ICT diffusion and the digital divide in tourism: Kazakhstan perspective

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Read all about it : the free press, the public sphere and democracy in Iraq

Despite a wealth of recent research which has detailed the impact that new media outlets and technologies have had on the Middle East&rsquo;s nascent public sphere and its role in promoting democracy, there has been little investigation into the re-emergence of the free press in Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the corresponding end to his tight control over the nation&rsquo;s media sector. This paper begins by reviewing Iraq&rsquo;s long relationship with the written word and its corresponding public sphere. It traces the introduction of the printing press to Iraq by the Ottomans and details those periods when the Iraqi press was truly free, fostering the emergence of a civil society and democratic reforms (such as under the Young Turks, the early Hashemite era and following the Second World War). It also examines those periods when the Iraqi media was most restricted and did little else than praise the regime at hand (such as under Ottoman rule and most recently under the Ba&dagger;th regime, especially under Saddam Hussein). Following on, this article reviews the developments since the fall of Saddam Hussein and, despite the extensive interference in Iraq&rsquo;s media sector from governmental entities both outside and inside Iraq, it concludes by arguing that these papers have been central to the re-emergence of an Iraqi public sphere which has openly debated and discussed the issues pertinent to post-Saddam Iraq.<br /

Blogging the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals

This study focuses on the use of new technologies by the sports-media complex, looking specifically at the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals. Combining the world's single largest sports media event with one of the most current, complex forms of Web-based communication, this article explores extent to which football fans embedded in Germany used the Internet to blog their World Cup experiences. Various categories of blog sites were identified, including independent bloggers, bloggers using football-themed Web sites, and blogs hosted on corporate-sponsored platforms. The study shows that the anticipated &quot;democratizing potential&quot; of blogging was not evident during Germany 2006. Instead, blogging acted as a platform for corporations, which, employing professional journalists, told the fans' World Cup stories. &copy; 2009 Human Kinetics, inc

Blogging on the ice: Connecting audiences with climate-change sciences

Scientists working in Antarctica have recognized the need to counteract problems associated with mainstream media's treatment of the climate-change crisis. For this reason, several of them have assumed the role of citizen journalists in order to report on the effects of global warming first-hand. More specifically, they have chosen to communicate directly with the general public through official or personal blogs. In so doing they are capitalizing on the way the Internet is changing science news and journalism. This article draws on an analysis of more than 50 Antarctic blogs published during the International Polar Year (2007-08), as well as data from e-interviews with a broad selection of bloggers, in order to examine how scientists 'on the ice' act as citizen journalists. The article explores the idea of citizen journalism as education and the extent to which the scientists achieve an unmediated form of communication through their blogging efforts. It concludes by suggesting this new form of citizen journalism, beyond raising people's awareness of the climate-change crisis, also signals an important way in which mainstream environmental reporting can be reinvigorated. © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article

Routinisation of Audience Participation: BBC News Online, Citizenship and Democratic Debate

Leading up to the 2010 UK general election, Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, stressed the importance of the Corporation’s ability ‘to provide a strong and independent space where the big debates can take place, free from political or commercial influence’. ‘In this public space,’ he continued, ‘everyone can have access to the lifeblood of healthy democratic debate – impartial news and information’. Affirming the importance of BBC Online, Thompson described it as ‘being a cornerstone of what the BBC should be about’ (Thompson, 2010). As with previous elections, one of the key strategic priorities for the BBC’s Election 2010 website was to help inform the citizenry about the campaign and empower voters to make an informed choice. In the most traditional sense, this was achieved through the BBC’s journalism and a series of rich background features – e.g. guidance on voting procedures, MPs and parliamentary politics, and comparisons of party manifestos. The BBC election websites have also featured experimentation with various forms of audience engagement, exemplified by different interactive features on the BBC micro websites for the 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2010 UK general elections. This has traditionally been anchored in the Corporation’s public service commitment to facilitating ‘civic engagement’ and providing ‘democratic value’ to British citizens (see also Thorsen et al., 2009, Thorsen, 2010, 2011, Allan and Thorsen, 2010). The BBC’s news website was incredibly popular during the 2010 election according to visitor statistics. On results day, May 7, BBC News Online had 11.4 million individual users, breaking the previous record set on November 5, 2008, for the election of Barack Obama as US President (Herrmann, 2010). Comparing this to 2005, the number of unique visitors to the BBC’s election site on results day, May 6, was 3 million taking the overall BBC News Online total to 4.3 million (Ward, 2006:17). This demonstrates a near three-fold increase in individual users from one election to the next and indicates that whilst the internet might not be perceived as having had a significant impact on the election outcomes, the BBC has certainly had a considerable impact on citizens’ online activities. Based on a larger study into BBC’s election websites involving interviews, observations and textual analysis, this chapter will examine how audience participation had by 2010 become a routinised part of the Corporation’s newsroom. It will begin by providing an historical overview of how public access programming has developed within the BBC and its influence on how the Corporation has sought to facilitate participatory spaces online. Following a discussion of online participatory spaces on the BBC’s election websites, it will offer a critique of how these are operationalized internally. It will argue that despite converged newsroom practices, the scale of the BBC’s operations means facilitation of civic engagement is fragmented between competing stakeholders within the Corporation each with their own routinised practices and perception of its value. This tension has a dramatic effect not only on the dialectic relationship between BBC journalists and its audiences, but also on the type of ‘public space’ the Corporation is able to foster and by extension the empowerment of citizens to engage in ‘healthy democratic debate’

Globalization and Legal Information Management

Draft of Chapter 2 of the IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management by Jules Winterton, Associate Director and Librarian, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. This chapter is a relatively brief survey of what globalization means in the field of legal information management and what effect it has had and will have on a range of activities and policy areas relevant to the practice of legal information management. There are firstly some comments towards a definition of globalization for the purposes of this chapter and then a survey of the following in the light of that definition: legal systems, information consumers, legal information needs, information and management, legal publishing, digitization, intellectual property rights, lobbying and advocacy on policy issues (the politics of law librarianship), international networking, and legal information managers and law librarians of the future

Intellectual Property Research: From the Dustiest Law Book to the Most Far off Database

This issue of IDEA introduces a regular series of articles on intellectual property research tools and strategies based on my experience for over a decade as Intellectual Property Librarian and Research Professor at Franklin Pierce Law Center. Pierce Law is consistently ranked among the top law schools training IP professionals. I have taught IP legal research, patent, trademark and copyright searching to hundreds of students and IP professionals in Pierce Law Graduate Programs. I have tackled hundreds of reference and research questions as well as working on countless projects requiring IP information. So I have been faced with challenges and changes common to consumers of IP information. What are the types of data IP researchers seek? What are the options for access to such data? How do we evaluate the access points? What is the value added to our information access choices? The mission of this series is to present tools and strategies and answers some of these consumer questions within evaluative frameworks appropriate to the tools under consideration. Each information acquisition choice is made on a moment-by-moment basis subject to the press of business. Choices are made by the totality of the circumstances. Pressures and factors such as time and money often drive information consumption and will be acknowledged and addressed in the series. Despite the intense growth of IP as a legal specialty, the widespread focus on IP in other disciplines outside the law and the increasing use of non-legal data such as patent statistical indicators, little has been written on IP research. There are no dedicated treatises or periodicals on IP legal research. There are no comprehensive treatises on patent, trademark or copyright searching. The intent of this series is not scholarship and footnotes. The intent is to provide some helpful tools and strategies to those performing IP research on the spectrum from law to facts. So, the phrase IP research in this introduction, unless otherwise specified, refers to the acquisition all types of IP information by the full range of consumers