"Afghanistan has made great strides in establishing media and communications outlets. However, very little is known about the ways in which Afghans actually engage in information exchange. To inform work with the media and effectively enhance access to information in Afghanistan, Internews commissio
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ned Sayara Research to map information ecosystems in three areas of Afghanistan. The information ecosystem in Afghanistan is vital to understand how Afghans make decisions about everything from personal security to health, migration, and livelihoods. Using a systems approach to analyzing information within and across communities is a powerful way to uncover deficiencies in current approaches and opportunities for future work." (Internews website)
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"Based on 15 months of ethnographic research, this book aims to understand why low-income Brazilians have invested so much of their time and money in learning about social media. Juliano Spyer explores this question from a number of perspectives, including education, relationships, work and politics
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. He argues the use of social media reflects contradictory values. Low-income Brazilians embrace social media to display literacy and upward mobility, but the same technology also strengthens traditional networks of support that conflict with individualism." (Back cover)
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"One of the first ethnographic studies to explore the use of social media in the everyday lives of people in Tamil Nadu, 'Social Media in South India' provides an understanding of this subject in a region experiencing rapid transformation. The influx of IT companies over the past decade into what wa
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s once a space dominated by agriculture has resulted in a complex juxtaposition between an evolving knowledge economy and the traditions of rural life. While certain class tensions have emerged in response to this juxtaposition, a study of social media in the region suggests that similarities have also transpired, observed most clearly in the blurring of boundaries between work and life for both the old residents and the new. Venkatraman explores the impact of social media at home, work and school, and analyses the influence of class, caste, age and gender on how, and which, social media platforms are used in different contexts. These factors, he argues, have a significant effect on social media use, suggesting that social media in South India, while seeming to induce societal change, actually remains bound by local traditions and practices." (Back cover)
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"The report has two main parts. In the first part, we explore the questions discussed in the previous paragraphs [on the internet of things] through a regional survey spanning the 22 Arab countries. In the second part we continue the tradition set in the previous editions of the Arab Social Media Re
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port series by exploring the growth and usage trends of influential social media platforms across the region, including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and, for the first time, Instagram. The findings highlight important changes—and some stagnation—in the ways social media is infiltrating demographic layers in Arab societies, be it gender, age and language." (Introduction, page 8)
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"Compared to five years ago, internet penetration rose in all six countries surveyed and most dramatically in Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia. Smartphone ownership tracks closely with internet use in the six surveyed countries. Nearly all nationals in Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE own a sma
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rtphone compared with 83% of Jordanians and 65% of Tunisians. Use of Arabic online has increased proportionally with the increase in internet users. In comparison, use of the internet in English remains essentially flat, 25% in 2013 and 28% in 2017, despite the increase in internet use. As internet penetration rises, nationals are less likely to be using offline media platforms compared with 2013. Most nationals still watch TV, but the rate declined modestly since 2013 (98% in 2013 vs. 93% in 2017). Rates of newspaper readership, however, declined more sharply from 47% in 2013 to 25% in 2017. Radio and magazines also declined in popularity since 2013 (radio: 59% in 2013 vs. 49% in 2017; magazines: 26% in 2013 vs. 19% in 2017)." (Executive summary, page 10)
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"Access to and use of internet in Afghanistan has grown in the past decade to reach approximately 12% of the population. Social media penetration has followed the same course, challenging traditional media platforms and providing new platforms for public discourse. Social media carries the expectati
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ons of propagating change in Afghanistan through open expression, but the reality of its usage provides a need for a more nuanced assessment of its impact on Afghan society Social media users represent approximately 9% of the Afghan population, and are a homogenous group of primarily young, urban, and educated individuals." (Executive summary)
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"Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in one of the most under-developed regions in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, this book describes the uses and consequences of social media for its residents. Jolynna Sinanan argues that this semi-urban town is a place in-between: somewhere city dwell
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ers look down on and villagers look up to. The complex identity of the town is expressed through uses of social media, with significant results for understanding social media more generally. Not elevating oneself above others is one of the core values of the town, and social media becomes a tool for social visibility; that is, the process of how social norms come to be and how they are negotiated. Carnival logic and high-impact visuality is pervasive in uses of social media, even if Carnival is not embraced by all Trinidadians in the town and results in presenting oneself and association with different groups in varying ways. The study also has surprising results in how residents are explicitly non-activist and align themselves with everyday values of maintaining good relationships in a small town, rather than espousing more worldly or cosmopolitan values." (Back cover)
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"Why do women respond so differently to becoming a mother in England from the way they do in Trinidad? How are values such as carnival and suburbia expressed visually? Based on an examination of over 20,000 images, the authors argue that phenomena such as selfies and memes must be analysed in their
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local context. The book aims to highlight the importance of visual images today in patrolling and controlling the moral values of populations, and explores the changing role of photography from that of recording and representation, to that of communication, where an image not only documents an experience but also enhances it, making the moment itself more exciting." (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press)
