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The monograph is focused on three essential research problems identified by the key terms used in its title. The analysis covers concepts that previously were not subject to in-depth research projects: the MediaPolis, a MediaEgo and evolution of the political communication paradigm, observed and analysed on the political scene in Poland. Evolution of the public sphere and the media requires consideration of the causes of ongoing changes and of forecast transformations initiated by those changes. Hence, the research project focused on the sphere that emerged in an intersection of known discourse areas – public, political, meta-political and media discourses. The monograph summarizes years of research into the proposed concepts of a MediaEgo politician and the MediaPolis public sphere.

McLuhan in Reverse proposes two new and startling theses about Marshall McLuhan’s body of work. The first argues that despite McLuhan’s claim that he did not work from a theory, his body of work in fact constitutes a theory that Robert K. Logan calls his General Theory of Media (GToM). The second thesis is that McLuhan’s GToM is characterized by a number of reversals, including his reversals of figure and ground, cause and effect, percepts and concepts; and the medium and its content as described in his famous one-liner "the medium is the message." 

While McLuhan’s famous Laws of Media are part of his GToM, Logan has identified nine other elements of the GToM. They are his use of probes; figure/ground analysis; the idea that the medium is the message; the subliminal nature of ground or environment revealed only by the creation of an anti-environment; the reversal of cause and effect; the importance of percept over concept and hence a focus on the human sensorium and media as extensions of man; the division of communication into the oral, written, and electric ages along with the notions of acoustic and visual space; the notion of the global village; and finally, media as environments and hence media ecology.

In The Preamble as Policy: A Social and Economic Analysis of the Preamble to the Constitution the authors show that the Preamble to the Constitution is more than an introduction to the document; it sets the tone for the rest of the document and how it should be viewed and interpreted. It is also a list of goals for a new government and a tool for holding our elected representatives accountable for their efforts on our behalf. The Preamble as Policy looks at the history of the development of the Constitution to show how the Preamble can be used to judge the laws and policies enacted by the federal government. The Preamble as Policy weaves political thought, history, and current events together allowing for examination of an oft forgotten part of the Constitution. It provides a unique framework and firm foundation for class discussions or social interactions about what we have achieved as a nation and where we might have come up short.

The purpose of this book is to understand the nature of social media and the impact they are having on almost all aspects of modern-day existence from family life and social interactions to education and commerce. Just as fish are unaware of the water they swim in and we humans are unaware of the air that we breathe so it is that the users of social media are unaware of the effects of these media and take their existence as a natural part of their environment. We will make use of Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology approach to understanding media. It is our intention to reveal the effects of social media on their users, how they are changing the nature of our social interactions and how we through our interaction with social media have become actual extensions of our social media, the reverse of McLuhan’s notion that media are extensions of mankind.

We will analyze the major social media apps including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tinder, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and blogs. We also examine the Splinternet and the social media scene in Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam and the Islamic world. We study the impacts of social media monopolies, the nature of advertising and branding in social media apps and the social media front in cyberwarfare. We close our study with an analysis of the social media counter revolution waged by players who actually helped to create social media.

Although the American Civil War has received extensive scholarly attention in the 150+ years since its conclusion, far less scholarly work has been devoted to western newspapers and their experiences of that bloody conflict. This first volume of a two-volume set reveals that the West was not immune from the war’s battles, military recruitment, national anxieties, or partisan infighting. The Western Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War explores how editors throughout the region (from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast) responded to secession, the war, and its immediate aftermath. This edited volume examines editors’ outspoken partisanship (including political feuds), their newsgathering techniques, their financial concerns, and their responses to wartime press censorship. The book also reveals how the war was reported in the western press, while also casting a light on reporting of home front issues. This first volume reveals the financial and editorial lengths that editors went to in order to meet readers’ demands for war and home front news across a vast region where infrastructure was poor and news, therefore, was often slow to arrive.

