Media-saturated Society Research Articles

Review: Nursing in media-saturated societies: implications for cultural safety in nursing practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

Review: Nursing in media-saturated societies: implications for cultural safety in nursing practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives and Digital Cultures (Danielle Kirby)

<i>Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives and Digital Cultures</i> (Danielle Kirby)

Nursing in media-saturated societies: implications for cultural safety in nursing practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

This educational piece seeks to apprise nurses and other health professionals of mass media news practices that distort social and health policy development. It focuses on two media discourses evident in White settler societies, primarily Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, drawing out implications of these media practices for those committed to social justice and health equity. The first discourse masks the dominant culture, ensuring it is not readily recognised as a culture, naturalising the dominant values, practices and institutions, and rendering their cultural foundations invisible. The second discourse represents indigenous peoples and minority ethnic groups as ‘raced’ – portrayed in ways that marginalise their culture and disparage them as peoples. Grounded in media research from different societies, the paper focuses on the implications for New Zealand nurses and their ability to practise in a culturally safe manner as an exemplary case. It is imperative that these findings are elaborated for New Zealand and that nurses and other health professionals extend the work in relation to practice in their own society.

The knowledgeable parenting style: stance takings and subject positions in media encounters

In today’s media-saturated societies it can be assumed that encounters with therapists and other experts may have implications for adult learning. Taking the point of departure in the idea of public pedagogy, and by using a close-up analysis of interview talk, the pedagogical agency the media may have on parenting is investigated. Drawing upon the discursive notions of styles, stance takings and subject positions, a pattern of regularities emerges called ‘the knowledgeable parenting style’. The knowledgeable parent is fashioned through various, yet typical ways of assuming stances and negotiating positions in media encounters, by displaying recognition, discrimination and insight. The study illustrates how the media’s claim on a pedagogical role is acknowledged, however, what is provided to be valuable competence is not just accepted. While the interviewed adults mainly exclude themselves from that site of public intervention, the knowledge provided and instructions given are depicted as having the potential of facilitating learning for ‘other parents’. Apparently, the ways in which people rhetorically approach and systematically establish stances also reveal subject positions associated with learning. A dynamic space is created where the displayed norms for adequate behaviour, and invitations to act upon that knowledge, are subject to constant tension.

A multimodal view of voluntary associations

Participation in voluntary associations is often considered challenging due to the fact that humans possess limited time and resources that can be allocated to various types of social activities. The prevalence of multiple modes of communication in our everyday lives may signal the possibility of addressing such traditional problems of voluntary associations. Employing the framework of media multiplexity, this study investigates the factors that predict multimodal participation and how multimodal participation in turn affects overall involvement in voluntary associations. Analyses of the data gathered by the Pew Internet Report show that the degree of affiliations, prior experiences (including participation in online groups, online recruitment, and leadership), and routinized technology use were significant predictors of multimodal group participation. In addition, multimodal group participation mediated the effects of these factors on participation in voluntary associations. Together, multimodal participation and groups' multimodal organizing positively predicted the generation of group impacts. These findings illuminate a new way of understanding voluntary associations in today's media-saturated society.

Enhancing Geographic Learning and Literacy Through Filmmaking

In this media-saturated society, students need to think more critically about the media they encounter and that they are producing. Through filmmaking, students can link geographic theory and the real world, bridging the distance from readings/lectures/ discussions to the geography on the ground, making the abstract concrete. But constructing films also enhances students' understanding of the communications they consume and the communications they construct (films, television, podcasts, YouTube, etc.). In this article, a student and instructor discuss the making of short films or videos in geography classes and how it can enhance both geographic education and media literacy.

Circulating social imaginaries: Theoretical and methodological reflections

In this introductory article for the special section on circulation, we examine the concept of circulation from theoretical and methodological perspectives. By drawing on media and social theory, we argue for the relevance of circulation in theorizing current on-the-move social dynamics. Three particular perspectives are introduced in this exercise: non-linearity, action and materiality. As a methodological tool, circulation refers to the tracking and tracing of social actions. In this article, we examine in particular the creation and maintenance of social imaginaries. Our context of analysis is contemporary highly media-saturated society. A case study on media circulation of the 2011 death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs illustrates our theoretical and methodological reflection.

Pre-Service ELT Teachers’ Perceptions of Media Literacy in Turkey

In a media-saturated society, it is becoming extremely difficult for audience, especially the young ones, to discern between positive and negative, fact and fiction, true and false, reliable and unreliable content in the media. In such an environment, Media Literacy, the ability to critically analyze, evaluate and discern media content and its production are imperative. Through a survey with participation of 183 undergraduate ELT students from Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University (Turkey), this paper attempts to find out media literacy perceptions of pre-service teachers based on the theories provided by the scholars in this field as well as to explore the relationship between Media Literacy perceptions of the students and their age, gender and class levels. Results showed that pre-service teachers attending English Language Teaching Department are eminently aware of the concepts of Media Literacy, no significant statistical differences were observed between the genders and among classes, the frequency of participants’ use of media forms is not so high in comparison with their level of Media Literacy perception, they are highly aware of the benefits of Media Literacy to teaching and learning English Language.