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"The media and political systems of former communist countries in Central/Eastern Europe share a number of similarities with those in Southern Europe. According to Karol Jakubowicz, these similarities also include late democratisation, a weak middle class, marked social and economic differences, a s
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trong catholicism, etc. Where are the third-wave democracies to date, particularly as regards their media systems? And where are they heading for? This volume with his differents talks of a joint conference in 2016 attempts to answer these questions and many more." (Publisher description)
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"In this decade of digital transformation in the region, the Arab World stands at a critical juncture, where the internet is driving three interconnected waves of change: 1. A developmental juncture: The emergence of an online critical mass of 173 million interconnected people online today is creati
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ng new opportunities for economic growth, development, information flows, as well as cultural and societal exchanges; 2. A demographic tipping point: The millennial generation of “digital natives”, with its universal embrace for digitization, increasingly driving business opportunities and growth, acquiring more leadership positions in businesses and governments around the region, and becoming the driving force within most regional labour markets. Globally, 70% of the online community is comprised of youth. 3In the Arab world, nearly 65% of those using the internet are young people between 15 and 24 years old; 3. A governmental paradigmatic shift, where an increasing number of governments in the region are reaching advanced levels of digital maturity and adoption, and acquiring high level of sophistication and capacity for internet governance and digital transformation. Today, despite the numerous economic and developmental challenges, as well as violent conflicts and political tensions in the region, this critical mass of the population has become almost universally connected to the internet in an increasing number of countries. For example, in 2017 there are three countries with more than 90% internet penetration and 12 countries with more than 100% mobile phone penetration rates. According to our estimates, by 2020, usage of the internet is expected to reach universal adoption levels in at least 7 countries in the region." (Page 5)
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"Juliano Spyer procura entender por que brasileiros de baixa renda investiram tanto tempo e dinheiro para incorporar o uso das mídias sociais a seu cotidiano. Explora essa questão por uma variedade de temas, incluindo educação, relacionamentos, trabalho e política e argumenta que o uso das míd
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ias sociais reflete valores e motivações contraditórias. Brasileiros de baixa renda abraçam as mídias sociais para exibir sua crescente escolaridade e mobilidade social, mas a mesma tecnologia também fortalece redes de apoio mútuo tradicionais que rejeitam atitudes individualistas." (Descrição da casa editora)
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"This volume examines the lived experiences of Africans and their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. By offering a comparative, critical and largely qualitative account of audiences and users across
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a range of national contexts in different regions of Africa, the book examines media through the voices and perspectives of those engaging with it rather than reducing audiences and users to numbers and statistics, ready to be exploited as potential target markets or as political constituencies. The critical, qualitative research perspective adopted in this book enables us to gain a better understanding of how African viewers, listeners and users make sense of a range of media forms; what role these play in their everyday lives and what audience and user engagement can tell us about how citizens perceive the state, how they imagine themselves in the wider world and how they relate to each other. The book argues that the experiences of audiences and engagements of users with a range of media—newspapers, radio, television, magazines, internet, mobile phones, social media—are always grounded in particular contexts, worldviews and knowledge systems of life and wisdom: ‘It is akin to the tortoise. The tortoise never leaves its shell behind. It carries it wherever it goes’ (Chivaura 2006: 221). African media audiences and users carry their contexts and cultural repertoires in the same way a tortoise carries its shell. Thus far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has addressed the policy and regulatory aspects as well as the relation between media institutions and the state (Willems 2014a). While studies on media, democratization and press freedom are invaluable, the ways in which ordinary people make sense of, and relate to, media in their everyday lives are largely left beyond consideration. As Barber (1997: 357) has pointed out, ‘[w]hat has not yet been sufficiently explored is the possibility that specific African audiences have distinctive, conventional modes and styles of making meaning, just as performers/speakers do. We need to ask how audiences do their work of interpretation’." (Page 4)
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"The report is based on a survey of more than 70,000 people in 36 markets, along with additional qualitative research, which together make it the most comprehensive ongoing comparative study of news consumption in the world. A key focus remains in Europe where we have added Slovakia, Croatia, and Ro
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mania for the first time – but we have also added four markets in Asia (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore) along with three additional Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, and Mexico) [...] In particular we have focused on two areas: (1) the extent to which people are prepared to pay for news or the different ways journalism might be funded in the future, and (2) understanding more about some of the drivers of low, and in some cases declining, trust in the media. For the first time we’ve attempted to measure and visualise relative levels of media polarisation across countries and identify a link between media polarisation and trust. Another focus has been on the media’s relationship with platforms – in particular how news is discovered and consumed within distributed environments such as social media, search, and online aggregators." (Foreword)
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"Social media is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives yet the impact on people with disabilities has gone largely unscrutinised. Similarly, while social media and disability are often both observed through a focus on the Western, developed and English-speaking world, different global
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perspectives are often overlooked. This collection explores the opportunities and challenges social media represents for the social inclusion of people with disabilities from a variety of different global perspectives that include Africa, Arabia and Asia along with European, American and Australasian perspectives and experiences." (Publisher description)
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