Libros

Anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in Europe, focused on Islam and on Arabs, and manifested in increasingly rigorous immigration regimes. What are Arabic Europeans watching on television and how does it affect their identities as Europeans? New quantitative and qualitative evidence from seven capitals shows that, far from being isolated in ethnic media ghettoes, they are critical news consumers in Arabic and European languages. Arabic speakers from the Maghreb, concentrated in Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid are bicultural, focusing on media in their European and Arabic homelands. Other Middle Eastern Arabic speakers are more transnational in their media. The author argues that hybrid television cultures of the sort found among Arabic speakers in Europe enhance, rather than detract from, the culture of civic life in Europe.

The internet has revolutionised the way we live our lives in untold ways, but the most far-reaching is the impact it is having on the way we communicate. Social media sites in particular allow us to maintain friendships beyond geographical barriers, to build up and exploit networked contacts, and to cultivate a public image. And how we communicate online has a profound and lasting impact on language and society.

This very timely book brings together a broad selection of the exciting and diverse research that is currently being conducted into language on social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, and TripAdvisor. Studies from leading language researchers, and those at the cutting edge of analysis into social media, explore the impact of social media on how we relate to each other, the communities we live in, and the way we manage and present a sense of self in twenty-first century society.

Most people have, at some point in their lives, experienced powerful, often strange and disconcerting, responses to films and television programmes of which they cannot always make sense. Psychosocial Explorations of Film and Television Viewing takes as its subject the seemingly mundane and everyday activity of watching television and films in the home, arguing that the affective and emotional experiences generated for audiences make this activity in fact extraordinary. Based on a fascinating empirical study of audiences' "favourite" films and television programmes, the book unravels the biographical and emotional intensity of viewing, from a psychosocial perspective.
Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis including the work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion and Christopher Bollas, and sociological theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, the book argues that viewing is a psychosocial activity which must consider the relationships and processes between "inner" and "outer" worlds. Important ideas from media audience research are revisited, to show that families and biographical experiences influence audience identification, interpretation and uses of television. The in-depth case studies show that whilst viewing can be pleasurable, in the conventional sense of enjoyment, it can also be anxiety-provoking and contradictory. Employing psychoanalytic methods for social and cultural research, this book is an important contribution to Media Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies and Psychosocial Studies.