A funny, touching look at the life of a social media influencer who starts to question the #goals life she has created for herself. Every day, Élie motivates her hundreds of thousands of followers to become the best versions of themselves by posting videos of exercise routines and high-protein breakfast recipes. Far from the shy teenager that she was, she is now in a very public relationship with singer Samuel Vanasse, and together they have become one of the most (...) popular influencer couples in the country. She has succeeded. She shines. And yet, Élie worries that her life is not as flawless as she makes it seem on YouTube and Instagram. Between her obsession with the "ideal weight," her growing attraction to another man, her family's disdain for her career as a content creator and a collaboration with another influencer who Élie can't stand, a thought haunts her. What if, by trying to become everything she wanted to be, she's lost herself along the way? Suck it In and Smile is an intimate exploration of our obsession with appearances and the hypocrisies that appear when you must craft the perfect online life. (shrink)

We respond to Morgan and Feeley’s critique on our article “Mass Media in Organ Donation: Managing Conflicting Messages and Interests.” We noted that Morgan and Feeley agree with the position that the primary aims of media campaigns are: “to educate the general public about organ donation process” and “help individuals make informed decisions” about organ donation. For those reasons, the educational messages in media campaigns should not be restricted to “information from pilot work or focus groups” (...) but should include evidence-based facts resulting from a comprehensive literature research. We consider the controversial aspects about organ donation to be relevant, if not necessary, educational materials that must be disclosed in media campaigns to comply with the legal and moral requirements of informed consent. With that perspective in mind, we address the validity of Morgan and Feeley’s claim that media campaigns have no need for informing the public about the controversial nature of death determination in organ donation. Scientific evidence has proven that the criteria for death determination are inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act and therefore potentially harmful to donors. The decision by campaign designers to use the statutory definition of death without disclosing the current controversies surrounding that definition does not contribute to improved informed decision making. We argue that if Morgan and Feeley accept the important role of media campaigns to enhance informed decision making, then critical controversies should be disclosed. In support of that premise, we will outline: (1) the wide-spread scientific challenges to brain death as a concept of death; (2) the influence of the donor registry and team-huddling on the medical care of potential donors; (3) the use of authorization rather than informed consent for donor registration; (4) the contemporary religious controversy; and (5) the effects of training desk clerks as organ requestors at the Department of Motor Vehicles offices. We conclude that organ donation is a medical procedure subject to all the ethical obligations that the medical profession must uphold including that of transparency and truthfulness. (shrink)

The new mass media technologies now make information processing and distribution more accessible to people globally. Marshall Mcluhan’s “global village” has given birth to a “global palour”. However, perpetrators of crimes now bask on the philosophy of communication media practitioners that people have the right to know what is happening within and outside their environment. This stance is rapidly dismantling, in an amazing fashion, the hitherto accorded respect for media ethics. Neil Postman, a New York (...) media analyst, describes the creator of technology as the list judge of its consequences, especially with regards to the technology of the media. True, every communication medium is potent with the possibility of occasioning other consequences not directly intended by it. This paper, therefore, attempts to bring to the fore the way communication media are inadvertently promoting crimes and terrorist activities globally. It is the stand of this paper that a global overhaul of mass communication media is needed for balance reportage that would bring about global and meaningful developments of human and material resources under an atmosphere of peace and mutual tolerance. (shrink)

Mass media campaigns are widely and successfully used to change health decisions and behaviors for better or for worse in society. In the United States, media campaigns have been launched at local offices of the states’ department of motor vehicles to promote citizens’ willingness to organ donation and donor registration. We analyze interventional studies of multimedia communication campaigns to encourage organ-donor registration at local offices of states’ department of motor vehicles. The media campaigns include the use (...) of multifaceted communication tools and provide training to desk clerks in the use of scripted messages for the purpose of optimizing enrollment in organ-donor registries. Scripted messages are communicated to customers through mass audiovisual entertainment media, print materials and interpersonal interaction at the offices of departments of motor vehicles. These campaigns give rise to three serious concerns: (1) bias in communicating information with scripted messages without verification of the scientific accuracy of information, (2) the provision of misinformation to future donors that may result in them suffering unintended consequences from consenting to medical procedures before death (e.g, organ preservation and suitability for transplantation), and (3) the unmanaged conflict of interests for organizations charged with implementing these campaigns, (i.e, dual advocacy for transplant recipients and donors). We conclude the following: (1) media campaigns about healthcare should communicate accurate information to the general public and disclose factual materials with the least amount of bias; (2) conflicting interests in media campaigns should be managed with full public transparency; (3) media campaigns should disclose the practical implications of procurement as well as acknowledge the medical, legal, and religious controversies of determining death in organ donation; (4) organ-donor registration must satisfy the criteria of informed consent; (5) media campaigns should serve as a means of public education about organ donation and should not be a form of propaganda. (shrink)

