When Media Information becomes a Business

Today’s media landscape resembles much of León’s (2010) interpretation of «a new informational ecosystem». However changes are not exclusively in terms of the content, as «drama, comic and spectacular» (Meyer, 2003) emerge as frequent news value in current media productions. Journalism, in particular, seems to demonstrate a special interest in what kind of contributions people are able to offer to their work. In some formats, such as the audience discussion programmes, it is likely to observe eager citizens who are interested in talking and taking part in those spaces. Thus, it is probably helpful to analyse how media institutions are working towards letting people talk in these specific spaces. Positioning this topic under the concept of the ‘citizens’ engagement’ in media, our observation will focus on two emblematic formats of public opinion on Portuguese radio and television. Hence, a comparison will be drawn according to several criteria: portrait of the participants (listeners and viewers) that take part in these formats; topics discussed, alongside a description of the commentators or guests invited by media productions (gender, provenience, invitation (actor/observer), job, programme and subject relationship. This paper also grants a particular focus to the role of digital media, whether these platforms constitute real opportunities for public intervention or simply express a recent tendency in media and society. This study has also been represented in the research project «TV journalism and citizenship: the struggle for a new digital public sphere», held in the Communication & Society Research Centre, in the University of Minho, (Braga – Portugal), which has worked as a permanent observatory of Portuguese television journalism.

The man-as-media is not only interpersonal, nor only a mass medium, but rather acts as a symbiosis of these two media which, merged into a whole new entity, lose some of their previous characteristics, but at the same time reach added (additional) value. By added (additional) value, we understand the fact that the man-as-media communicates: a) from single to many, b) from many to one, c) from many to many, and it is these communication models that distinguish the man-as-media from the mass media, giving it an entirely different communication power. Communication is the primary process used to build reality, rather than a derived, posterior process, " presenting " a reality that exists before, beyond and independently from it. In spite of centuries of domination of the latter interpretation, the understanding of the creator role of communication is actually not new, but rather a suppressed part of European intellectual history dating back to the sophists. The sophists believed that the " communication instances make the primary substance of the human life ". The new openness to " alternative and more subtle approaches " to communication is partly seen in the reappearance of pre-Socratic, sophist views that communications creates (calls into being) the social facts the society lives in.

Media discourse refers to interactions that take place through a broadcast platform, whether spoken or written, in which the discourse is oriented to a non-present reader, listener or viewer. Though the discourse is oriented towards these recipients, they very often cannot make instantaneous responses to the producer(s) of the discourse, though increasingly this is changing with the advent of new media technology, as we shall explore. Crucially, the written or spoken discourse itself is oriented to the readership or listening/viewing audience, respectively. In other words, media discourse is a public, manufactured, on-record, form of interaction. It is not ad hoc or spontaneous (in the same way as casual speaking or writing is); it is neither private nor off the record. Obvious as these basic characteristics may sound, they are crucial to the investigation, description and understanding of media discourse. Because media discourse is manufactured, we need to consider how this has been done – both in a literal sense of what goes into its making and at an ideological level. One important strand of research into media discourse is preoccupied with taking a critical stance to media discourse, namely critical discourse analysis (CDA). It is important that we continually appraise the messages that we consume from our manufactured mass media. The fact that media discourse is public means that it also falls under the scrutiny of many conversation analysts who are interested in it as a form of institutional talk, which can be compared with other forms of talk, both mundane and institutional. The fact that media discourse is on record makes it attractive for discourse analysts and increasingly so because of the online availability of newspapers, radio stations, television programmes and so on. Advances in technology have greatly offset the ephemerality factor that used to relate to media discourse, especially radio and television (where it used to be the case that, if you wanted to record something, it had to be done in real time). It is a time of great change in media discourse, and this chapter aims to capture this moment, especially in the final section, where traditional notions of media discourse are challenged, in this time of opening up of the medium through Web 2 technologies.

The Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, as explicated in his seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962 in German, translated into English in 1989), is tied to a particular validation of ‘public’ as the ‘rational-critical’ discussion of personally disinterested people occupying the same public spaces. While those 18th century participants might have got their topics of conversation from the early forms of journalism in circulation, Habermas relies on their face-to-face discussion in physical spaces to construct his theory of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’. In this study he excludes modern-day media as a space from his delineation of the public sphere because of their commercial, non-conversational and entertainment dimensions. However, in later commentary on this study (1974 and 1989), he qualifies saying “today newspapers and magazines, radio and TV are the media of the public sphere” (quoted by Eley 1992) thus modifying his position somewhat. His study has provoked both a normative understanding of how the media should operate in the public sphere, and a pessimism about whether the media do this task properly, given their modern-day features. In this paper I question the normative ideal, and the pessimistic conclusions about media operations, by drawing on other theorists to make more nuanced and complex the description of ‘the public sphere’ for today. I draw on Arendt for a larger understanding of the ‘social’ and the ‘intimate’; Fraser, Benhabib and Eley for their ideas about counter publics and Other participants. And, for a better understanding of the workings of media, on Thompson’s ideas of non-co-present publicness and ‘visibility’. I use Warner to understand the idea of public subjectivity and the desire to participate vicariously in public bodies through certain kinds of media genres. Finally, I attempt a description of what kind(s) of public sphere(s) and what kinds of media activities we see operating in our world today

tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 2024

Mediatisation has established itself in the last decade as a key approach in media and communication studies. Its aim is to explain the vast transformations of social relations caused by the growing power of the media. I provide a theoretical and empirical critique of this approach, with a particular focus on the institutionalist (strong) approach to mediatisation. As I argue, one of the biggest problems of mediatisation is that it perceives the power of the media in a wholly abstract manner. Even though authors advocating for the mediatisation approach typically preach about holism, their works often narrowly focus on the media, without embedding them in the social totality. This leads to a flawed approach, primarily due to the excessive media-centrism. For a critique of the ontological, epistemological and theoretical failures of mediatisation, I largely base the article on two critical approaches to the media and communication research: critical sociology of the media and political economy of communication. Empirically and mostly for illustrative purposes, the article is based on semi-structured interviews with representatives of Slovenian political parties. Three fundamental issues are identified based on this focus of the paper: mediatisation fails to distinguish between the form and content of communication; it does not make a proper distinction between public political communication and political activity; and it ignores the non-public parts of politics and deep inequalities, which influence the political process. Mediatisation generally bypasses these issues, in turn also ignoring the wider relations of power in capitalist society and how they change.

Jurnal Ilmiah Peuradeun

This study aimed to develop learning tools to help children with learning disabilities of comorbid dyscalculia-dyslexia. The learning tools were developed using the 4D model. Each stage of development was conducted based on the materials focused on in this research, namely the topics of recognizing and understanding numbers, sorting numbers, and operating numbers. This study involved 280 students, ages between 7 and 8 years old, from four elementary schools. Students took a series of tests, and 11 students were found with comorbid dyscalculia-dyslexia. The results of this study provided an overview related to the learning tools developed, tested, and implemented in mathematics learning for students with dyscalculia and dyslexia. This finding was indicated by the analysis results of recognizing numbers, sorting numbers, and operating numbers using paired-sample t-tests (p< 0.05). The results showed increased students' essential mathematics ability based on the pretest and post...

Image Narrative, 2014

The rather unknown and repudiated 19th century Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) plays a prominent role in Walter Benjamin's later work, such as the Arcades Project (Benjamin's "primal history" of the nineteenth century) and the Artwork essay. Wiertz foresaw, argues Benjamin, that the introduction of new technological reproduction media like photography would change the 'entire character of art'. Wiertz is, together with Baudelaire, one of the few artists who had a distinct view on the relation between art and technology and between art and photography in particular. However why would Benjamin depict Wiertz as a prophetical figure, as a precursor of film and the political use of photo-montage? Benjamin meant with the word precursor not simply a person or phenomenon that announces the coming of another. Wiertz' work is for Benjamin one of those 'disreputable' forms of art that in moments of crisis point at new modes of perception and imaging. His work constitutes not just a stage in a linear development of emerging nineteenth century mass culture or the pre-history of cinema. In Benjamin's philosophy of history the relation of the present to the past is not of a purely temporal order but also 'figural' [Bildlich]. Historical knowledge consists of (fugitive) images, or more precisely, of dialectical images in which past and present form a special constellation. Benjamin shows that insignificant nineteenth century phenomena such as Wiertz only gain significance at the very precise historical moment in which they contract a dialectical relation with the present. It were Dada artists like John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde and Georg Grosz who recognised themselves in the figure of Wiertz and brought Wiertz' revolutionary potential to explosion in their revolutionary montage-practices. Dada 'saved' the neglected and discredited figure of Wiertz because they touched him with their actuality and it is according to Benjamin the task of the historian to decipher these 'prophecies'. Résumé Aujourd'hui presque oublié ou répudié, le peintre belge Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) joue un rôle de premier plan dans les écrits tardifs de Walter Benjamin, comme le projet des Arcades (son histoire par citations du 19 e siècle) ou le célèbre article sur l'oeuvre d'art. Selon Benjamin, Wiertz avait été un des premiers à comprendre que l'introduction de nouveaux médias de reproduction comme la photographie allait changer la nature même de l'oeuvre d'art. En cela, son rôle est aussi important que celui de Baudelaire. Mais quelles étaient les raisons qui allaient conduire Benjamin à voir en Wiertz un prophète, un précurseur du cinéma et de l'usage politique du photo-montage ? La prophétie, en l'occurrence, ne renvoie pas au fait que Wiertz précédait tel ou tel autre artiste ou mouvement mais que son travail est une de ces formes dépréciées qui en temps de crise révèle de nouvelles formes de voir et de représenter. En Vol. 15, No. 4 (2014) IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE cela, Wiertz fait plus que simplement servir de transition entre la culture de masse naissante du 19 e siècle et le cinéma, par exemple, dans une vision linéaire de l'histoire. La philosophie de l'histoire de Benjamin, le rapport entre passé et présent n'est pas seulement chronologique, mais aussi figural (bildlich). La connaissance historique est faite d'images (fugitives) ou plus exactement d'images dialectiques qui réarticulent le rapport entre passé et présent. Benjamin montre que des pratiques apparemment futiles comme celles de Wiertz n'acquièrent leur sens qu'au moment précis où elles établissent un rapport dialectique avec le présent. C'est ce qui arrive au moment historique de Dada, quand des artistes comme Georg Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde ou John Heartfield se sont reconnus en Wiertz et ont démontré le potentiel révolutionnaire de son travail dans leurs propres montages. Dada a sauvé Wiertz du mépris et de l'oubli à travers sa propre actualité et la tâche de l'historien selon Benjamin consiste à déchiffrer ce type de prophéties.

