"With regards to professional role orientations, Chinese journalists found it most important to report things as they are, to provide analysis of current affairs, to support national development, to provide advice, orientation and direction for daily life, and to be a detached observer. The relevanc
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e of these “classic” roles such as “to report things as they are” and “to provide analysis of current affairs” was fairly undisputed among the interviewed journalists as the relatively low standard deviations indicate. Likewise, there was a strong consensus among the respondents over the importance of supporting national development. Still, a majority of journalists in China found it important to provide the kind of news that attracts the largest audience, to let people express their views, to influence public opinion, and to support government policy. The most disputative role is to be an adversary of the government (s=1.32), which is also the least supportive role. Another highly disputative role is to convey a positive image of political leadership (s=1.16). Except for the roles of supporting national development and supporting government policy, other politically more assertive roles were not widely supported, such as setting the political agenda, motivating people to participate in political activity, and monitoring and scrutinizing political leaders." (Journalistic roles, pages 1-2)
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"Media concentration has been an issue around the world. To some observers the power of large corporations has never been higher. To others, the Internet has brought openness and diversity. What perspective is correct? The answer has significant implications for politics, business, culture, regulati
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on, and innovation. It addresses a highly contentious subject of public debate in many countries around the world. In this discussion, one side fears the emergence of media empires that can sway public opinion and endanger democracy. The other side believes the Internet has opened media to unprecedented diversity and worries about excessive regulation by government. Strong opinions and policy advocates abound on each side, yet a lack of quantitative research across time, media industries, and countries undermines these positions. This book moves beyond the rhetoric of free media and free markets to provide a dispassionate and data-driven analysis of global media ownership trends and their drivers. The book covers thirteen media industries, including television, newspapers, book publishing, film, search engines, ISPs, wireless telecommunication, and others across a 10- to 25-year period in thirty countries. After examining these countries, this book offers comparisons and analysis across industries, regions, companies, and development levels. It calculates overall national concentration trends beyond specific media industries, the market share of individual companies in the overall national media sector, and the size and trends of transnational companies in overall global media." (Publisher description)
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"This study aims to examine the pastoral situations of Wenzhou Diocese, to evaluate the formation for laity in Wenzhou Diocese under pastoral communication perspective, to find its positive and critical signs, as well as to analyze the pastoral needs, which leads to integrate pastoral communication
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in lay formation. The survey result shows that “Xue Xi Ban” (Basic Ecclesial Community in Wenzhou context) helps laity in Wenzhou to know Catholic faith, to live as Christian, to have sense of belonging, and to exercise their vocation and mission. The lack of Catechists, the study content, need for community building, and missing structural support, are the critical signs of “Xue Xi Ban”, which indicates the pastoral needs for lay formation. These needs are categorized as the need of strengthening pastoral communication in ministry (Preaching, Catechesis, Liturgy, Biblical Apostolate, and Service), the need of formation for catechists, and the need of means of social communication. This study also finds out seven challenges for lay formation: the Atheistic approach, the political pressure, the threat of Materialism, the impact of migration, the family problem, the division among the Catholic Church, and lack witness of life. The pastoral needs and challenges demand an emphasis on pastoral communication. By using the “Wenzhou Model of development”, the research explores the possibilities of integrating pastoral communication in lay formation, which includes to make a five-year pastoral plan, to promote Basic Ecclesial Community, to use possible agents for lay formation, and to create possible programs for lay formation." (Abstract)
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"The first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world, including Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the re
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sults of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences." (Back cover)
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"Now in paperback for the first time, the Handbook is an academic adaptation of information contained in the Global Report on the Status of Women in News Media, a study commissioned by the International Women's Media Foundation. The book's editor was the principal investigator of the original study.
