"Women on average are 14% less likely to own a mobile phone than men, which translates into 200 million fewer women than men owning mobile phones. Women in South Asia are 38% less likely to own a phone than men, highlighting that the gender gap in mobile phone ownership is wider in certain parts of
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the world. Even when women own mobile phones, there is a significant gender gap in mobile phone usage, which prevents them from reaping the full benefits of mobile phone ownership. Women report using phones less frequently and intensively than men, especially for more sophisticated services such as mobile internet. In most countries, fewer women than men who own phones report using messaging and data services beyond voice. Cost remains the greatest barrier overall to owning and using a mobile phone, particularly for women, who often have less financial independence than men." (Executive summary)
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"This timely study is based on detailed interviews with Chinese documentary makers rarely available in English, and insights gained by the author while working as a journalist in Beijing. It considers the relationship between independent documentaries and China’s official film and television secto
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rs, exploring the ways in which independent films probe, question and challenge the dominant ideas and narratives circulating in the state-sanctioned public sphere. Detailed analyses of key contemporary documentaries reveal a sustained attempt to forge an alternative public sphere where the views and experiences of petitioners, AIDS sufferers, dispossessed farmers and the victims of Mao’s repression can be publicly aired for a small, but steadily growing, public." (Publisher description)
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"The study of Chinese media is a field that is growing and evolving at an exponential rate. Not only are the Chinese media a fascinating subject for analysis in their own right, but they also offer scholars and students a window to observe multi-directional flows of information, culture and communic
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ations within the contexts of globalization and regionalization. Moreover, the study of Chinese media provides an invaluable opportunity to test and refine the variety of communications theories that researchers have used to describe, analyse, compare and contrast systems of communications." (Publisher description)
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"Adopting a truly global, theoretical and multidisciplinary perspective, Media Pluralism and Diversity intends to advance our understanding of media pluralism across the globe. It compares metrics that have been developed in different parts of the world to assess levels of, or threats to, media plur
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alism." (Publisher description)
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"This report gives forecasts for online video spend and consumption, where available, for 40 markets in which online video is at varying stages of development. From markets such as Singapore, where 85% of the population claims to access online video (according to GlobalWebIndex, 2014), to countries
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where online video is still in its early stages of growth, what we see is that online video consumption has risen sharply over the past few years and has begun to attract budget-switching from TV advertising. TV remains, of course, the world’s most popular advertising channel, and will be so for some years yet. Nevertheless, networks and studios are having to adapt to the new importance of digital." (Introduction, page 1)
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"This report surveys the changing patterns of media consumption in 65 countries across the world, and forecasts how the amount of time people allocate to different media will change between 2014 and 2017. It measures the amount of time spent reading newspapers and magazines, watching television, lis
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tening to the radio, visiting the cinema, using the internet, and viewing outdoor advertising while out of the home. Note that the extent of information available varies considerably from market to market. For some countries we have a full breakdown of consumption figures across all media, with separate figures for desktop and mobile internet, with historical figures back to 2010 and forecasts to 2014, plus monthly breakdowns for consumption across the year, and hourly breakdowns for consumption across the day. For a few countries there is very little research on media consumption trends, so we are able to present only a limited set of figures. We expect the scope of the report to expand in future editions, both by adding new countries and by providing more details for countries where information is currently sparse." (Introduction)
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"This paper provides one of the first studies on the role of social media in articulating individuals’ experiences and memories and (re-)shaping collective memory in contemporary China. It investigates how social media enable and facilitate the participation of ordinary citizens in distributing an
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d accumulating alternative narratives and memories of the past against the authoritarian version by taking the debate over China’s Great Famine – a topic long considered a political taboo – on Sina Weibo, one of the country’s most popular social media sites, as the case study. This study demonstrates that weibo provides people with an alternative communicative sphere for sharing previously suppressed, marginalised, “unofficial” memories as civil disobedience and accumulating them into an alternative collective memory that is relevant to the changing socio-political context of China." (Abstract)
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"Clandestine broadcasts are politically-motivated broadcasts produced by groups opposed to the government of the target country. Other target broadcasts can be produced by either governmental or non-governmental organisations and are targetted at zones of regional or local conflict." (Page 508)