series has evolved, how it has contributed to the field, and in which direction(s) it is moving.
The chapters reprinted in this volume have been selected to showcase the variety and diversity of topics published in the series. Grounded in cultural studies, they approach mediated youth through the lenses of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, and technology. As a whole, they paint a multi-faceted, complex, and nuanced picture of the relationship between youth and media today, and demonstrate that there is no one, singular «youth.» They remind us of the rich diversity of life experiences and media involvements of youth from a range of backgrounds, cultures, and countries.
These chapters serve not only as a retrospective collection of scholarship published in Peter Lang’s Mediated Youth book series, but also as a roadmap to the diversity of scholarship characterizing the field of youth media studies during these years.

Video games are becoming an ever more ubiquitous element of daily life, played by millions on devices that range from smart phones to desktop computers. An examination of this phenomenon reveals that video games are increasingly being converted into cultural currency. For video game designers, culture is a resource that can be incorporated into games; for players, local gaming practices and specific social contexts can affect their playing experiences. In Cultural Code, Phillip Penix-Tadsen shows how culture uses games and how games use culture, looking at examples related to Latin America. Both static code and subjective play have been shown to contribute to the meaning of games; Penix-Tadsen introduces culture as a third level of creating meaning.

Penix-Tadsen focuses first on how culture uses games, looking at the diverse practices of play in Latin America, the ideological and intellectual uses of games, and the creative and economic possibilities opened up by video games in Latin America — the evolution of regional game design and development. Examining how games use culture, Penix-Tadsen discusses in-game cultural representations of Latin America in a range of popular titles (pointing out, for example, appearances of Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue in games from Call of Duty to the tourism-promoting Brasil Quest). He analyzes this through semiotics, the signifying systems of video games and the specific signifiers of Latin American culture; space, how culture is incorporated into different types of game environments; and simulation, the ways that cultural meaning is conveyed procedurally and algorithmically through gameplay mechanics.

Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade (CECS) Universidade do Minho +info: http://www.lasics.uminho.pt/ojs/index.php/cecs_ebooks/issue/view/218

This volume brings together scholars from different disciplines and nations to examine and assess the effectiveness of China's soft power initiatives in Africa. It throws light not only on China's engagement with Africa but also on how China's increasing influence is received in the African media.

This book argues for hybridity of Western and African cultures within cybercultural and subcultural forms of communication. Kehbuma Langmia argues that when both Western and African cultures merge together through new forms of digital communication, marginalized populations in Africa are able to embrace communication, which could help in the socio-cultural and political development of the continent. On the other hand, the book also engages Richard McPhail’s Electronic Colonization Theory in order to demonstrate how developing areas such as Africa experience a new form of imperialistic subjugation because of electronic and digital communication. Globalization and Cyberculture illustrates how new forms of communication inculcate age-old traditional forms of communications into Africa’s cyberculture while complicating notions of identity, dependency, and the digital divide gap.

Balancing provocative criticism with clear explanations of complex ideas, this student-friendly introduction investigates the crucial role global entertainment media has played in the emergence of transitional capitalism.

Examines the influence of global entertainment media on the emergence of transnational capitalism, providing a framework for explaining and understanding world culture as part of changing class relations and media practices
Uses action adventure movies to demonstrate the complex relationship between international media political economy, entertainment content, global culture, and cultural hegemony
Draws on examples of public and community media in Venezuela and Latin America to illustrate the relations between government policies, media structures, public access to media, and media content
Engagingly written with crisp and controversial commentary to both inform and entertain readers
Includes student-friendly features such as fully-integrated call out boxes with definitions of terms and concepts, and lists and summaries of transnational entertainment media

The Cognitive Impact of Television News examines how much information people get from televised news. While people around the world consistently nominate TV as their most important news source, research has shown that its actual impact does not usually measure up to viewers' own beliefs about it. Televised news can impart important information to people that they value and can use in many ways, but more often much of the content of news bulletins is lost to viewers within moments. Broadcast news professionals pride themselves of producing objective, timely, balanced and comprehensive coverage of events of the day, yet viewers can take away misleading and incomplete impressions of those events. Although viewers do not always pay close attention to bulletins when watching TV, a significant part is played in the loss of news information to news audiences by the way the news is written, packaged and presented. News professionals use production techniques that can distort information or cause confusion in viewers. This book examines research evidence to show how such information losses can occur.

Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places charts media practices that migrate between documentary, experimental, narrative, animation, game, and performance through digital technologies and networks. The book offers a means of conceptualizing digital media by looking at projects that think through digital media. Hudson and Zimmermann analyze over 131 projects at the intersections of imbedded technologies, transitory micropublics, human-machine interface, migratory histories, affective geographies, and critical cartographies to forward a set of speculations about how things work together rather than what they represent. The book focuses on digital media from different cultures to frame ongoing debates on topics such as participation/surveillance, global warming, virtual migrations, flexible labor, structural inequality, and perpetual war by artists, coders, activists, students, and intellectuals in some of the most dynamic, innovative sites for digital media, including Brazil, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Israel/Palestine, Italy, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and United States.

An approachable but critical introduction to the complex relationship between disability and the media, bringing together prominent theoretical work and research on disability internationally, with analysis and examples of a range of contemporary media issues in news, the press, broadcasting and new media.