In this article I consider what the implications of ubuntu, interpreted as an African moral philosophy, are for self-expression as a value that the media could help to promote. In contrast to the natural hunches that self-expression is merely a kind of narcissism or makes sense for only individualist cultures to prize, I argue that an attractive construal of ubuntu entails that self-expression can play an important communitarian role. The mass media can be obligated to enable (...) people to express themselves since doing so can be one way for people to share with and care for others. (shrink)

The current paper provides readers some clarifications on the nature and goals of mass media campaigns designed to promote organ donation. These clarifications were necessitated by an earlier essay by Rady et al. (Med Health Care Philos 15:229–241, 2012) who present erroneous claims that media promotion campaigns in this health context represent propaganda that seek to misrepresent the transplantation process. Information is also provided on the nature and relative power of media campaigns in organ donation promotion.

Few today can escape exposure to mass art. Nevertheless, despite the fact that mass art provides the primary source of aesthetic experience for the majority of people, mass art is a topic that has been neglected by analytic philosophers of art. The Philosophy of Mass Art addresses that lacuna. It shows why philosophers have previously resisted and/or misunderstood mass art and it develops new frameworks for understanding mass art in relation to the emotions, (...) morality, and ideology. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the role of self-observation in managing complexity in meaning systems. Revising Niklas Luhmann's theory of mass media, we approach the mass media system as a social sub-system functionally specialized in the coupling of psychic systems' self-observation and social systems' self-observation.According to Autopoietic Systems Theory and von Foerster's second order cybernetics, self-observation presupposes a capability for meta-observation that demands a specific distinction between observer and actor. This distinction seems especially relevant in those (...) social contexts where a separation between the action of observation and other social actions is required. However, in those social contexts where the defining action is precisely observation, the border between observer and actor is blurred.We shall consider the significant divergence between the implicit and the explicit epistemologies of the mass media system, which appears to be characterized by the explicit assumption of a classic objectivist epistemology, on one side, and a relativist epistemology on the other, posing a hybrid epistemic status somewhere in between science and arts. (shrink)

The article discusses the forms and ways of the impact of modern digital media on people, groups, and society as a whole. The unilateral communication effect on a person is emphasized. The accent is made on the transmission model of information dissemination, taking into account the formation of its ritualized form. The author pays his particular attention to the status and role of an individual in interaction with mass media; provides arguments about the exclusion of a person (...) from the communication dimension. The activity of modern digital media structures is substantiated as social constructors of reality. The researcher shows the technological and visual possibilities of mass media in the creation of artificial, illusory simulated models of the world perceived by a person as objective, authentic, and real. Mass media are presented as an integral social institution of modern society, operating autonomously, based on its own rules and norms, technological and content principles, conditions of network communication, digitalization, and mediatization of society. The article presents the concepts of theoretical comprehension of mass media as a self-sufficient autopoietic system of N. Luhmann, and consideration of media communication implementation as a non-communication of J. Baudrillard. The author stresses the role of spectacle and visuality in the process of TV influence on the subjects, in the construction of images and models of the world, comparable with the already available information consumers pictures of the world. The contradictory and ambiguous conceptual assessments of the activity and influence of mass media on the modern man are emphasized. (shrink)

