Comunicación y cultura

This book is about the construction of identity in digitised and virtual screen environments. It investigates the phenomenon of three-dimensional virtual worlds in relation to our physical selves. Using four regions of Second Life as a foundation of analysis, this book explores the issues surrounding the body, embodiment, virtual space and tourism, as well as examining notions of subversion as they relate to gender and sexuality in screen environments. The key arguments put forth in this work have their foundations in poststructuralist theories of the body and the cultural construction of identity. Most important to this analysis are the cultural and social conditions that replicate dominant tropes of power and agency as they are applied to representational practices, such as embodying oneself via an avatar through the screen. The arguments in this book are readily extendible to other on-screen environments due to the proliferation of virtual environments and other social networks which are premised on real-time engagement through digitized interaction.

Mapping BRICS Media is the first comprehensive and comparative study of the emerging media landscape in the world’s most dynamic and fastest growing markets. This pioneering collection focuses on one of the key topics in contemporary international relations – the emergence of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – a grouping that includes some of the world’s largest populations and fastest growing economies.

The volume brings together leading scholars, mainly from the BRICS nations, to examine how the emergence of the BRICS media will impact on global media and communication. Contextualizing the rise of the BRICS nations within the broader shifts in global power relations, the chapters investigate the unprecedented growth of the BRICS media within a ‘multi-polar’ world, evaluating the media landscapes in the individual BRICS countries, their histories, and their journalism practices, as well as analyzing emerging inter-BRICS media relationships.

Accessible and comprehensive, the book provides a critical guide to the complex debates about the impact of the ‘rise of the rest’ on the media globe and how far this poses a challenge to the Western-dominated world order and its media systems.

Understanding Cultural Taste updates and critiques established theoretical and empirical accounts of cultural taste. It takes account of the role of cultural industries and cultural policies in shaping cultural tastes and of the contemporary technologies through which cultural goods are produced, circulated and consumed. It weaves together a story of taste as bound up with sensation, skill and sensibility. Taking a historical and theoretical perspective which complicates an understanding of taste as either a matter of personal preference or a simple weapon in social struggles, the book argues that taste remains a significant and complex concept in the sociology of culture, media and cultural studies, cultural policy studies and in their applied sub-disciplines. Such disciplines have come to appreciate and accept the relation between taste and individual and group identities but have been less attentive to other social and political dimensions of this important component of cultural life.

Digital Creativity examines the impact of technology on the creative practitioner, how it influences, and sometimes determines, the way they work and what they produce. It questions the claims to creativity of the technology industry, and at the same time argues for seeing computing as a craft practice. Artists and craftspeople have always been drawn to new technologies for inspiration, and the book seeks to contextualize the frenzy of claims about the impact of digital technology against the reality of what it is to be creative. The different motivations for creativity are tested, making much-needed distinctions between the practices of the arts and the models of innovation in engineering and elsewhere in the technology industries. Finally, the book warns of the problems ahead if technology comes to dominate creative practice, either by defining it or imitating it. Ultimately, artists must engage with it if it is to retain a human form and scale.

Power, Media, Culture is embedded in an analytical perspective that is needed today more than ever in order to understand the functioning of our complex cultural and media systems. It is destined to become a reference work for those interested in delving into the debates arising from the performance of traditional and new media, cultural and communication policy-making, and sociocultural practices in the new digital landscape. This book is a timely and useful roadmap for understanding the relationship of communication and culture with power in the current phase of globalized capitalism, whose main driver lies in the communication sector.

This collection of research papers provides extensive information on deploying services, concepts, and approaches for using open linked data from libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. With a special emphasis on how libraries and other cultural heritage institutions can create effective end user interfaces using open, linked data or other datasets. These papers are essential reading for any one interesting in user interface design or the semantic web.

This volume offers up-to-date insights into the state of library and information science (LIS) in the Middle East and North Africa. Covered topics include information literacy, intellectual property, LIS education and research, publishing and more. This timely contribution thus presents vital areas of research on a region that receives relatively little coverage and is currently experiencing rapid and significant changes.

La férrea competencia por la matriculación de alumnos en las instituciones de educación superior obliga a las universidades a generar estrategias tanto de fondo como de forma para presentarse al mercado como la mejor opción posible. Este libro plantea un original diseño mixto y experimental para determinar la efectividad entre la estrategia mediática en la adopción de un búho vivo como mascota de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (FFyL) de la Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua (UACH), México y su efecto en la percepción del clima y la imagen institucional de la escuela. Con esta adopción, la UACH, a través de la FFyL se convierte apenas en la tercera universidad en México que utiliza en su imagen institucional una mascota viva como parte de un programa estratégico planeado. Los otros dos referentes tienen ya más de 51 años haciéndolo. (Los Pumas de la UNAM y los Burros Blancos del IPN)

The study of celebrities has been the focus of several works from two main fields: Cultural Studies and Political Communication. But up until now, such works have produced only fragmented views of links between celebrity culture, the entertainment industries, and the political systems, which this book attempts to transcend. Analyzing the movement of celebrities to politics, this book contributes to a thorough understanding of the links between media industries and the political system, providing tools for grasping the varied ways in which media capital is converted into electoral power. To achieve this goal, Nahuel Ribke has assembled a wide range of data from the United States, Brazil and Israel, providing a complex comparative view of the migration of celebrities to politics, which incorporates a historical and cultural analysis, an examination of the respective political institutions, as well as an understanding of the impact local cultural industries had on the development of celebrity politics.

La llamada comunicación para el desarrollo, que todavía se defiende, ha calado profundamente llegando a formar parte de nuestra herencia genética a partir del siglo XX. El esfuerzo por renombrar las cosas, definir un nuevo concepto y modelo de vida verdaderamente natural, va a requerir tiempo, tanto como el necesario para hacer posible que las nuevas generaciones puedan tener la oportunidad de recibir una educación descontaminada, asentada en valores universales y universalizables, desde lógicas que apuesten por pensar el mundo en una felicidad compartida.