Media In Everyday Life Research Articles

The Field of American Media Sociology: Origins, Resurrection, and Consolidation

AbstractThis contribution is written against the backdrop of the historic dispersal of early American media sociology out from the core concerns of the discipline and into various importer academic disciplines (including communication, journalism, and media studies) and an ever‐growing pervasiveness of media in everyday life which is reflected by a resurgence of sociological scholarship in the United States since the early 2000s. The article divides the field in works that study media inwards – along the threefold dimensions of production and technologies, communication and discourse, reception and effects – and works that study media outwards. We argue that this latter perspective, examining broader theoretical, methodological, and substantive social implications of mass‐mediated communication, is the most promising one for a mature field of American media sociology. On this basis, we conclude with some suggestions regarding possible new, and as of yet understudied, lines of inquiry for future media sociologists.

Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)

Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)

A Call for Compassion in Social Media Studies

In social media we can see ourselves live, as much as we are blind to media. Compassion is therefore key in studying the role of social media in everyday life.

Mass Media and Children. Globality in Everyday Life

Mass media play an important role in everyday life. There is a growing use of media in early childhood, so it is not surprising that they greatly influence children and young people as well as become an essential element of education. At present, it is difficult to imagine the world without such global media as TV or the Internet that most of us use every day. Children do the same. Most of them make use of media every day, both at home and at school.The aim of the article is to discuss theoretical analyses and empirical data which involve the use of mass media in everyday life.

Book review: Ruth Ayaß and Cornelia Gerhardt (eds), The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life

Book review: Ruth Ayaß and Cornelia Gerhardt (eds), <i>The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life</i>

Perceived realism moderates the relation between sexualized media consumption and permissive sexual attitudes in Dutch adolescents.

This study examined whether the development of sexualized media consumption and permissive sexual attitudes would be more strongly interrelated when adolescents perceived sexualized media images as highly realistic. We used data from a three-wave longitudinal sample of 444 Dutch adolescents aged 13-16years at baseline. Results from parallel process latent growth modeling multigroup analyses showed that higher initial levels of sexualized media consumption were associated with higher initial level of permissive sexual attitudes. Moreover, increases of sexualized media consumption over time were associated with increases of permissive sexual attitudes over time. Considering the moderation by perceived realism, we found these effects only for those who perceived sexualized media as more realistic. Findings for male and female adolescents were similar except for the relations between initial levels and subsequent development. Among male adolescents who perceived sexualized media images to be realistic, higher initial levels of permissive sexual attitudes were related to subsequent less rapid development of sexualized media consumption. For male adolescents who perceived sexualized media to be less realistic, higher initial levels of sexualized media consumption were related to a subsequent less rapid development of permissive sexual attitudes. These relations were not found for female adolescents. Overall, our results suggest that, in male and female adolescents, those with a high level of perceived realism showed a correlated development of sexualized media consumption and permissive sexual attitudes. These findings point to a need for extended information on how to guide adolescents in interpreting and handling sexualized media in everyday life.

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters

This book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitanism. It considers the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational migration and the role of the media in everyday life, offering detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book provides an empirically grounded and theoretically insightful investigation into this evolving phenomenon.

Some of the challenges and experiences of formal education in a Mobile-Centric Society (MCS).

The aim of the paper is to describe some of the challenges faced by schools, or by formal education in general, as a consequence of today’s mobile-centric society (henceforth MCS), the term we will use to denote the new, networked learning ecology that has arisen from the massive penetration of digital media in everyday life. After revisiting some of the ideas of McLuhan and Vygotsky in the light of this new technological scenario, we describe five traits of the MCS and the challenges – illustrated through educational practices – that we believe schools will face if they wish to preserve their function of individualization and socialization. We believe that despite the emergence of the MCS, the main function of the school is still to provide the “box of tools” (a set of psychological instruments, such as reading, writing, mathematical notation, digital literacy, etc.) that enables people to develop their learning skills and life projects and to become part of communities and groups. However, the complexity and mobility of the new learning environments means that the position held by schools needs to be re-evaluated in the face of the informal learning paths and experiences – both online and offline – to which learners now have access. We also need to re-evaluate the meaning of the school itself as an institution and the model of learner it should be training.