Literaturkritikerinnen und -kritiker, die das Neue der Gegenwartsliteratur beobachten und filtern, sind im Vergleich zur Zeit der,Kritikerpäpste‘ mit einem deutlichen Relevanzverlust konfrontiert. Beobachter sprechen ihnen die Unabhängigkeit ihres Urteils ab, und das betrifft nicht nur die Legitimität ihrer literarischen Kriterien, sondern auch ihre Souveränität über ihre medialen Plattformen. Die Frage, was den Blick der Literaturkritik lenkt, ist deswegen auch eine nach ihren ökonomischen und systemischen Bedingungen. Die haben sich im vergangenen Jahrzehnt vor allem durch die Digitalisierung fundamental verändert. Feuilletons und (...) Kritiken, die in der herkömmlichen Landschaft der Massenmedien ihren Ort,unter dem Strich` auf den Zeitungsseiten hatten, finden sich jetzt im Feed, im konstanten Nachrichtenstrom, in Konkurrenz zu Ereignissen und Angeboten höchst unterschiedlicher Dimension wieder. Wie können sie sich behaupten? (shrink)

"Die Logik der Erfahrung" stellt eine Systematisierung der wissenschaftsphilosophischen Gedanken der klassischen Pragmatisten (Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey) dar. Die pragmatistische Erfahrungstheorie sowie die Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von Theorie und Praxis bilden die Grundlage einer holistischen Wissenschaftsphilosophie, deren Aktualität durch die exemplarische Anwendung auf klassische wissenschaftstheoretische Fragestellungen gezeigt wird. Die AutorinTina Massing ist Akademische Rätin am Institut für Philosophie der Universität Koblenz. In ihrer Forschung beschäftigt sie sich insbesondere mit wissenschaftsphilosophischen Themen und dem Klassischen Pragmatismus.

This collection assembles a number of chapters engaging different strands of Martin Heidegger_s philosophy in order to explore issues relevant to contemporary media studies. Following the release of Heidegger_s controversial Black Notebooks and the subsequent calls to abandon the philosopher, this book seeks to demonstrate why Heidegger, rather than be pushed aside and shunned by media practitioners, ought to be embraced by and further incorporated into the discipline, as he offers unique and often innovative pathways to address, (...) and ultimately understand, our daily engagements with media-related phenomena. (shrink)

Since seminal essays like Adorno’s ‘The Culture Industry’ and Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ the mass media has been of central concern for Critical Theory. Yet Critical Theorists have produced relatively little in the way of systematic analysis of the concrete institutions of mass communication. Early on, Habermas seemed to be headed in this direction, especially with the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. However, in Habermas’s later years, (...) this concern is eclipsed, on the one hand by an ideal theory of communication which says relatively little about non-ideal institutions that “systematically distort” communication, and on the other hand by an increasing focus on properly “political” institutions and the formal structure of law, exemplified by his later work Between Facts and Norms. In this essay, I will show how the colonization of public space by private interests, via technological media, remains sorely under-theorized in Habermas’s work, and that this is not just a peripheral oversight but a central problem that Habermas fails to resolve. I will then give some preliminary suggestions as to how one might expand and develop the critique of systematically distorted communication in more fruitful directions by developing the idea of a politics of meaning. My argument is located within the extensive discussion generated by the relatively recent translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English, which has produced many useful and important criticisms. (shrink)

Even as paleoanthropology becomes increasingly sophisticated in revealing both the broad contours and the details of the deep evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, it continues to be informed by lingering pre-evolutionary residues. Specifically, the goal of prior research was to demonstrate that the influence of the ancient Scala Naturae as an organizing principle significantly contributed to the scientific community’s delayed acceptance of Australopithecus as a plesiomorphic member of the Hominidae. The present study extends this research through a selective examination of (...) non-primary source material reporting on significant early hominid discoveries over the last century, beginning with Australopithecus africanus and ending with Ardipithecus ramidus. It is argued that these accessible sources reify to varying degrees the perception among the non-expert public that human beings are an inevitable culmination of the evolutionary process. This culturally transmitted schema of human exceptionalism continues to impact other life on Earth in profound ways, in some cases with calamitous results. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article aims to analyse the consciousness of masses in the communication system of the 20th century projecting the individual level onto the social one. _Theoretical basis._ In the fields of philosophy and other humanities since the middle of the last century there has dominated an opinion that the category of mass and its communication are second-rate and non-elitist phenomena. Condensing the experience of human history (especially – the nineteenth century – the time of the bourgeois revolutions (...) and the two world wars), such parameters were set by the creators of social psychology Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud in their basic research "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind", "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego". Since ancient times the masses have really resembled immoral emotional neoformations, which minimized the individual qualities of the components of the whole and showed the features of a predominantly animal nature. It is no coincidence that those masses were called emotional, or just a crowd, regardless of the topos of existence: streets and squares, or the infospace of the first mass media (newspapers, radio, cinema, television). However, analysing the crowd, the scientists noted that this is only an extreme modification of the mass, and, in addition to it, there may be others – quite the opposite in their nature. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the situation has changed: scientists and futurists have been talking about the mass of intellectuals, which seems to be formed and combined in the field of information technology. And it surpasses the traditional elite in many respects. _Originality._ Having analysed the works of classic and modern researchers, we came to the conclusion that in fact the masses, like individuals (according to C. G. Jung), are divided into four types. Correspondingly, each of them has its own behaviour, psychology, philosophy etc. This article focuses on beliefs and ideological positions as the basis for the functioning of emotional, sensory, intuitive and rational masses in the context of 20th century philosophy. The object of our analysis was the philosophical schools of neo-positivism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, existentialism, pragmatism, anthropology, phenomenology, and others. _Conclusions._ According to our assumption, regardless of the type of mass and direction of modern philosophy as a field of its implementation, rationalism comes to the fore everywhere (as a primary source and theoretical basis or motivation). Thus, it can be concluded that the rational mass now dominates, not emotional (which was thoroughly described by Le Bon and Freud). And this is quite natural in the age of digital technology. (shrink)

