Search Results

This chapter considers legal and other policy approaches to limit youth exposure to harmful media content. A wide range of arguments against censorship of problematic content is reviewed. In particular, it is difficult to identify problematic content and to enforce its suppression. Suppression often gives rise to other more problematic content. Censorship is also costly to enforce. Another concern is that the same media content can affect various people differently, so while suppressing content may limit harm to some, it could limit good to others (examples of this are in the chapter on the Internet). Regimes can abuse censorship, and censorship can limit the benefits gained from free expression. A better approach is for the government to promote desirable behavior, which generally works better than punishing bad behavior. Media literacy is an alternative to censorship, which in principle can favorably change reactions to and consumption of media content.

This chapter examines the relationship between mass society, social participation and the mass media. It reviews research on social participation in the U.S. and the very limited cross-national data on participation and stresses the need for more relevant research on membership and participation in various types of associations. It describes trends in media content and style and provides explanations on the impact of the mass media in culture and politics. It also proposes hypotheses and some data about how different patterns of participation shape consensus and conflict.

This chapter deals with some of the main lines of argument in the contemporary debates concerning pluralism and diversity. It begins by distinguishing between media pluralism and media diversity, the former being more commonly used in European debates and the latter in American debates. Pluralism is often discussed as a highly abstract value, but never really properly defined. The most established framework for an operational definition of media pluralism is based on a dichotomy between media structures and content. The chapter also talks about the main problems involved in media pluralism. These include arguments regarding the assumed relationships between its components, and debates that have been wrongly assigned as disputes over the extent of media system regulation.

This chapter discusses the research into the effects of sex and porn on adolescents' sexual beliefs, sexual attitudes, and sexual behavior. More than any other media format, the Internet has brought sexual media content to the masses in an affordable, accessible, and anonymous manner. It is no wonder that many teens, who are in the middle of developing their sexual identities, look for sex online. And it is no wonder that there is concern about the potential consequences for these teens. Are these concerns justified? What is the influence of this vast quantity of easily accessible sex and porn on adolescents? What are the characteristics of online sex and porn, and how do these influence adolescents' ideas about sexuality and gender roles?

This chapter explores the relationship between media content and the capacity of hard infrastructure, offering a framework for understanding how particular technologies, social practices, and natural environments can be conceptualized as media infrastructures. It then develops a relational approach to media infrastructure that delineates the multiple routes and effects of global undersea cable networks. There are five ways undersea cables function as a media infrastructure: they become resources for media activity; alter everyday experience of media temporarily; shape one's susceptibility to media censorship and surveillance; solidify global relationships of media power; and serve as a platform where publics can affect the dissemination of media content.

This chapter analyzes media malaise theories and their consequences for legitimacy. These theories argue that the increasing availability of information through new and old media and increasingly negative tone of media are to blame for declining legitimacy. The chapter examines these claims by providing a systematic review of empirical research on media and political support. It first investigates whether news coverage has become more negative over time, and then examines the micro process that might explain the link between media coverage and political support. Empirical evidence suggests that where coverage has become more negative, this occurred before the 1990s and has levelled off since, and is concentrated primarily in election news. Negative political news does have a modest impact on political support once controlled for level of education, but that effect can be positive and negative, depending on the medium, the receiver, and the indicator of political support.

This chapter examines the effect of TV debates on political knowledge conditioned by the media context. We argue that TV debates take place in a wider media context and the extent of citizens’ learning processes about issue positions depends also on the informational context in general. We test four hypotheses: while the first three hypotheses concern the conditional impact of media issue coverage and debate content, the last hypothesis addresses the differences between incumbent and challenger. Using media content analyses and panel survey data, our results confirm the hypotheses that (1) when an issue is addressed in a TV debate, viewers tend to develop a perception of the parties’ positions on this issue, but (2) only if this issue has not been addressed extensively in the media beforehand. This learning effect about parties’ positions is bigger for the opposition party.

Stuart Hall’s influence on studies of the media continue to have ripple effects through a variety of disciplines. The history of media studies ranges from the “hypodermic needle” model assuming direct effects on consumers to choice in shaping one’s own media consumption to the use of media as education and more. Because of the preponderance of media in various facets of our lives, studies of the media have long been interdisciplinary. This conclusion considers how a range of disciplines have examined issues such as racial bias in media, media advocates who attempt to persuade decision-makers in the media world, and how identity and positionality shape various media effects. The relevance of tackling such issues are particularly salient in today’s climate of “fake news” and rampant distrust of media gatekeeping and media content.

This chapter examines the relations between the nature of mediated sound and social experience, with particular emphasis on how the digital extension of radio sound organizes the affective management of the everyday in the so-called “(i)home”—a digitally enabled private sphere with multiple channels for the reception and circulation of media content. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of people's perceptions of radio sound in Great Britain, the chapter identifies a significant generational shift in ways of defining radio as a technological form, which in this case consists of digital and Internet audio. It also considers the tension between a changing technological form and a durable domestic utility and argues that such tension should be interpreted in terms of a consistent subjective need for “stillness” and the privacy of domestic life. Finally, it shows how radio and mediated audio become meaningful through the experience of listening.

This book has examined the shift in Japanese cinematic modes from the film studio era to the post-studio era, with particular emphasis on their relation to recent developments in digital technology and the transformation in the critical framework from the national to the transnational cinema. This concluding chapter considers the extent to which the national cinema has truly become transnational and asks whether the unambiguous structural equalities between the national cinema and the studio system or between the transnational disposition and the post-studio production mode are viable. It argues that the complicit relationship between America's universalism and Japan's particularism has influenced Japanese cinema studies. The chapter proposes a few research interests that might reveal the new cinema's counterintuitive connection with the national by focusing on television cinema and Japanese cinema's relationship to the kontentsu sangyo—the business of producing and selling digital media products—as well as Japan's national policy regarding media content.