Self-Expansion through Fictional Characters

The prevalence of entertainment media in everyday life might offer unexpected social opportunities. The present paper examined whether cognitive overlap with the character and self-expansion occur as a result of exposure to fictional characters. Results of two studies indicated that transportation into a narrative leads to greater cognitive overlap with the character and perceived self-expansion. Providing a distinction between these two concepts, we found that cognitive overlap with the character increases to the extent the character represents one's actual self-guide; perceived self-expansion increases to the extent the character represents one's ideal self-guide. Together, these findings illustrate the nature of parasocial relationships and impact of entertainment media on the self.

Book Review: Graham Meikle and Sherman Young, Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life

Book Review: Graham Meikle and Sherman Young, <i>Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life</i>

Introduction: Understanding social media monopolies

The ubiquitous presence of social media in everyday life has not been met by equally pervasive research efforts for their critical understanding, due mostly to the increasing specialization and fragmentation of academic research. Unlike Us: Understanding Social Media Monopolies attempts to set out a research platform that overcomes both the dominant quantitative analyses and the privacy paradigm in current social media research.

List Media: The Telephone Directory and the Arranging of Names

List Media: The Telephone Directory and the Arranging of Names

Media convergence: networked digital media in everyday life

This book focuses on how everyday media such as Facebook, iTunes andGoogle can be understood in new ways for the21st centurythrough ideas of convergence.Key chapters explore the development of the internet, the rise of social media and the new opportunities for audiences to create, collaborate upon and share their own media.

Questions of Reading and Readership of Pictorial Texts: The Case of Bhimayana, a Pictorial Biography of Dr. Ambedkar

Bhimayana (2010) is a pictorial biography of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (1891–1956), a very important Indian leader whose struggles and writings about uprooting the caste system from the Indian society have been of crucial relevance for contemporary struggles by dalits and adivasis (tribals) in India. It is in this spirit of Ambedkar’s encounter to the dominant Brahmanical hegemonic forces that the title of the pictorial text under consideration, ‘Bhimayana’, gains relevance – that is, in providing a counter-epic to the dominant Brahmanical, nationalist epic of the Ramayana; it subverts the commonsensical nationalist narrative of what constitutes an epic. The visual narrations in Bhimayana by the well-known Gondi (tribal) artists Subhash Vyam and Durgabai Vyam, have come to challenge the conventional way of storytelling in a sequential format like that of a graphic text along with challenging the way in which image-word texts are generally read. The visual and the verbal arrangements in Bhimayana have shared a different strategy of storytelling which defies marking this text into categories such as ‘comic book’ or ‘graphic novel’. It has brought Gond art to a medium of mass media but only as an exclusive commodity. This paper attempts to address the problems of image-word relationship in the text – Bhimayana, by scrutinizing the challenging reading patterns it has called for. The discussion ranges from inquiries in art-historical studies, to more contemporary aspects of visual culture and mass media in everyday life like graphic novels, comics etc.

The importance of popular media in everyday girl culture

This article investigates the importance of popular media in everyday life, more specifically in everyday girl culture. Based on eight months of ethnographic research with a group of 8th graders (ages 11—12), it explores the role of media in an everyday setting: the classroom. The study is informed by two central research questions: how do girls use media in the classroom and how important are media to their everyday life? It aims to provide an empirical, theoretical and methodological contribution to existing literature. First, it empirically contributes to our knowledge of everyday media use in general and in the school context specifically. Second, it adds to theory about audiences, more precisely about the media’s role in identity practices. Third, it shows how different methods produce different results about the importance of media.