The second edition of Doing Ethics in Media continues its mission of providing an accessible but comprehensive introduction to media ethics, with a theoretical grounding in moral philosophy, to help students think clearly and systematically about dilemmas in the rapidly changing media environment. Each chapter highlights specific considerations, cases, and practical applications for the fields of journalism, advertising, digital media, entertainment, public relations, and social media. Six fundamental decision-making questions - the "5Ws and H" (...) around which the book is organized - provide a path for students to articulate the issues; understand applicable law and ethics codes; consider the needs of stakeholders; work through conflicting values; integrate philosophic principles; and pose a "test of publicity." Students are challenged to be active ethical thinkers through the authors' reader-friendly style and use of critical early-career examples. While most people will change careers several times during their lives, all of us are life-long media consumers, and Doing Ethics in Media prepares readers for that task. Doing Ethics in Media is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students studying media ethics in mass media, journalism, and media studies. It also serves students in rhetoric, popular culture, communication studies, and interdisciplinary social sciences. The book's companion website-doingethicsin.media, or www.doingmediaethics.com-provides continuously updated real-world media ethics examples and collections of essays from experts and students. The site also hosts ancillary materials for students and for instructors, including a test bank and instructor's manual. (shrink)

Why do we understand media the way we do? Sometimes we think about media simply as means of communication and instruments of human creativity. At other times we understand media as powerful technologies that influence human culture and that can even govern how we think and act. Dominic Boyer grapples with these complexities in Understanding Media, where he questions what our different strategies of engaging media actually tell us about media, their messages and powers." (...) "Understanding Media explores, in a serious yet entertaining way, our common habits of thinking about the presence and significance of media in our lives. Offering analysis of the philosophical and social foundations of contemporary media theory as well as everyday strategies of knowing media, it addresses the advantages and limitations of different ways of understanding media. Boyer also reflects on the practical issue of how we can know media better than we do."--Jacket. (shrink)

_Imagologies: Media Philosophy_ is no ordinary book. Provocative, irritating and stimulating, this is a work to be engaged, questioned and pondered. As the web of telecommunications technology spreads across the globe, the site of economic development, social change, and political struggle shifts to the realm of media and communications. In this remarkable book, Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen challenge readers to rethink politics, economics, education, religion, architecture, and even thinking itself. When the world is wired, nothing remains the (...) same. To explore the new electronic frontier with Taylor and Saarinen is to see the world anew. A revolutionary period needs a revolutionary book. Get a head start of the 21st Century: Read _Imagologies: Media Philosophy_. (shrink)

This article explores a framework for analyses of what has variously been termed the ‘implied’, ‘imagined’, ‘virtual’ or ‘putative’ reader/addressee – the effect by which ostensibly ‘monologic’ texts, such as news media commentary, political pronouncements and academic essays project particular attitudes, beliefs and expectations on to the reader/addressee. The framework is demonstrated in being applied to an examination of the construal of putative addressee positioning in a selection of mass media texts concerned with the Israeli military’s invasion (...) of Gaza in 2014. The framework is novel in the way in which it mobilises the account of the options for dialogistic positioning offered by the appraisal-framework literature, combined with some insights from Toulmin’s notion of the argumentative ‘warrant’. Conclusions are offered as to how such analyses of the readers being ‘written into the text’ can extend insights into the rhetorical workings of such texts and their ideological functionality in naturalising particular value positions. (shrink)

