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This chapter begins with a consideration of the broad media messages concerning parents and music as present in parenting books and websites. It then turns to the media messages parents identified as important to their musical parenting and parenting musically. Next it presents five themes drawn from interviews with parents when the content analysis results were shared. Finally, it documents five categories of messages that participants believed would be beneficial to see in the media. The chapter argues that class, race, privilege, and community play a pivotal role in understanding interactions of parents and the media. Participants also recognized and embraced the dialectical nature of media messages, a stance that could be useful for other families encountering these messages. Seeing the participants’ reactions to and relationships with media could be useful to parents in their own approach to media, as well as helpful to professionals working with parents.

This chapter focuses on the content within campaigns’ social media messaging strategies. Campaign sites have become a space to highlight the pleasant interpersonal elements of campaigns. Retail politics have found a home online, as have descriptions of the everyday ins and outs of life on the campaign trail and behind-the-scenes views of campaign headquarters. Often amplified by a heavy reliance on images and subsequent development of aesthetic sensibilities, this “fun,” interpersonal content cropped up in 2010 and marked the beginning of a trend of appreciating content that once seemed frivolous. The emergence of this new genre of interpersonal content marks an addition to the landscape of information that emphasizes very different goals than messages traditionally produced by communication departments. Campaigns’ social media messaging has moved away from providing information and attempting to persuade, in favor of strengthening the social connections that are necessary to mobilize citizens.

The visual image is a powerful tool for mobilisation. This chapter identifies four key aspects behind its potency, each illustrated with contemporary and historical examples. First, the ‘medium is the message’ asserts that the photograph itself undermines the logic of the disappeared as ‘disposable peoples’. To be photographed is to be important, worth recording. The photo creates an emotional bond as the observer looks into the eyes of the missing person, a deep feeling, a sense of knowing. Second, ‘seeing is believing’: the visual image of the disappeared and disappearances validate, inform, confirm, and produce an inventory of disappearance. It thus challenges denial of the phenomenon. Third, the ‘disruption and emptiness’ of disappearance are marked by visual images. Chairs without students, bicycles without riders, silhouettes, photographs of family members who did not return home, appear in public spaces shocking out of complacency the false sense of safety disappearance happens to others – a kind of distancing that blames the victims for their own disappearance. Fourth, the visual image is a ‘weapon of the weak’, easy and inexpensive to reproduce and distribute widely -- locally and internationally -- to urge societies to see, to care, to help. The powerful tool of visual image is thus available to even the most marginalised in society to promote solidarity among victims and within broader, including international, communities. Through this tool, a deep personal story of loss is told that is shown to be not an isolated event, but a broader phenomenon. Visual image has the potential to correct misunderstanding of disappearances and to mobilise behind the demand for ‘never again’.

This chapter examines media effects, communication, and complexity science insights on games for learning. More specifically, it considers how a communication perspective can contribute to research on games for learning. It first provides an overview of traditions of media effects research before turning to a discussion of communication research on media use and media messages. In particular, it explores the concept of “uses and gratifications,” user control, and the dynamic effects of formal features. It also describes dynamical systems and how science can inform the design of educational games.

The three activities in this chapter focus on the everyday experiences of people with disabilities. The first activity highlights the ways that disabled people have to expend energy for disability-related needs, specifically the financial and time costs. The second activity explores pain experiences in an experiential activity; students are asked to endure minor discomfort for 30 minutes and pay attention to their perceptions. They will note how they might describe pain to another, and what coping mechanisms they used. The third activity focuses on media messages about disability for one week, in as many media sites as possible (e.g., television, magazines, billboards, advertisements, movies, traffic reports, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). They then consider the potential impacts of those messages on disabled clients.

There are two activities in this chapter, both involving watching films. The first activity can be done in class or over one week, and has students pick one film from a provided list and analyze it from the vantage point of the director, the characters, and the story. The second activity is best done over about 10 weeks as it is intended to be a sequential exposure to increasingly complex concepts related to disability. Students watch various preselected YouTube videos and nonfiction films. By viewing the materials over time, students have time to reflect as they move through the sequence. By keeping notes each week students can monitor if and how their own perceptions change.