2000

En este artículo se recogen algunas de las claves de un trabajo más amplio, cuyo principal objetivo es profundizar en el conocimiento acerca de cómo operan los discursos sobre la (in)seguridad ciudadana de los diferentes grupos sociales en la ciudad, tomando en consideración la variable espacial, en nuestro caso el barrio, como definitoria de contextos históricos, socioeconómicos y culturales significativos, contrastables en términos sociológicos. Para este fin, escogimos dos barrios del centro de la ciudad de Madrid: el barrio popular de Lavapiés, y el barrio burgués de Salamanca, sobre los que aplicaremos un análisis sociológico basado en tres grandes ejes. Un primer eje socio-histórico, a partir del cual podamos conocer la génesis social de ambos barrios y su íntima relación con las cuestiones securitarias. Un segundo eje estructural o macrosociológico, basado en el análisis de la desigual distribución de capitales económicos, culturales y sociales, y su relación con las tasas y tipo de criminalidad. En fin, un tercer eje microsociológico centrado en el análisis de los discursos que portan los agentes sociales según su posición social, o cómo opera el capital simbólico colectivo a nivel de barrio en relación con la (in)seguridad ciudadana.

The identification of molecular markers linked to resistance against root diseases is a priority in sugar beet breeding. In this study, a linkage analysis was carried out to identify SNP markers associated with rhizomania (beet necrotic yellow vein virus, BNYVV) and cyst nematode (Heterodera schachtii Schmidt) resistance. A selected panel of 384 SNPs was screened for genotyping polymorphisms in segregating progenies for rhizomania and nematode resistance. The analysis was carried out by means of a novel high-throughput marker array technology (QuantStudio 12K Flex system with OpenArray technology, Life Technologies, Carlsbad, CA). Two of the 384 SNPs were associated (LOD ≥ 4.0) with rhizomania and nematode resistance. These selected SNPs were successfully validated in reference commercial varieties. This study identified two molecular markers which are amenable to high-throughput automated analysis and expected to be useful for rhizomania and nematode marker-assisted selection (MAS).

This practical serves to explain the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, how they can be applied to a web application, and the requirements necessary to create a secure link between a server and a client machine. In addition, a development history of the protocols will be given, and a brief discussion of the impact that secure communications protocols have had on the electronic commerce arena. This paper particularly serves as a resource to those who are new to the information assur...

Over 330 million people live in India’s 5,165 cities, and 35 cities have a population of over a million each. Three (Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata) of the 10 largest metropolises in the world are in India. Over two-thirds of India’s GDP originates in urban agglomerations in the country. However, urban governance and finance in India leave much to be desired in terms of providing services to the country’s burgeoning urban population while accommodating different needs and pressures and adapting to shocks, whether natural or human-caused. This paper draws on lessons from fiscal federalism theory and the experiences of governance institutions and financing systems around the world to identify some key reforms needed to ensure more citizen participation and greater accountability in urban governance, and to augment and strengthen the capacity of Indian cities to deliver more adequate services and provide needed urban infrastructure.

Journal of Computational Physics, 2011