British Expanded Cinema and the ‘Live Culture’ 1969–79

Expanded Cinema, a loosely knit set of practices incorporating film, video, performance and multiple screens, enjoyed its most visible period in the UK during the early 1970s. Marked by the culmination of various avant-garde movements and experiments with new media – namely video art – this was also a period of increased proliferation of live media in everyday life in the UK. But the ‘live event’, as Stuart Laing points out, was not simply the property of an increasingly televised mainstream: by the late 1960s it had become ‘the paradigmatic form of the counter-culture’. By the mid-1970s artists and filmmakers were actively combining film, video and performance as the influence of television and other media technologies on the space and conditions of perception was challenged by a branch of experimental practice rooted firmly in an ‘underground paradigm’ of liveness that emphasized process over product. Yet the meeting of experimental film and the ‘live culture’ (or the ‘pseudo-immediacy’) of television is not clearly defined. In this article I hope not only to map something of this important moment in British film and video art but also to point towards the relevance of Expanded Cinema for the continuing assessment of the relationship today between art, technology and media in UK visual culture.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Social Psychology and Media: Critical Consideration

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Social Psychology and Media: Critical Consideration

Games culture and media practices

Our aim in this article is to explore the relationship between videogames and other practices related to audiovisual media in everyday life; we are specifically interested in examining how far videogames, as a cultural form that combines audiovisual narrative with the fun of a game, may be useful in understanding broader cultural transformations in relation to cultural production in the new media context opened up by information and communication technologies.

Implications of Mobility: The Uses of Personal Communication Media in Everyday Life

This study examined the impact of mobile communications on interpersonal relationships in daily life. Based on a nationwide survey in Japan, landline phone, mobile voice phone, mobile mail (text messaging), and PC e-mail were compared to assess their usage in terms of social network and psychological factors. The results indicated that young, nonfamily-related pairs of friends, living close to each other with frequent faceto-face contact were more likely to use mobile media. Social skill levels are negatively correlated with relative preference for mobile mail in comparison with mobile voice phone. These findings suggest that mobile mail is preferable for Japanese young people who tend to avoid direct communication and that its use maintains existing bonds rather than create new ones. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00023.x Since their rapid growth in popularity in the late 1990s, mobile phones have become an almost essential part of daily life. Currently, mobile phones are also used for purposes other than voice communication. In some countries, there has been a trend for young people to create their own unique subcultures in which they communicate predominantly through SMS (short message service), or by e-mail over their mobile phones (Ishii, 2004; Kasesniemi & Rautiainen, 2002; Skog, 2002). To explore the implications of media mobility, this study compared the impact of four types of personal communication media—landline phone, mobile voice phone, mobile mail, and PC e-mail—on interpersonal relationships, based on a representative survey. More specifically, egocentric network data were analyzed to examine the factors affecting the use of these media in daily life. In this study, empirical data were collected in Japan where cutting-edge mobile technologies (e.g., ‘‘i-mode’’ and 3-G phones) are widely used and where a unique mobile communication culture is prevalent among the youth. Henceforth, the term ‘‘mobile mail’’ will be used to refer to both SMS and e-mail via mobile phones because in Japan, SMS and e-mail

The Role of the Media and Media Hypes in the Aftermath of Disasters

Health consequences after disasters cannot be studied without focusing on the role of the mass media. In modern society, the significance of the media in everyday life has increased dramatically, turning the world into a global village. We searched three databases and, in this paper, review the current literature on the role of the media in the context of disasters and their aftermath. In addition, we explore theoretical frameworks on the risk amplification process that takes place after disasters and the way in which so-called media hypes frame new risk issues. In the last part of this paper, we present the case of a 1992 plane crash that occurred in Amsterdam (the 'Bijlmermeer plane crash' ), as an example of how media hypes can trigger a proces years later, in which a growing number of people attributed their health problems to the disaster. (aut.ref.)