This book challenges white and Western feminist approaches to embodied politics, or the use of the body in everyday enactments of resistance, while mapping transgressive performances of femininities by the funkeiras, marginalized women and transfeminine people of color artists in Brazilian favela funk. Often studied from a white feminist perspective, embodied politics reflects debates about agency and structural change that are generally applicable to white women in the West. Concurrently, studies of femininity tend to universalize experiences of gender oppression encountered by white women to women across the globe. In this work, the author offers a transnational perspective on the performative force of embodied politics as a possible means to disrupt white, classist heteropatriarchal structures that oppress particularly poor women and transfeminine people of color in Brazil. This project has a threefold goal: first, it challenges the theoretical shortcomings of white feminist approaches to embodied politics, providing instead a transfeminista take on the concept. Secondly, this project aims to shed light on how traditional methodological approaches have hindered nuanced understandings of women and people of color and their performances. Third and finally, by challenging and re-envisioning the potential of embodied politics from a transnational perspective, the text intends to contribute to the field of critical intercultural communication’s growing but still limited research around bodies and performance, especially of those who are marginalized in global contexts.

Twenty-five years have elapsed since apartheid’s end and South Africa is in a state of emergency. The Black majority are landless and without basic amenities. According to a World Bank report, inequality has increased since apartheid’s end. The charismatic Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader, Julius Malema says, “the time for reconciliation is over, now is the time for justice,” and he has captivated the minds of South African youth. The EFF was the only top political party to increase its voter base in the 2019 South African general elections, and its core voters were young people, restless for change. The EFF is a protest movement, representative of an international trend among the youth, who are using social media to protest. The EFF’s pillars have emerged from a clarion call among the youth for their liberation. Malema says the EFF is the “true inheritor of the ANC’s radical agenda,” as he vows to fight corruption in South Africa, striking fear in the hearts of the white monopoly capitalists and their conspirators. In addition, Malema’s agitational rhetoric is investigated in the first rhetorical study on his discourse, and the results are fascinating. At its core, this struggle among the generations, is for the future direction of South Africa. So, the South African youth are singing struggle songs and toyi-toying, wearing red berets, attentively listening to their command team, holding up their election manifesto called a gun, and are equipped now for the legislative battles for economic freedom in their lifetime.

Pensar el estudio de la comunicación como una "guerra" implica reconocer que este no es un campo de estudio delimitado por una sola disciplina o una estricta definición del concepto "comunicación". Exige, también, identificar diversas tradiciones de investigación, así como explorar los principales dilemas que han guiado varias disciplinas en distintas épocas históricas y latitudes del mundo. Esta colección de tres volúmenes propone, entonces, analizar la comunicación y los medios desde muy diversas trincheras. Estos diversos panoramas, enfoques, tradiciones, épocas, escuelas, autores y sus preocupaciones dialogan entre sí. No hay consensos definitivos; pero tampoco perdedores o ganadores en el debate. La "guerra" consiste pues, en identificar lo que está en juego; reconocer la diversidad de opiniones e intereses, y; considerar el vasto arsenal disponible para resolver los grandes dilemas de la comunicación.

Volumen I. Enfoques disciplinarios

Este primer volumen de La comunicación y sus guerras teóricas. Introducción a las teorías de la comunicación y los medios revisa los principales enfoques disciplinarios: sus supuestos, alcances y límites, así como las propuestas generales de los diversos cristales desde los que se mira este complejo campo de estudio. "Y es que en el mundo traidor", dicta el verso, "no hay ni verdad ni mentira: todo es según el color del cristal con que se mira". Este volumen presenta algunas (im)precisiones necesarias, al tiempo que propone un mapa tentativo para navegar en esta muy variada área de estudio. El recorrido comienza por el enfoque tradicional de la sociología invitándonos a cuestionar el determinismo tecnológico que constantemente amenaza el estudio de la comunicación y los medios. Otros "cristales" como el enfoque normativo, el cultural, el afectivo, el biológico, el económico, el digital o el político complementan esta revisión crítica a través de las plumas de los grandes expertos de cada mirada.

In a unique, and at times highly polemical way, the author demonstrates how the media generally influences thinking and what kind of content they put into peoples’ heads. He aims to encourage a better understanding of oneself, one’s environment, and the world but above all, a better understanding of freedom, the condition of democracy - or dictatorship. This is probably the first book in the media and communication studies which, through scientific provocation, makes the readers delve deeply into their intelligence, teaches them how to use it, and allows them to decide whether they have a weak, average, or insightful mind. The book sets one of the most important trends: it tells how the media think and how they shape their audiences.