IAMCR Book Series – serie

This volume gathers together some of the most significant debates surrounding the development, use and potential of the Internet. Twenty scholars from four continents address some of the more pertinent questions surrounding the presence and future of the Internet. These are organized into questions regarding the role of the Internet as a mediator of communicative space and process; an object of current and future policy; and a tool for development. The debates are proceeded by a discussion on the contextual positioning of the medium in terms of arts, the market, gender, and education.

This book is about the training needed for the effective use of community radio by social groups whose voices and opinions are rarely head in mainstream media. Such training includes Internet and computer skills, web site creation, digital audio editing, live broadcasting of local events, the creation of local sound archives for music, webcasting, and community radio training for refugees and asylum seekers. Introductory chapters set the historical and theoretical context for the community radio tradition that underpinned the training and discuss the connection between access and participation and the local level and the demands for a voice for civil society at the global level.

In recent years democratic theory has taken a deliberative turn and one central question that needs to be answered is how to connect face-to-face conversations and deliberations in particular forums to broader discussions in the larger society. Working within the cutting edges of deliberative theories, this book surveys the role of the mass media in the deliberative system and investigates, through a set of empirical cases, a range of key problems in the media arena: the interplay between arguing and strategic manoeuvring; public demands for accountability; emotional appeal for deliberation; tensions between agonistic and diplomatic deliberation; and the public construction of general claims. Adopting an integrative perspective, this book also looks at how affected people use published opinions to make sense of politics and produce bottom-up reasons, in addition to media-driven or top-down discourses in the public sphere. The general aim of the book is to show that the mass media have an important place in deliberative democracy and to enrich political and media theories with new findings.

In recent years democratic theory has taken a deliberative turn and one central question that needs to be answered is how to connect face-to-face conversations and deliberations in particular forums to broader discussions in the larger society. Working within the cutting edges of deliberative theories, this book surveys the role of the mass media in the deliberative system and investigates, through a set of empirical cases, a range of key problems in the media arena: the interplay between arguing and strategic manoeuvring; public demands for accountability; emotional appeal for deliberation; tensions between agonistic and diplomatic deliberation; and the public construction of general claims. Adopting an integrative perspective, this book also looks at how affected people use published opinions to make sense of politics and produce bottom-up reasons, in addition to media-driven or top-down discourses in the public sphere. The general aim of the book is to show that the mass media have an important place in deliberative democracy and to enrich political and media theories with new findings.

Primarily based on a transnational study of college students’ net-radio consumption practices, this book uncovers two types of audiences (radio online or net-only radio audiences) and a three-tiered net-radio subculture (conservatives, swingers, and radicals), which is determined by users’ taste distinctions and how much power they have over their net-radio consumption and production practices. It contends that net-radio, its synergy with radio and music journalism and youth subcultures is not a trivial flash in the pan, but an important and ongoing social-cultural and global phenomenon. In doing so the book contributes to cultural studies research on the Internet.

This book deals with the transition from the analog to the digital world and its impact on the market, everyday life, and the academy, offering a more detailed view of these transformations in South America and the Caribbean. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are changing the relationships among subjects, be they social, economic, cultural, educational, or environmental, as well as in the realms of behavior and affect. Despite this influence, technology can enlarge the participation of social actors, increasing the visibility of the individual and collective, as never seen before, but we live in countries with significant digital differences. Right now we are at the bridge—we ar leaving the analog world and moving into the digital world—and we also live in paradoxical societies, with important and profound economic, social, cultural, and linguistic differences. On the one side, we have new technologies and a small number of people eager to acquire them. On the other side, we have Latin American countries, where 80% of residents have prepaid cell phones or where in countries, like Bolivia and Paraguay, access to the Internet does not reach 5%. From the viewpoint of the emerging industry of digital content in Latin America and the Caribbean, we analyze the potential of different platforms—free-to-air digital TV, digital radio and cinema, computers, games, cell phones, the convergence of media, and interactive digital content production.