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This text draws together the most robust data from that original study, presenting it in 29 chapters on individual nations and three additional theoretical chapters. The book is the most expansive effort to date to consider women's standing in the journalism profession across the world. Contents organize nations in relation to their progress within newsrooms, with those most advanced in gender equality representing diversity in terms of region and national development. Contributing authors are, in most cases, the original researchers for their respective nations in the Global Report study." (Publisher description)
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"Commercial Nationalism intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and, on the other, the commercial mobilization of nationalist discourses. The book's uniq
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ue contribution is to consider an emerging formation characterized by the following complementary (and related) developments: the ways in which states come increasingly to rely on commercial techniques for self-promotion, diplomacy, and internal national mobilization, and also the ways in which new and legacy forms of commercial media rely on the mobilization emerging configurations of nationalism for the purpose of selling, gaining ratings, and otherwise profiting. We see this formation as a unique reconfiguration of the formation of nationalism associated with the contemporary context. Often these processes are approached separately: what is the economic role of nationalism and how do media participate in the formation of national identity?" (Publisher description)
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"The 45 country reports gathered here illustrate the link between the internet and economic, social and cultural rights (ESCRs). Some of the topics will be familiar to information and communications technology for development (ICT4D) activists: the right to health, education and culture; the socioec
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onomic empowerment of women using the internet; the inclusion of rural and indigenous communities in the information society; and the use of ICT to combat the marginalisation of local languages. Others deal with relatively new areas of exploration, such as using 3D printing technology to preserve cultural heritage, creating participatory community networks to capture an “inventory of things” that enables socioeconomic rights, crowdfunding rights, or the negative impact of algorithms on calculating social benefits. Workers’ rights receive some attention, as does the use of the internet during natural disasters. Ten thematic reports frame the country reports. These deal both with overarching concerns when it comes to ESCRs and the internet – such as institutional frameworks and policy considerations – as well as more specific issues that impact on our rights: the legal justification for online education resources, the plight of migrant domestic workers, the use of digital databases to protect traditional knowledge from biopiracy, digital archiving, and the impact of multilateral trade deals on the international human rights framework. The reports highlight the institutional and country-level possibilities and challenges that civil society faces in using the internet to enable ESCRs. They also suggest that in a number of instances, individuals, groups and communities are using the internet to enact their socioeconomic and cultural rights in the face of disinterest, inaction or censure by the state." (Back cover)
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"This volume captures the domestication of mobile communication technologies by families in Asia, and its implications for family interactions and relationships. It showcases research on families across a spectrum of socio-economic profiles, from both rural and urban areas, offering insights on chil
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dren, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. While mobile communication diffuses through Asia at a blistering pace, families in the region are also experiencing significant changes in light of unprecedented economic growth, globalisation, urbanisation and demographic shifts. Asia is therefore at the crossroads of technological transformation and social change. This book analyses the interactions of these two contemporaneous trends from the perspective of the family, covering a range of family types including nuclear, multi-generational, transnational, and multi-local, spanning the continuum from the media-rich to the media have-less." (Publisher description)
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"ICTs in Developing Countries is a collection of conceptual and empirical works on the adoption and impacts of ICT use in developing societies. Bringing together a wide range of disciplines and contributors, it offers a rich examination of digital divide and ICT for development both in terms of cont
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extual information and disciplinary perspectives." (Publisher description)
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"Es lässt sich ein ausgesprochen breites Themenspektrum und eine hohe Kontinuität innerhalb der Berichterstattung feststellen. Dabei ist die journalistische Haltung keinesfalls einseitig negativ — vielmehr wird häufig ein ausgewogenes Chinabild vermittelt, das besonders dort kritisch ist, wo si
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ch Missstände nicht nur aus deutscher Sicht kommentieren lassen. Setzt man diese Berichterstattung in Beziehung zu dem hohen Stellenwert, der den Zeitungen in Bezug auf Glaubwürdigkeit und Seriosität in allen Bevölkerungsschichten zugewiesen wird haben, selbst in der jungen Generation, so ist der Einfluss solcher Berichterstattungsformen hoch einzuschätzen. Deutlich weniger als die negative Berichterstattung fällt jedoch die quantitativ dominierende neutral-sachliche Bewertung auf — gerade diese jedoch hat sich den letzen Jahren verstärkt." (Fazit, Seite 202-3)
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"This book analyzes extensive data on the world’s rapidly changing and growing access to, use and geographies of information and communications technologies. It studies not only the spatial differences in technology usage worldwide, but also examines digital differences in the major world nations
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of China, India, the United States and Japan at the state and provincial levels. At the global level, factors such as education, innovation, judicial independence and investment are important to explaining differences in the adoption and use of technology. The country studies corroborate consistent determinants for technology usage for education, urban location, economic prosperity, and infrastructure, but also reveal unique determinants, such as social capital in the United States and India, exports in China and working age population and patents in Japan. Spatial patterns are revealed that indicate clusters of high and low technology use for various nations around the world, the countries of Africa and for individual states/provinces within nations. Based on theory, novel findings and phenomena that have remained largely unreported, the book considers the future of the worldwide digital divides, the policy role of governments and the challenges of leadership." (Publisher description)
