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]

This paper discusses the effect of social media on the occurrence of ‘Arab Spring’. In the
Arab world no country could claim to be truly democratic and most were autocratic coupled
with desertification (68.4 per cent of the total land area), phenomenal rise in population and
scarcity of water. Moreover, about 60 per cent of the population is…[Read more]

This research work is an investigation into the reception of anti-smoking advertisements
that make use of “fear appeals”. The objective of the research is to bring audience
perceptions, interpretations and making sense processes of such advertising campaigns to
the limelight. Instead of measuring effects or effectiveness of anti-smoking mes…[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]

Twitter is a useful tool for predicting election outcomes, effectively complementing traditional opinion
polling. This study undertakes a volume, sentiment and engagement analysis for predicting the
popularity of Prime Ministerial candidates on Twitter as a run-up to the Indian Elections 2014. The
results from a survey of 2,37,639 pre-poll…[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]

The relationship between viewer personality and reality show watching has been a point
of discussion among media researchers but has been rarely tested. The authors in the
present study explore: (i) Reality Show Watching Motives (RSWM) of viewers, (ii) further
investigates the impact of viewer personality on RSWM in a developing nation context.…[Read more]

Online, no one can tell that you’re a dog. When in the third space of the internet, the body
is left behind, allowing people to explore their own identities and to engage in identity
tourism with different possible bodies. It is the representations we choose for ourselves
online that allow this exploration, the icons and avatars we create t…[Read more]

This paper is an attempt to measure the impact of social media on the vanity level of
youngsters in India. An experimental research was conducted on a controlled group of 40
participants with an average age of 23 years. Netemeyer’s vanity scale was administered
on the participants and their vanity was measured. A month later, the participants i…[Read more]

As continued production and rendering of service is enabled, in this instance, through varying product range as it pertain mobile tele-communication, MTN in Nigeria is attempting to further its CSR bid through the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” programme. The need to evaluate its efficacy is premised on continued programming, participation and…[Read more]

Social media has not only transformed an individual’s interaction pattern but has also integrated into wide range of interests and practices of online users. This social network facilitates self construction, identity performance and social integration on one hand while mediating fake relationships, unethical practices and invading privacy on t…[Read more]

This paper uses the Winseck-Fuchs debate as a case study in assessing how value preferences shape definitions, predicate logic, and axiomatic reasoning, and in turn influence the analysis of institutions. The study identify and contrast the explanatory power behind different modes of institutional analysis often applied in the study of…[Read more]