Against Transmission introduces the technical history and phenomenology of media, a field of study that explains the characteristics of contemporary life by looking to the technical properties of machines. By studying the engineering of signal processing, the book interrogates how the understanding of media-as-machine exposes us to a particular phenomenological relationship to the world, asking: what can the hardware of machines that segment information into very small elements tell us about experiences of time, memory and history? This book (...) offers both a detailed and radical investigation of the technical architecture of media such as television, computers, cameras, and cinematography. It achieves this through in-depth archive research into the history of the development of media technology, combined with innovative readings of key concepts from philosophers of media such as Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski and Wolfgang Ernst. Teaming philosophical inquiry with thorough technical and historical analysis, in a broad range of international case studies, from early experimental cinema and television to contemporary media art and innovative hardware developments, Barker shows how the technical discoveries made in these contexts have engineered the experiences of time in contemporary media culture. (shrink)

In _Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media_ D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one (...) of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated. To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control. Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book. _ _. (shrink)

Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, and capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the consonant relationship between economics and ethics and how, together, they can be applicable to interpret economic trends within the media industry. The theory assumes that ethics may be quantified as either a cost or benefit and by using economic models and principles ethics can be used as a means to prevent potential losses and, therefore, sustain or increase its gains.

In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

This book examines the ethical concepts which lie at the heart of journalism, including freedom, democracy, truth, objectivity, honesty and privacy. The common concern of the authors is to promote ethical conduct in the practice of journalism, as well as the quality of the information that readers and audience receive from the media.

This book examines the ethical concepts which lie at the heart of journalism, including freedom, democracy, truth, objectivity, honesty and privacy. The common concern of the authors is to promote ethical conduct in the practice of journalism, as well as the quality of the information that readers and audience receive from the media.

The process of merging the political, economic and media power in Italy and the role of the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi are discussed. “La Repubblica” and “L’Unita” publications are investigated (2009–2010) and compared via the famous European media as “The Financial Times”, “The Times”, “The Independent”, ”Le Monde”, “La Liberation”, “Le Nouvel Obstrvateur”, “El Pais” and “Der Spigel”. In particular the author pays the attention to polemics devoted to the information freedom protection. The existence of media (...) empires in modern mass media hinders one of the main functions of the press, namely the spreading of objective and full information on all sides of the society life directed by plurality in informational and analytical material. At the same moment in time the mass media influence on the fates of the leading political figures, Silvio Berlusconi in particular. A topical problem of complex relations of modern press and different political, social and power structures is analyzed on the Italian example. (shrink)

Analyzes twentieth-century media and cultural theories as they relate to changes in political economy, communication technology, popular culture and collective consciousness in the United States. It argues that much of contemporary media environment is operating as Western capitalist media have for more than a century, making these theories more relevant than ever.

This book examines the ethical concepts which lie at the heart of journalism, including freedom, democracy, truth, objectivity, honesty and privacy.

This paper analyses mass media exposure and its effect on family planning in Bangladesh using data from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 1993s place of residence, education, economic status, geographical region and number of living children appeared to be the most important variable determining mass media exposure to family planning. Multivariate analysis shows that both radio and TV exposure to family planning messages and ownership of a radio and TV have a significant effect on (...) current use of family planning methods. These factors remain significant determinants of contraceptive use, even after controlling socioeconomic and demographic factors. The study reveals that both socioeconomic development policies and family planning programmes with a special emphasis on mass media, especially radio, may have a significant effect on contraceptive use in Bangladesh. The principal policy challenge is to design communications strategies that will reach the less privileged, rural and illiterate people who are by far the majority in Bangladesh. (shrink)

