Dale F. Eickelman, Jon W. Anderson (eds.): New Media in the Muslim World. The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd ed. (2003)

19 September 2010, dusan

This second edition of a widely acclaimed collection of essays reports on how new media—fax machines, satellite television, and the Internet—and the new uses of older media—cassettes, pulp fiction, the cinema, the telephone, and the press—shape belief, authority, and community in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chapters dealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities in the United States and elsewhere. The extent to which today’s new media have transcended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understandings of gender, authority, social justice, identities, and politics in Muslim societies emerges from this timely and provocative book.

Publisher Indiana University Press, 2003
Indiana series in Middle East studies
Edition 2
ISBN 0253216052, 9780253216052
213 pages

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Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)

6 May 2010, dusan

We live in the midst of a revolution in communication technologies that affects the way in which people feel, think, and behave. The mass media (including web-based media), Manuel Castells argues, has become the space where political and business power strategies are played out; power now lies in the hands of those who understand or control communication.

Over the last thirty years, Castells has emerged as one of the world’s leading communications theorists. In this, his most far-reaching book for a decade, he explores the nature of power itself, in the new communications environment. His vision encompasses business, media, neuroscience, technology, and, above all, politics. His case histories include global media deregulation, the misinformation that surrounded the invasion of Iraq, environmental movements, the role of the internet in the Obama presidential campaign, and media control in Russia and China. In the new network society of instant messaging, social networking, and blogging–“mass self-communication”–politics is fundamentally media politics. This fact is behind a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy that challenges the meaning of democracy in much of the world.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 0199567042, 9780199567041
Length 571 pages

publisher
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Christian Fuchs: Internet and Society. Social Theory in the Information Age (2007)

20 February 2010, dusan

In this study, Christian Fuchs discusses how the internet has transformed the lives of human beings and social relationships in contemporary society. By outlining a social theory of the internet and the information society, he demonstrates how the ecological, economic, political, and cultural systems of contemporary society have been transformed by new ICTs. Fuchs highlights how new forms of cooperation and competition are advanced and supported by the internet in subsystems of society and also discusses opportunities and risks of the information society.

Publisher Routledge, 2007
ISBN 0415961327, 9780415961325
398 pages

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