Sociología de la comunicación

Media technologies have played a central role in shaping ideas about home life over the last two centuries. Changing Media, Homes and Households explores the complex relationship between home, householders, families and media technologies by charting the evolution of the media-rich home, from the early twentieth century to the present.

Moving beyond a narrow focus on media texts, production and audiences, Deborah Chambers investigates the physical presence of media objects in the home and their symbolic importance for home life. The book identifies the role of home-based media in altering relationships between home, leisure, work and the outside world in the context of entertainment, communication and work. It assesses whether domestic media are transforming or reinforcing traditional identities and relations of gender, generation, class and migrancy.

Mediatisation theory is employed to assess the domestication of media and media saturation of home life in the context of wider global changes. The author also develops the concept of media imaginaries to explain the role of public discourses in shaping changing meanings, values and uses of domestic media. Framed within these approaches, four chapters also provide in-depth case studies of the processes involved in media’s home adoption: early television design, family-centred video gaming, the domestication of tablet computers, and the shift from "smart homes" to today’s "connected" homes.

This is an ideal text for students and researchers interested in media and cultural studies, communication, and sociology.

Over the past 45 years, award-winning sociologist David L. Altheide has illuminated how media formats and media logic affect our understanding of social issues, of how political decisions are made, and of how we relate to each other. In this masterful, summative work, Altheide describes the media syndrome: how these factors shape our expectations of, and reactions to, both public and personal events. Ideal for courses on mass media and political communication, the book

provides a detailed description of the media syndrome and its impact on daily life;
uses historical and contemporary examples from Watergate to Edward Snowden;
includes the changes in the ecology of communication from mass media to social media

Across Asia, consumer culture is increasingly shaping everyday life, with neoliberal economic and social policies increasingly adopted by governments who see their citizens as individualised, sovereign consumers with choices about their lifestyles and identities. One aspect of this development has been the emergence of new wealthy middle classes with lifestyle aspirations shaped by national, regional and global media especially by a range of new popular lifestyle media, which includes magazines, television and mobile and social media. This book explores how far everyday conceptions and experiences of identity are being transformed by media cultures across the region. It considers a range of different media in different Asian contexts, contrasting how the shaping of lifestyles in Asia differs from similar processes in Western countries, and assessing how the new lifestyle media represents not just a new emergent media culture, but also illustrates wider cultural and social changes in the Asian region.

Among the most well-known YouTubers are a cadre of talented Asian American performers, including comedian Ryan Higa and makeup artist Michelle Phan. Yet beneath the sheen of these online success stories lies a problem-Asian Americans remain sorely underrepresented in mainstream film and television. When they do appear on screen, they are often relegated to demeaning stereotypes such as the comical foreigner, the sexy girlfriend, or the martial arts villain. The story that remains untold is that as long as these inequities have existed, Asian Americans have been fighting back-joining together to protest offensive imagery, support Asian American actors and industry workers, and make their voices heard. Providing a cultural history and ethnography, Asian American Media Activism assesses everything from grassroots collectives in the 1971s up to contemporary engagements by fan groups, advertising agencies, and users on YouTube and Twitter. In linking these different forms of activism, Lori Kido Lopez investigates how Asian American media activism takes place and evaluates what kinds of interventions are most effective. Ultimately, Lopez finds that activists must be understood as fighting for cultural citizenship, a deeper sense of belonging and acceptance within a nation that has long rejected them.

Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio s residents or Hospiceños express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile. In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives. This exciting conclusion is illustrated by the range of social media posts about personal relationships, politics and national citizenship, particularly on Facebook.

This volume explores and clarifies the complex intersection of race and media in the contemporary United States. Due to the changing dynamics of how racial politics are played out in the contemporary US (as seen with debates of the "post-racial" society), as well as the changing dynamics of the media itself ("new vs. old" media debates), an interrogation of the role of the media and its various institutions within this area of social inquiry is necessary. Contributors contend that race in the United States is dynamic, connected to social, economic, and political structures which are continually altering themselves. The book seeks to highlight the contested space that the media provides for changing dimensions of race, examining the ways that various representations can both hinder or promote positive racial views, considering media in relation to other institutions, and moving beyond thinking of media as a passive and singular institution.

Os movimentos feministas não inventaram somente novas estratégias ou novos léxicos, mas, mais importante, conceberam um novo sujeito social, as mulheres: não apenas como leitoras, consumidoras e espectadoras de objectos culturais, mas também como escritoras, realizadoras e produtoras desses mesmos objectos culturais. O foco no cinema português realizado por mulheres correspondeu, assim, ao estudo de uma dupla invisibilidade: aquela que ultrapassa a consagração de alguns nomes, mas também o antagónico interesse da generalidade do público. Constatando-se que as cineastas portuguesas realizaram apenas 14 por cento das longas-metragens de ficção estreadas comercialmente nas últimas três décadas, defendem-se medidas de discriminação positiva, como a inserção de quotas na cedência de financiamentos e a própria criação de um festival de cinema de mulheres, em Portugal.

THE CYBERGYPSIES describes one man's exploration of cyberspace over many years and the folk he meets on the Net, the cybergypsies: virus writers, hackers, witches, sex-peddlars, conmen, net vamps, randy paratroopers posing as girls; the A-bomb blueprints he was offered for sale. He recounts with startling honesty how he nearly lost everything because of his obsession with the Net and how the Net can be as dangerous and destructive as any drug addiction. However, the author also shows how the Internet can be used for positive aims, as he describes how he fought for human rights with desperate appeals for the Kurdish refugees in the wake of the Gulf War and justice for Bhopal's gas victims in campaigns involving Jeffrey Archer and Don McCullin.

¿Conoces a alguien que siempre está conectado a Facebook? Desde el prisma del humor, La dieta Facebook analiza nuestra dependencia de las redes sociales, y lo hace con cincuenta divertidas viñetas y unas pícaras e ingeniosas leyendas que muestran los comportamientos más estúpidos, vergonzosos y lamentables de este nuevo medio de comunicación. Los adictos a Facebook encontrarán en este librito divertidos consejos para la desintoxicación tecnológica, así como la manera de saber desconectar de vez en cuando y decir no al lado oscuro y diabólico de las redes sociales.

This book brings together a number of prominent scholars to explore a relatively under-studied area of Marshall McLuhan s thought: his idea of formal cause and the role that formal cause plays in the emergence of new technologies and in structuring societal relations. Aiming to open a new way of understanding McLuhan s thought in this area, and to provide methodological grounding for future media ecology research, the book runs the gamut, from contributions that directly support McLuhan s arguments to those that see in them the germs of future developments in emergent dynamics and complexity theory."