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"All in all, Chinese media development in Africa can be considered as a ‘charm offensive‘ in terrns of its scale and scope, which is characterised by the following: 1) all the projects are mainly government sponsored, strategically engineered and efficiently irnplemented; 2) projects centre arou
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nd infrastructure building and technical support, under the aegis of voluminous investment; 3) all projects and their outcomes have drawn attention around the globe, evoking particularly harsh criticism and even derogatory abuse from Western media and liberal intellectuals who fear that China will colonise Africa, thereby replacing the foundational belief in Western-imported press freedom with the Chinese model of ‘market-driven liberalisation under authoritarian control.‘" (Page 138)
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"In order to offer a more nuanced account of the relationship between online media and politics, this article proposes a theoretical framework that pays attention to discursive struggles, identifies strategies to contest hegemonic discourses, and employs a broadened notion of politics, referred to a
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s minimal politics. The framework is then used to analyze a corpus of Weibo (microblog) posts published by the charity organization, Love Save Pneumoconiosis (LSP). LSP activists use Weibo to campaign for medical treatment for workers with pneumoconiosis, and the article identifies two strategies of contestation in LSP activists' online activism. First, LSP activists articulate alternative discourses that challenge the hegemony of official discourses. Second, LSP activists' discourses are polyphonic expressions that legitimize the organization's work, while subtly politicizing the problem of pneumoconiosis. The strategies of contestation used by LSP activists exemplify how political contestation is possible in repressive contexts and illustrate the need to refine the theories used to study the political impact of online media." (Abstract)
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"Mediated Communities brings together a diverse, global cohort of academics and professional communicators to assess the current state of democratic mobilizing around the world and the ways in which protest movements are being transformed in the midst of a communication revolution. The volume’s co
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ntributors draw on a variety of international settings—from Greece to Lebanon, China to Argentina—to demonstrate the ways in which community organizing in the digital age relies increasingly on digital media to communicate, help participants find common ground, and fight for change. The contributors acknowledge the challenges that lie ahead for creating real and lasting democratic change but at the same time are able to draw attention to the potential that digital media hold for strengthening citizen voices around the globe." (Back cover)
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"The rapid development of the information society has accentuated the importance of digital divides, which refer to economic and social inequalities among populations due to differences in access to, use of, or knowledge of information and communication technologies (ICT). This book discusses the cu
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rrent state of digital divides, ranging from global." (Publisher description)
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"The history of Catholic mission in China has revealed the fact that the encounter of the Gospel with Chinese culture and people, beginning with the folk customs and the further dialogue with Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. The summit of Church mission is in the period of Ming Dynasty. Matteo Ric
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ci, a Jesuit missionary, is considered the apostle of China. Since then, his missionary approach – the accommodation missionary strategy affirmed by the Second Vatican Council as the model of “Inculturation” – is widely studied not only in China but the entire world. The key to understand Ricci’s missionary method is Ricci himself. It is the initial step to explore his ministry and missionary activities in history, the Ming Dynasty. Pastoral and Evangelizing communication centers on the ministers, precisely, discussing the ways and means of pastoral and evangelizing ministry of the Church ad extra and ad intra. The decisive element to foster a competent communicator requires the communicative disposition, which means to open. Pastoral and Evangelizing communication also highlights to proper use the mass means of social communication to achieve the proclamation of Christ in Chinese context. Time has changed. Today, the Church in China needs to deal with the Sino-Vatican relationship, the divisions inside the Church and the social-economic challenges. The study tries to further investigate Ricci’s Missionary activities and approaches and to analyze it from the perspective of pastoral and evangelizing communication, so as to help pastoral ministers living in the 21st century in China." (Abstract)
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"Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest and placing greater demands on the private sector to take down offending content. State authorities have also jailed more users for their online writings, wh
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ile criminal and terrorist groups have made public examples of those who dared to expose their activities online. This was especially evident in the Middle East, where the public flogging of liberal bloggers, life sentences for online critics, and beheadings of internet-based journalists provided a powerful deterrent to the sort of digital organizing that contributed to the Arab Spring. In a new trend, many governments have sought to shift the burden of censorship to private companies and individuals by pressing them to remove content, often resorting to direct blocking only when those measures fail. Local companies are especially vulnerable to the whims of law enforcement agencies and a recent proliferation of repressive laws. But large, international companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have faced similar demands due to their significant popularity and reach." (Page 1)
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