Journalistic Practice and the Cultural Valuation of New Media: Topicality, Objectivity, Network

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, American journalism is undergoing an existential crisis provoked by the emergence of digital and networked communication. As the economic model of producing journalism is undergoing significant changes, this study argues that the crisis of journalism is primarily a cultural crisis of valuation. Because the practices that traditionally defined the exclusivity of journalism as a form of public communication have been transposed to the online and digital environment through social media and blogs, such practices no longer value journalism in the same terms like in the age of mass media. The key to understanding the cultural crisis of journalism in the present, this study argues, is to revise the traditional narrative and its associated terminologies of the institutionalization of journalism. Journalism is thus defined as a structure of public communication, which needs to be enacted by producers and audiences alike to become socially meaningful. The consequence of seeing journalism as a structure sustained through social practices is that it allows to see the relation between audiences and their journalistic media as constitutive for the social function of new media in journalism. Through the analytically central dimension of practice, the study presents key moments in the history of modern journalism, where the meaning of new media was negotiated. These moments include the emergence of topical news media oriented toward a mass market (the penny press in the 1830s) and the definition of a schema of objectivity which valued journalistic practice in professional and scientific terms around the turn of the twentieth century in analogy to photographic media. In each phase, material, cognitive and social practices helped to define the value of a given new medium for journalism. Through the schemas of topicality and objectivity, journalistic practice institutionalized a privileged structure of public communication. The legacy of defining these schemas is then regarded as the central reason for the cultural crisis of journalistic practice in the present, as practices have been transposed and re-valued to sustain either forms of alternative journalism (as peer-production) or forms of self-communication in network media like blogs. Neither the form nor the technology of the blog alone can explain this differential social relevance but only the different ways in which social practices integrated and value new media. The study synthesizes an interdisciplinary array of concepts from cultural studies, sociology and journalism studies on subjects such as public communication, interaction, news production and cultural innovation. The theoretical framework of practice theories is then applied to an extensive body of primary and secondary source material, in order to retrace the cultural valuation of new media in a historically-comparative perspective. The study offers a theoretical and empirical contribution to the analysis of cultural innovation, which can be adopted to other cultural forms and media

Sporting Rules in EC Law- the example of the football transfer system

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Itinerários na representação do corpo : um olhar sobre Sylvia Plath e Muriel Rukeyser

Tese de Doutoramento em Estudos Americanos apresentada à Universidade AbertaEste estudo procura descrever e analisar de que forma Muriel Rukeyser e Sylvia Plath utilizam a imagética corporal nos seus textos, testando paradigmas e os limites da representabilidade, numa sociedade predominantemente visual. Estas imagens são confrontadas com outras fontes contemporâneas (nomeadamente fotográficas ou pictóricas) e com representações anteriores do feminino ou de corpos marginais, com o objectivo de, por um lado, auxiliar a leitura crítica da obra e, por outro, aferir da sua presença e restruturação no texto enquanto consequência de factores sociais, políticos e culturais específicos. Ao estudar as representações do corpo, consideram-se os contributos teóricos de Michel Foucault e, nomeadamente, a sua noção de corpo dócil e a aplicação da figura do panóptico à sociedade moderna, mas também o conceito de um corpo vivido, postulado por Merleau-Ponty. O corpo social construído sob o predomínio de um olhar fixo (“gaze") é desconstruído pela possibilidade perceptiva do olhar passageiro ou do vislumbrar (“glance") e pela importância do toque. Na desconstrução das representações corporais de um Outro, onde o Feminino surge como figura de alteridade, pondera-se ainda as possibilidades de uma revisão e rescrita dos mitos tradicionais ou a criação de uma “biomitografia" própria.This study examines the ways in which Muriel Rukeyser and Sylvia Plath dwell upon body imagery in their works, consciously or unconsciously challenging the limits of social representation. This imagery is compared with the prevalent body imagery in other contemporary sources (such as photography and painting), as well as with previous representations of the female body or with representations of otherness, looking upon, on the one hand, to the critical reading of the work itself and, on the other hand, to the presence of this body imagery as a consequence of a restructuring of specific social, political, and cultural aspects. The theoretical framework for this study relies on the writings of Michel Foucault (namely on his concept of “docile bodies" and his scopic regime of surveillance and panoptic domination), and on the concept of a lived body developed by Merleau-Ponty. The body as a social construct, structured under a paralysing gaze, is deconstructed through the possibilities of the glance and the significance of touch. To critically deconstruct mythical narratives by including woman as subject or by establishing the grounds for a possible “biomythography" serves the purpose of deconstructing representations of Otherness and of women as a peripheral Othe

On the coöperative creation of multimedia meaning

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/110.1007/978-3-642-10543-2_5Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies, SAMT 2009 Graz, Austria, December 2-4, 2009In this paper, we propose a content-based method the for semi- automatic organization of photo albums based on the analysis of how different users organize their own pictures. The goal is to help the user in dividing his pictures into groups characterized by a similar semantic content. The method is semi-automatic: the user starts to assign labels to the pictures and unlabeled pictures are tagged with proposed labels. The user can accept the recommendation or make a correction. The method is conceptually articulated in two parts. First, we use a suitable feature representation of the images to model the different classes that the users have collected, second, we look for correspondences between the criteria used by the different users. A quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach is proposed based on pictures of a set of members of the flickr® photo-sharing community