Preface: Communication, empowerment and governance: The 21st century enigma

Communication in the 21st century is transforming rapidly through the globalization of organizations and digital technologies.Communication not only shapes organizational governance and empowerment but also influences our way of thinking.Due to these twin forces, the roles of communication must be explored in the context of organizational governance and its impact on media and society. The economic crisis that hit East Asian countries just before the turn of the 21st century and Europe a decade or so later has proven to be a transformative factor triggering local conflict and change (e.g., leadership transitions and uneven liberalization of global economic policies, among others) and creating new organizing processes forcing disparate countries together in closer interactions.In these closer interactions, pressures for conformity and adherence to institutional norms have become a manifest.But the basic clash between western-based conceptions of liberal economic regionalism and the Asian value of mercantilism has created conflicts making future cooperation more difficult. Situations exemplifying this can be found around the globe in very different contexts, even as it is still somewhat surprising to come across the application of similar methodologies in different scenarios and backgrounds.In addressing events such as the economic crisis that befell the East Asian countries, this conference discusses the crucial concerns (and their potential solutions) related to the emergence,interconnected elements from various communication contexts, organizational government perspectives and empowerment that influence our way of thinking in the context of the basic clash between Western-based conceptions of liberal economic regionalism and the Asian value of mercantilism.The conference provides a broad platform for discourse on the emergence and interconnected issues shaped by the meaning of communication, governance and empowerment as understood in the Asia-Pacific region as well as other parts of the world. The 2014 theme “Communication, Empowerment and Governance: The 21st Century Enigma” is aimed toward advancing scholarships in the field of communication which would benefit communities that are experiencing change.This volume comprises papers that were presented at the 4th International Conference on Communication and Media (i-COME’14) which was held in Langkawi Island, from the 18 to 20 October 2014.Organised by the Communication Department, School of Multimedia Technology and Communication, Universiti Utara Malaysia, this conference was attended by 200 participants from 20 countries, including those from Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia.As guest editors of the conference proceedings, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to the members of the scientific committee, reviewers and contributors to this volume for their goodwill, support and patience in revising their papers.We are also grateful to the committee members of the i-COME’14 who have assisted us in bringing this volume to fruition

Reclaiming “People Power”: Prospects for Renewed Civil Society Engagement and Democratic Governance

With mounting challenges to democratization and the threat of regression, one asks how do we best reclaim spaces for engagement and public participation. The paper turns to civil society and revisits the case of the Philippines. It takes a closer look at their contributions, experiences, and insights as to challenges faced by the country relative to democratic nation-building. Towards this end, the paper discusses prospects for renewed engagement towards inclusive and democratic governance

Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook serve as "networked publics." As with unmediated publics like parks and malls, youth use networked publics to gather, socialize with their peers, and make sense of and help build the culture around them. This article examines American youth engagement in networked publics and considers how properties unique to such mediated environments (e.g., persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences) affect the ways in which youth interact with one another. Ethnographic data is used to analyze how youth recognize these structural properties and find innovative ways of making these systems serve their purposes. Issues like privacy and impression management are explored through the practices of teens and youth participation in social network sites is situated in a historical discussion of youth's freedom and mobility in the United States

Do companies reduce CSR disclosures during recessions?

Purpose: We investigate trends in prevalence and volume of CSR disclosure by the top 50 New Zealand listed companies from 2005 to 2010, i.e. from before until after the initial impact of the global financial crisis (GFC). Design/methodology/approach: We examine the annual reports of each of the companies between the years 2005 and 2010, as well as company websites for standalone CSR reports. We count the number of pages of any social and environmental disclosures in annual reports and in standalone reports for each year and use this data to assess whether overall trends can be discerned. We compare CSR disclosure trends with changes in business confidence. Findings: Our results reveal a general upward trend in CSR disclosures over the six-year period. The number of companies disclosing in their annual reports and standalone reports increased from 2005 to 2007. However, during the initial drop in business confidence in 2008 (brought on by the GFC), CSR disclosures in annual reports and standalone reports remained consistent overall with 2007. Companies operating within industries more prone to public scrutiny or those industries more sensitive to the social and environmental impacts of corporate operations actually increased their CSR disclosures, whereas other companies decreased their disclosure for an overall constant level. The upward trend resumed in 2009, but when business confidence again suffered in 2010, overall annual report CSR disclosures decreased, whereas overall standalone report disclosure continued the upward trend. In sum, during times of reduced business confidence, companies in non-environmentally-sensitive and non-socially-sensitive industries appear to buck the overall trend towards increased CSR disclosures. Originality: Many studies conclude that there is an upward trend in CSR disclosures over time. Other studies examine the impact of particular events on disclosure. However, we are not aware of any study that examines the impact of the initial phase of the GFC on the overall upward trend in CSR disclosures, i.e. whether companies subjugate CSR in favour of more pressing business priorities during times of reduced business confidence

Female politicians in the British press: The exception to the ‘masculine’ norm?

