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Chapter 3 develops a cultural sociological model of the space of opinion and its role in democratic deliberation. It analyzes three waves of media theory which have shaped thinking about news and opinion. The first wave of media theory emphasized the importance of objective news and a neutral media for rational information-processing citizens. It defined much of the media scholarship produced prior to the 1960s, and it continues to resonate with broad publics because of its elective affinities with the professional project of objective journalism. The second wave of media theory had its roots at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. It offered a sociological analysis which recognized that small groups and social networks intervene between media and citizens to shape the nature of deliberation. The third wave of media theory builds on the second wave to emphasize that a wide variety of aesthetic and performative structures help citizens identify with media intellectuals, which leads to increased levels of public involvement in the political public sphere. This cultural model of media and deliberation points to the importance of a variety of communicative formats for journalism, including the innovative formats of the space of opinion.

This Introduction offers a critical political and social context for Algeria 1988-2015. It makes the case for thinking about the idea of Algeria and to its contemporary realities and the need to do so through a range of methodological approaches that are attentive to the weft and warp of everyday cultural production and political action. It argues for the need to read contemporary cultural production in Algeria not as determined indices of a specific place and time (1988–2015) but as interrogations and explorations of that period and of the relationship between nation and culture. Reviewing the chapters that compose the volume it makes the case for a form of enquiry that offers historical moments, multiple contexts, hybrid forms, voices and experiences of the everyday that will prompt nuance in our approach to understanding contemporary Algeria. In particular, it makes the case for the existence of a variety of cultural public spheres in Algeria and their importance to the country’s transition.

This chapter looks at the cultural integration of Mexican immigrants. In spite of exhausting work days, the immigrants take an active part in artistic, religious, and civic associations, centered mostly though not exclusively around the cultural referents of the places of origin, thus helping to reinforce transnational linkages. Empirical observation confirms that most artistic, cultural, and religious activities adapt to the ethnic segregation of the Los Angeles region and reproduce it through the pursuit of recognition of the immigrants' own cultural referents within a diverse cultural field. This constitutes a differentialist integregation strategy that makes use of specific cultural referents in negotiating inclusion in a heterogenous society. In turn, this suggests that the maintenance of transnational ties with sending communities is not an obstacle but rather a resource, employed in the process of negotiating space in a segmented cultural sphere.

The chapter examines how the economy has changed during the years when night time industries emerged. The modern times is characterised by the further convergence of cultural and economic spheres. Consumer capitalism is the driving factor behind experiential consumption. Another concept employed in the chapter is the concept of leisure. Its attainment has become so valuable among the youth that it has become how they identify themselves. It also discusses the aspects that define the night time industry and examines how night life has become partnered with commercial interests in order to form lawlessness and disorder in the cities.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the general theme of the book. It discusses and defines the terminology employed to describe, analyse, and evaluate Arabic-Islamic records on medieval Western Europe on a macro-historical scale. An overview of the range of available sources introduces the reader to the material that is subject to analysis in the following chapters. An account of the current state of research questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records and outlines the study’s alternative approach: to analyse and interpret the extant material thematically and in chronological order, thus tracing and explaining the processes of transmission, reception, and contextualization that facilitated the production of the extant Arabic-Islamic records on certain Latin-Christian phenomena. Two short overviews at the beginning and end of the chapter explain the structure of the current study.

Video games have become widespread cultural artifacts. As a result, video game spaces increasingly become places of cultural practice and cultural significance. How do they incorporate this quality? This chapter follows the development of story maps as they enter a shared cultural sphere.

This chapter examines the contexts for documentary in cinemas and on television. In the period from late 2002 to early 2004, a ‘boom’ in documentary cinema was identified. Such commentaries were based initially on the commercial success of a handful of documentary features, most notably Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, the sleeper hit Winged Migration, the spelling contest film Spellbound and Errol Morris's Fog of War. Debates about the politics of speaking positions and the impossibility of standing beyond them emerged as part of the major epistemological shift associated with the post-structuralist turn in humanities and the social sciences are also discussed. It is essential that the genre of documentary should not be granted a kind of moral exceptionalism in the cultural sphere which fireproofs it against properly critical scrutiny, so obviating all criticism of the mode.