Defining a Medium: The Educational Aspirations for Early Radio

This essay examines the attempts by many writers to steer the burgeoning U.S. radio industry towards educational uses and programming in the 1920s. At the same time that commercial radio began to take shape, several competing and seemingly incompatible visions of the airwaves emerged—one of which privileged the use of radio for educational purposes. Using discourse from trade journals, general interest magazines, and newspapers, this article explores the calls for educational programming amid the rapidly expanding and consolidating commercial radio industry

'Surely the most natural scenario in the world’: Representations of ‘Family’ in BBC Pre-school Television

Historically, the majority of work on British children’s television has adopted either an institutional or an audience focus, with the texts themselves often overlooked. This neglect has meant that questions of representation in British children’s television – including issues such as family, gender, class or ethnicity - have been infrequently analysed in the UK context. In this article, we adopt a primarily qualitative methodology and analyse the various textual manifestations of ‘family’, group, or community as represented in a selected number of BBC pre-school programmes. In doing so, we question the (limited amount of) international work that has examined representations of the family in children’s television, and argue that nuclear family structures do not predominate in this sphere

The Economics of Smoking

While the tobacco industry is among the most substantial and successful economic enterprises, tobacco consumption kills more people than any other product. Economic analysis of tobacco product markets, particularly for cigarettes, has contributed considerable insight to debates about the industry's importance and appropriate public policy roles in grappling with health consequences of tobacco. The most significant example is the rapidly expanding and increasingly sophisticated body of research on the effects of price increases on cigarette consumption. Because excise tax is a component of price, the resultant literature has been prominent in legislative debates about taxation as a tool to discourage smoking, and has contributed theory and empirical evidence to the growing interest in modeling demand for addictive products. This chapter examines the research and several equity and efficiency concerns accompanying cigarette taxation debates. It includes economic analysis of other tobacco control policies, such as advertising restrictions, prominent in tobacco control debates. Research addressing the validity of tobacco-industry arguments that its contributions to employment, tax revenues, and trade balances are vital to economic health in states and nations is also considered, as it is the industry's principal weapon in the battle against policy measures to reduce tobacco consumption.

“Yes! I Had Cosmetic Surgery”: Celebrities\u27 Comsmetic Surgery Confessions in the Media and Their Impact on Korean Female College Students\u27 Perceptions.

This paper analyzes celebrities’ cosmetic surgery confessions in the media and explores the impact of the confessions on non-celebrities. Based on the analysis of talk shows and online news in Korea today, I argue that celebrities’ confessions are the result of the interaction between celebrities and the media, and the confessions serve as an atonement ritual to make a new start for celebrities themselves. The confessions also have the effect of trivializing cosmetic surgery. My analysis of Korean female college students’ self-accounts about the confessions confirms these arguments and shows the students’ strong endorsement of cosmetic surgery as well as their tendency to view cosmetic surgery as a means of upward mobility, given the success of surgical celebrities. The survey questionnaire developed for this study, completed by 217 female college students, reveals that more exposure to such confessions predicts greater normalization and trivialization of cosmetic surgery in the respondents’ everyday lives

Use of Social Media in Presidential Campaigns: Do Social Media Have an Effect on the Political Behavior of Voters Aged 18-24?

Today, the idea of social media is radically different from the media of a decade ago. While a decade ago the Internet was considered new media, our society now turns to Facebook, Twitter, and blogs as sources of information. In the United States during election cycles, the use of social media by presidential candidates has become a way for many voters to find out about candidates. As a result, presidential candidates have had to adapt their campaign strategies to work with these media in a way that will effectively target these audiences. This study examines whether campaigns that are more “social media savvy” will ultimately garner more votes, specifically from those aged 18-24. By analyzing social media tactics of the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections and surveying voters in this age range, I ultimately found that there was no relationship between social media use and young voter participation or likelihood of voting for Democratic candidates. However, there was a relationship between social media usage and likelihood of voting for Republican candidates: when social media was used, participants were less likely to vote for the Republican candidate than when no social media use was present

Does \u2018bigger\u2019mean \u2018better\u2019? Pitfalls and shortcuts associated with big data for social research

\u2018Big data is here to stay.\u2019 This key statement has a double value: is an assumption as well as the reason why a theoretical reflection is needed. Furthermore, Big data is something that is gaining visibility and success in social sciences even, overcoming the division between humanities and computer sciences. In this contribution some considerations on the presence and the certain persistence of Big data as a socio-technical assemblage will be outlined. Therefore, the intriguing opportunities for social research linked to such interaction between practices and technological development will be developed. However, despite a promissory rhetoric, fostered by several scholars since the birth of Big data as a labelled concept, some risks are just around the corner. The claims for the methodological power of bigger and bigger datasets, as well as increasing speed in analysis and data collection, are creating a real hype in social research. Peculiar attention is needed in order to avoid some pitfalls. These risks will be analysed for what concerns the validity of the research results \u2018obtained through Big data. After a pars distruens, this contribution will conclude with a pars construens; assuming the previous critiques, a mixed methods research design approach will be described as a general proposal with the objective of stimulating a debate on the integration of Big data in complex research projecting

Texts of female desire and of community

This study investigated narratives obtained from 45 participants about their watching of EastEnders. The first aim was to understand why people watch this program. The second aim was to identify the kinds of social object dominating their accounts as a way of revealing the forms of cultural debate catalyzed by the show. Material was generated via an open-ended e-mail questionnaire and analyzed qualitatively using grounded theory. Two major themes constituting social objects were identified; female desire and community. These themes were made-up of seven categories each of which helped explain why our participants watched EastEnders; reduced troubles, gender, relaxation, social activity, community, realism, and Britishness. We discuss these results in relation to past research but also argue that, as our findings suggest some participants gained a therapeutic effect from watching EastEnders, there is a fruitful and little explored link between such comfort viewing and research on psychotherapy