Ellen Mickiewicz: Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (1990)
Filed under book | Tags: · communism, mass media, politics, public broadcasting, radio, soviet union, television
Television has changed drastically in the Soviet Union over the last three decades. In 1960, only five percent of the population had access to TV, but now the viewing population has reached near total saturation. Today’s main source of information in the USSR, television has become Mikhail Gorbachev’s most powerful instrument for paving the way for major reform.
Containing a wealth of interviews with major Soviet and American media figures and fascinating descriptions of Soviet TV shows, Ellen Mickiewicz’s wide-ranging, vividly written volume compares over one hundred hours of Soviet and American television, covering programs broadcast during both the Chernenko and Gorbachev governments. Mickiewicz describes the enormous significance and popularity of news programs and discusses how Soviet journalists work in the United States. Offering a fascinating depiction of the world seen on Soviet TV, she also explores the changes in programming that have occurred as a result of glasnost.
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 1990
ISBN 0195063198, 9780195063196
304 pages
PDF (16 MB, updated on 2014-4-27)
Comment (0)Elizabeth Losh: Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, hypertext, marketing, mass media, p2p, politics, video games, viral marketing, virtual communities
Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government’s digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government’s digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users.
Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.
Losh concludes that the government’s virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents’ need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262123045, 9780262123044
416 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-14)
Comment (0)Jordan Crandall (ed.): Under Fire 1 & 2. The Organization and Representation of Violence (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, democracy, journalism, mass media, military, politics, war
Through a series of discussions about an array of issues–battle simulation techniques and news programming, democracy and violence, the privatization of the military, and militarized bodies–Jordan Crandall explores the organization and representation of contemporary armed conflict. Moderated by Crandall, Under Fire 1 is a compilation of a series of dialogues that occurred online from January 25 through April 19, 2004 between artists, political scientists, critics, activists, and journalists around the central theme.
Publisher Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2005
ISBN 90-73362-61-X
Length 96 pages
Under Fire 2 is the second collection edited by Jordan Crandall in an ongoing project that explores the organization and representation of armed conflict. Emerging from online dialogues among a group of artists, theorists, scientists, critics, activists, and journalists during three months of 2004 and reorganized thematically, the discussions in Under Fire 2 aim to offer new insights into symptomatic violence. The book covers issues such as the privatization of the military and the contributions of commercial and independent news media, as well as representations from artistic, literary, and popular entertainment sources, to our cultural perception of conflict. Rather than relying on discourses based on Western conceptions of modernity, the project is dedicated to opening up new historical perspectives, exploring the potential of Islamist points of view as sources of critical and political debate.
Publisher Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2005
ISBN 9073362652, 9789073362659
Length 112 pages
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