Review of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism

The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. In Low Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the…[Read more]

Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates…[Read more]

This chapter examines how activist ideals manifest in the realm of practice, emphasizing the reality of technical expertise running afoul of participatory goals in the practice of radio activism. A major plank of the radio activists’ work was the promotion of technical participation to novices through various activities such as radio s…[Read more]

Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy…[Read more]

This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article arg…[Read more]

This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and e…[Read more]

Patriotism and national unity have become favorite brand positioning propositions for
advertisers in India. The paper explores the reasons behind the popularity of these patriotic
themes that also embrace notions of nationhood, communal harmony and national unity in
commercials and public service advertisements. While these patriotic themes…[Read more]

Social media has altered the design of modern society. It has changed the way people lived
and worked. Though no profession or industry is left untouched by the communication
revolution stirred by social media, yet communication professionals bore maximum impact.
This paper analyzed the usage and perception of public relation (PR) professionals…[Read more]

Ethnicity has become a key interest of advertisers in diverse societies. Contrary to the
popular argument that ethnic identities are threatened by the intensified influence of media
and consumer culture, they have become the core sites of representation and reproduction
of ethnic identities. It is arguable that in today’s (mass) mediated s…[Read more]

This survey focuses on how the people in Sabah perceived Malaysia’s governmental public
relations practice and their perception of the government based upon it. It includes how the
different types of mass media and its content that they expose themselves to have influence
their image of the nation administration as well as its policies and i…[Read more]

The traditional lines between journalism and public relations are now intertwined and public
relations practitioners have an influential role on the content consumers see every day in
newspapers and on news broadcasts. This survey looked at video news releases and their
implications about journalists’ ethics, integrity, independence and c…[Read more]

Our study compared the use of fear messages on Facebook by Barack Obama and Mitt
Romney during the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Results show that written fear messages
embedded in photographs posted on Facebook by both candidates affected the degree to
which those photographs were shared. More specifically, photographs containing…[Read more]

India witnessed a revolution in the television communication landscape following the
shift in the economic policies in 1991. This analytical study looks into the changes and
additions in the functions performed by mass communication using television medium
before and after the implementation of liberalization policies in India. Tables…[Read more]

Every day media is interpreting the space with a new name, identity and representation.
The media discourse shaped in such extent that the identity of a space is deflecting from
original and existing together with new name both together as well. The constructed
identity and existing identity of the region is shaped in such an extent that the…[Read more]

From its Delhi moorings in the late 1950’s till date, the Indian television has gone through steady
evolution marked by phases of silent or radical revolution. Born with a political agenda of national
reconstruction and turning out to be an ideological hegemony, its course has been redefined by
absorbing transnational media participation and t…[Read more]

This study discussed the differences between Chinese youth film and American teen film through the
perspective on cultural foundation. The authors argue that Confucianism was an alternative that greatly
affects the depiction of young characters and the causal relationship of morality and fate of the
characters in films. The objective of such a…[Read more]

Television is known to be a powerful provoker and circulator of meanings. The attempt in this article
is to read the discursive elements of female soap opera protagonists and find out if they are idealised
partly as religious devotees in their whole existence. Wars of production and re-enforcement of
meanings are often waged in media space.…[Read more]

The current study examines the effect of emotional contents in television advertising on the rural
women and how they understand and react towards these advertisements. The study further leads
us to the issues of cognitive behaviour of rural women after the advertisement has influenced their
emotional corridor. For this study 167 women are…[Read more]

The role of advertising as an effective vehicle of communication has long been acknowledged. It has
become the important ‘part of the cultural and economic fabric of a society and continues to be a
primary tool for marketing communication’ (Lane et. al., 2005). The current study examines the
portrayal of women in contemporary Indian mag…[Read more]