As educators of journalists we are concerned with some of the most fundamental questions about the relationship between the media and democracy, and this we argue, is gendered. Through content analysis and interviews we look at the ways in which women MPs are represented in the British Press. We show that the way in which they are reported (or ignored) positions them as dierent from the ‘male norm’ and this in turn has consequences for the ways in which democratic politics is written about by journalists and experienced by female MPs. A press rep-resentation of women that sometimes serves to suggest politics is a ‘man’s game’, where women are regarded as the aberrant, exception to the rule, can alienate women representatives and likely future candidates. This in turn may have negative consequences for the democratic process, whereby women voters feel unrepresented in Parliament and turn away from political engagement

Thumb-bangers : exploring the cultural bond between video games and heavy metal

« Heavy Metal Generations » is the fourth volume in the series of papers drawn from the 2012 Music, Metal and Politics international conference (http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/product/heavy-metal-generations/).Heavy metal and video games share an almost simultaneous birth, with Black Sabbath’s debut album in 1970 and Nolan Bushnell’s Computer Space in 1971. From Judas Priest’s ‘Freewheel Burning’ music video in 1984 to Tim Schafer’s Brütal Legend in 2009, the exchanges between these two subcultures have been both reciprocal and exponential. This chapter will present a historical survey of the bond between video games and heavy metal cultures through its highest-profile examples. There are two underlying reasons for this symbiosis: 1) the historical development and popular dissemination of the video game came at an opportune time, first with the video game arcades in the 1970s and early 1980s, and then with the Nintendo Entertainment System, whose technical sound-channel limitations happened to fall in line with the typical structures of heavy metal; 2) heavy metal and video games, along with their creators and consumers, have faced similar sociocultural paths and challenges, notably through the policies set in place by the PMRC and the ESRB, and a flurry of lawsuits and attacks, especially from United States congressmen, that resulted in an overlapping of their respective spaces outside dominant culture. These reasons explain the natural bond between these cultural practices, and the more recent developments like Last Chance to Reason’s Level 2 let us foresee a future where new hybrid creations could emerge

Scheduling science on television: A comparative analysis of the representations of science in 11 European countries

While science-in-the-media is a useful vehicle for understanding the media, few scholars have used it that way: instead, they look at science-in-the-media as a way of understanding science-in-the-media and often end up attributing characteristics to science-in-the-media that are simply characteristics of the media, rather than of the science they see there. This point of view was argued by Jane Gregory and Steve Miller in 1998 in Science in Public. Science, they concluded, is not a special case in the mass media, understanding science-in-the-media is mostly about understanding the media (Gregory and Miller, 1998: 105). More than a decade later, research that looks for patterns or even determinants of science-in-the-media, be it in press or electronic media, is still very rare. There is interest in explaining the media’s selection of science content from a media perspective. Instead, the search for, and analysis of, several kinds of distortions in media representations of science have been leading topics of science-in-the-media research since its beginning in the USA at the end of the 1960s and remain influential today (see Lewenstein, 1994; Weigold, 2001; Kohring, 2005 for summaries). Only a relatively small amount of research has been conducted seeking to identify factors relevant to understanding how science is treated by the mass media in general and by television in particular. The current study addresses the lack of research in this area. Our research seeks to explore which constraints national media systems place on the volume and structure of science programming in television. In simpler terms, the main question this study is trying to address is why science-in-TV in Europe appears as it does. We seek to link research focussing on the detailed analysis of science representations on television (Silverstone, 1984; Collins, 1987; Hornig, 1990; Leon, 2008), and media research focussing on the historical genesis and current political regulation of national media systems (see for instance Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Napoli, 2004; Open Society Institute, 2005, 2008). The former studies provide deeper insights into the selection and reconstruction of scientific subject matters, which reflect and – at the same time – reinforce popular images of science. But their studies do not give much attention to production constraints or other relevant factors which could provide an insight into why media treat science as they do. The latter scholars inter alia shed light on distinct media policies in Europe which significantly influence national channel patterns. However, they do not refer to clearly defined content categories but to fairly rough distinctions such as information versus entertainment or fictional versus factual. Accordingly, we know more about historical roots and current practices of media regulation across Europe than we do about the effects of these different regimes on the provision of specific content in European societies

The Aims of Public Scholarship in Media Law and Ethics

This essay urges scholars in media law and ethics to reevaluate the extent and utility of their public-scholar efforts and to consider ways that they can transfer research-based knowledge to public audiences while also playing a more deliberate role in holding media and government institutions accountable. It suggests that the devolution of standards in mass communication, the increasing encroachments on media autonomy, and the broader collapse of power into fewer hands make this a particularly urgent moment for scholars to reengage the public and to abandon their feckless neutrality on public issues. The overarching aim of public scholars ought to be to serve as bulwarks against the unrelenting and asocial exercise of institutional power, and this essay suggests that media law and ethics scholars, because of the normative emphasis within their fields, are uniquely situated to serve that goal