Sartre and the Media is the first book to offer a systematic account of Sartre's involvement in press publications and radio and television broadcasting in postwar France. Sartre's awareness of the growing power of the media to shape and influence public opinion was the motivating force underlying his interventions in the press from Combat and Le Figaro in 1944-45 to La Cause du Peuple, J'Accuse and Liberation in 1970-74, and in the French state-controlled radio and television network from (...) the 'Tribune des Temps Modernes' radio series of 1947 to the aborted 'Antenne 2' television history series of 1974-75. Focused principally on the nature of relations between intellectuals and the media, this book will appeal to those interested in the issues of freedom of expression and censorship in contemporary France. (shrink)

The mass media promotes terrorism by stressing fear and an uncertain future. Major changes in US foreign and domestic policy essentially went unreported and unchallenged by the dominant news organizations. Notwithstanding the long relationship in the United States between fear and crime, the role of the mass media in promoting fear has become more pronounced since the United States `discovered' international terrorism on 11 September 2001. Extensive qualitative media analysis shows that political decision-makers quickly adjusted (...) propaganda passages, prepared as part of the Project for the New American Century, to emphasize domestic support for the new US role in leading the world. These messages were folded into the previous crime-related discourse of fear, which may be defined as the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. Politicians marshaled critical symbols and icons joining terrorism with Iraq, the Muslim faith, and a vast number of non-western nations to strategically promote fear and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk and fear in order to achieve certain goals, including expanding domestic social control. (shrink)

Information, as well as freedom of expression and freedom of the media are essential for democratic society and fundamental characteristic of modern states. The year 2020 will be remembered as a year of pandemic caused from Covid-19 (coronavirus) and a year of response to unexpected challenge that the spread of the virus caused. In the times of pandemic and any type of crisis, the media always plays a key role in informing the public all over the Globe. This (...) paper aims to make theoretical descriptive research and analysis of the influence of coronavirus on news consumption, the role of media in communication and presentation of important developments during pandemic. The authors present an overview of the media system and the latest developments in the EU in preventing fake news related to the pandemic. We conclude that media plays key role in informing the citizens during pandemic and therefore they have increased responsibility in providing reliable information. At the same time, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media have been challenged with parallel outbreaks of disinformation and misinformation about the virus, ranging from fake coronavirus cures, false claims and harmful health advice to wild conspiracy theories. Disinformation can in turn speed up the spread of disease, hinder effective public health responses, as well as create confusion, fear and distrust. We highlight the fundamental function of creating awareness regarding the topic based on facts, and the need of media for preventing panic and fostering people's understanding by ‘checking the source and information twice’. (shrink)

The main theme of the paper is the role of the mass media in the production, creation, retention, protection and defense of a social order, or in carrying out revisions, or cosmetic and extensive changes to it. In the first section, the author explains the Power of the Mass Media by looking at Foucauldian leprosy/plague management. The second part, Docile Mass Media Producers Under Panoptic Control, deals with the routinization of the mass (...) class='Hi'>media craft. Finally, the Social Order of Docile Individuals who Feel Freedom takes a closer look at the social order and how it is created by mass media producers (as professionals in their craft). (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume of essays explores how the notion of time varies across disciplines by examining variance as a defining feature of temporalities in cultural, creative, and scholarly contexts. Featuring a President's Address by philosopher David Wood, it begins with critical reassessments of J.T. Fraser's hierarchical theory of time through the lens of Anthropocene studies, philosophy, ecological theory, and ecological literature; proceeds to variant narratives in fiction, video games, film, and graphic novels; and concludes by measuring time's variance with (...) tools as different as incense clocks and computers, and by marking variance in music, film, and performance art. (shrink)

Without mass media, openness and accountability are impossible in contemporary democracies. Nevertheless, mass media can hinder political transparency as well as help it. Politicians and political operatives can simulate the political virtues of transparency through rhetorical and media manipulation. Television tends to convert coverage of law and politics into forms of entertainment for mass consumption, and television serves as fertile ground for a self‐proliferating culture of scandal. Given the limited time available for broadcast and (...) the limited attention of audiences, stories about political strategy, political infighting, political scandal and the private lives of politicians tend to crowd out less entertaining stories about substantive policy questions. Political life begins to conform increasingly to the image of politics portrayed on television. Through a quasi‐Darwinian process, media events, scandals, and other forms of politics‐as‐entertainment eventually dominate and weed out other forms of political information and public discussion, transforming the very meaning of public discourse. In this way the goals of political transparency can be defeated by what appear to be its central mechanisms: proliferating information, holding political officials accountable for their actions, and uncovering secrets. (shrink)