Youth Performance in Virtual Environments

This article examines the changing nature of young audiences in a media-saturated society. There is a growing trend toward participation and agency in video and augmented reality games allowing players to become participant and observer, actor and avatar. Based on my work with drama for youth, my experiments with participatory performance utilizing video games, and the convergence of theories about play and performance, I analyze the evolving connections between the way children and adults experience virtual environments and games, the ways they engage with a theatrical event, and how this informs the development of theatre for young audiences.

The Gaze as constituent and annihilator

This article aims to join the contemporary effort to promote a psychoanalytic renaissance within cinema studies, post Post-Theory. In trying to shake off the burden of the 1970s film theory's distortion of the Lacanian Gaze, rejuvenating it with the strength of the Real and fusing it with Freudian thoughts on the uncanny, hopefully this new dawn can be reached. I aspire to conceptualize the Gaze in a straightforward manner. This in order to obtain an instrument for the identification of certain strategies within the filmic realm aimed at depicting the subjective destabilizing of diegetic characters as well as thwarting techniques directed at the spectorial subject. In setting this capricious Gaze against the uncanny phenomena described by Freud, we find that these two ideas easily intertwine into a draft description of a powerful, potentially reconstitutive force worth being highlighted.Mats Carlsson, Scholar at the Department of Media Studies, Cinema Studies, at Stockholm University. His academic interests revolve around (post-modern) critical theory, with the goal of applying theoretical strategies, such as psychoanalysis, as a limelight on the ideological implications inherent in today's media-saturated society.

Inhabitants of the Screen

In Bahia, Brazil, the public articulation of religious authority comes to depend more and more on celebrity discourses. This article takes the Afro-Brazilian spirit possession cult Candomblé as an example to show how in media-saturated societies religious and media imaginaries become inextricably entangled. In their struggle to be publicly recognized as a proper ‘religion’, Candomblé priests ?nd themselves overcoming their media-shyness. Televisual fame is a value understood by the public at large, and its acquisition adds weight to the status and prestige of Candomblé priests in ways that religious criteria for priestly authority cannot accomplish.

The Lifeworld of Youth in the Information Society

Media is now central to how youth form their identities. Media also shapes the cultural background of much of young people’s action and decision making and the institutional framework of social interaction. This article explores this mediated “lifeworld” of young people by examining rates of current media use and the infiltration of media into conventional forms of socialization such as schools, family, and peers. The authors argue that increasing media use coincides with a larger structural shift to an information-based society wherein social relationships are constituted and reinforced through a cycle of “networked individualism” and growing “risk” among youth. The authors illustrate the cycle of media use, individualization, and risk by briefly examining (a) rising economic insecurity among all Americans and American youth in particular, and (b) the contradictions minority youth face in navigating structural barriers to achievement. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their work and suggesting policy directions for youth in a media-saturated society.

Personalization according to politicians: A practice theoretical analysis of mediatization

Following the evolution towards media-saturated societies, this article presents practice theory as an alternative framework for mediatization studies. We discuss how it can help us grasp the diversity of social and cultural changes related to the highly integrated media. This is demonstrated by studying politicians' personalization, not as a product of media logic but by looking at politicians' media-related practices and media's anchoring of practices. Our in-depth interviews with Flemish politicians show that their practices are in many ways organized by the media, but through this mediatization at the same time aim to retain control over them. It is also shown that politicians' practices are not only directly influenced by media, but also by other politicians' media-related practices. Together, these findings draw a complex picture of the mediatization and personalization process.

Mediatization – Empirical perspectives: An introduction to a special issue

In general, the concept of mediatization tries to capture long-term interrelation processes between media change on the one hand and social and cultural change on the other. As institutionalized and technological means of communication, media have become integral to very different contexts of human life. The media are not just neutral instances of mediation: Media like television, radio, newspaper, the web or the mobile phone are in themselves mediators of social and cultural change. Within media and communication studies two strands of research, medium theory and effect research, have in very different ways addressed this ‘influence’ of media on processes of social and cultural change. Medium theory describes socio-cultural change as deeply structured by the advent of a new leading medium, and constructs human history as the succession of oral, scribal, print and electronic cultures (cf. for example, Meyrowitz, 1995). Approaches of media effect research analyze the rather short-term impact of certain media content on the social world (cf. for example, Rosengren, 1994). Both kinds of approaches have contributed to the understanding of the relationship between media, culture and society, but they clearly have some shortcomings. Medium theory conceptualizes the relation between one medium and its socio-cultural influence too directly and neglects questions of media content. Effect research theorizes the influence of certain media contents too directly and neglects questions of media specificity and cultural context. Furthermore, these approaches have not been able to conceptualize a key feature of contemporary culture and society: Media are no longer ‘outside’ society exerting a specific influence or effect on culture and therefore on individuals. In our present media-saturated society media are inside society, part of the very fabric of culture; they have become ‘the cultural air

Collaboration in Animation: Working Together to Empower Indigenous Youth

How do underrepresented populations, with little exposure to global media discourse, begin not only to develop a critical stance toward dominant messages in the media, but also to assert their own voices and perspectives in unfamiliar formats? How can a school with a mission to develop leadership skills for members of indigenous populations empower students to honor and preserve valued traditions, languages, and practices while adapting to the challenges of thriving in an increasingly media-saturated society? Perhaps through media literacy programs like the one that my collaborator and I have offered for the past 3 years at the Centro Rural de Educaci?n Superior (CRES) in Estipac, Mexico. In this article, we will describe the goals, processes, and outcomes of our animation and technology workshops at CRES, and will offer insights into the teamwork that is integral to this ongoing project. For the past several years, Karin Gunn and I have been working together to present animation workshops in a variety of settings. Since 2007, we have traveled yearly to the campus of CRES-Estipac to work with high school and college level students. Over 150 students are enrolled in the high school, and approximately 98% are indigenous, representing nine different language groups from throughout Mexico, although the

Media literacy courses in faculties of communication in TRNC

Developments in information technologies have changed the world and the way we create and use information. Due to these developments, flow of messages occupy daily life through media. In order to overcome the chaos of the messages, people are in need of acquiring critical thinking and self-expression in media environment. Children, as well as adults, are becoming a part of this phenomenon, and teachers need to know how to leverage these technologies to better educational systems. Media literacy, which is an ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms, has become a key subject for eliminating the harmful effects of media.In this study, media literacy understanding in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus has been put forward and the programs of five Faculties of Communication on the island have been analysed in the light of media literacy and its importance. As a program initiative, media literacy presumes to go beyond fundamental theoretical communication courses by providing student-outcome that enables students to become active participants in an increasingly media-saturated society. In the paper, it is discussed that with improving the programs of Faculties of Communication, the graduates will have the opportunity to become the future teachers of media literacy in primary and secondary education.

Power and personality: politicians on the World Wide Web

This article is a comparative analysis of the websites of four of the most powerful leaders in the world: two presidents (George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac) and two prime ministers (Angela Merkel and Tony Blair). The analysis focuses on the structure and content of the websites; the relation between textual elements, visual and other elements; the types of information given; the way it addresses users; and to what degree and in what forms interactive potentials for dialogue are constructed. The ways in which the relation between the official, political person, the representative of the nation and the more personal aspects of these politicians are constructed are key focus points seen in the more theoretical context of mediated politics and the mediation of the political personae in the present media-saturated society. The comparative analysis shows significant national differences in the way the political leaders are linked to national symbols and national cultural identity. The last part of the article discusses the empirical data on the rising importance of political websites for the general population.

Health identities: from expert patient to resisting consumer

This article explores the formation of 'health identities': embodied subjectivities that emerge out of complex psychosocial contexts of reflexive modernity, in relation to data on health and illness practices among groups of people and patients using medical technologies including weight-loss drugs and the erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil (Viagra). We examine a range of health identities, from the 'expert patient'--a person who broadly adopts a biomedical model of health and illness, to a 'resisting consumer', who fabricates a health identity around lay experiential models of health and the body. The understanding of health identities is developed within a theoretical framework drawing on previous work on body/self and the work of Deleuze and Guattari. It is concluded that the constellation of health identities reflects the diversity of relations in an industrialized, technology-driven, consumer-oriented and media-saturated society.

Pedagogy of the Obsessed

The author examines his obsession with a variety of media culture texts—films, television programs, visual ads in magazines and on billboards, music CDs, comic books, video games, websites—an obsession that manifests itself most pervasively in collecting “video texts.” Among the over 1,000 video texts collected are more than 100 school films, many of which were used for various critical pedagogical projects designed around selected media texts. The author explains how his use of these video texts was radically transformed when he began using selected segments from a wide range of them to create “videocompilations” and “videocollages.” He argues that even though we live in a media‐saturated society (a typically negative phrase within media‐literacy discourses), there exist many opportunities for educators to use media texts for productive pedagogical purposes.

In Celebration of Unsung Heroes

There is an unhealthy tendency in our media-saturated society to value only those things that receive the most hype. Our interests and opinions about the popular world are shaped by the tabloids that we all secretly read in supermarket checkout lines, which only enlighten us about Oscar winners,