Copyright and cultural work: an exploration

This article first discusses the contemporary debate on cultural “creativity” and the economy. Second, it considers the current state of UK copyright law and how it relates to cultural work. Third, based on empirical research on British dancers and musicians, an analysis of precarious cultural work is presented. A major focus is how those who follow their art by way of “portfolio” work handle their rights in ways that diverge significantly from the current simplistic assumptions of law and cultural policy. Our conclusions underline the distance between present top-down conceptions of what drives production in the cultural field and the actual practice of dancers and musicians

Political candidates in infotainment programmes and their emotional effects on Twitter: An analysis of the 2015 Spanish general elections pre-campaign season

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Contemporary Social Science on 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21582041.2017.1367833.[EN] The infotainment format offers candidates an informal setting to show a more personal side of themselves to the electorate, opening themselves up to potential voters. An example of media hybridisation, social networks users can immediately comment on infotainment television programmes, a process known as second screening. These second screeners tend to be especially active in politics. This paper analyses the immediate emotional reaction of these users as they watch infotainment programmes that air during the campaign or pre-campaign seasons and feature political candidates as guests. We have confirmed that second screeners react more emotionally towards the candidate when his or her party is mentioned, and less emotionally when the host displays an aggressive attitude through his or her non-verbal communication. When issues related to the candidate¿s personal lives are discussed, users¿ emotional reactions improve slightly. The relevance of this research stems from the fact that we are witnessing the consolidation of a politics that increasingly strays from ideological questions, and instead focuses on more emotional and personal issues.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under Grants CSO2013-43960-R and CSO2016-77331-C2-1-R.Baviera, T.; Peris, À.; Cano-Orón, L. (2019). Political candidates in infotainment programmes and their emotional effects on Twitter: An analysis of the 2015 Spanish general elections pre-campaign season. 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The Hybrid Media System. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759477.001.0001Dang-Xuan, L., Stieglitz, S., Wladarsch, J., & Neuberger, C. (2013). AN INVESTIGATION OF INFLUENTIALS AND THE ROLE OF SENTIMENT IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON TWITTER DURING ELECTION PERIODS. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 795-825. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.783608Giglietto, F., & Selva, D. (2014). Second Screen and Participation: A Content Analysis on a Full Season Dataset of Tweets. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 260-277. doi:10.1111/jcom.12085Grabe, M. E., & Bucy, E. P. (2009). Image Bite Politics. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372076.001.0001Guo, L., & Vargo, C. (2015). The Power of Message Networks: A Big-Data Analysis of the Network Agenda Setting Model and Issue Ownership. Mass Communication and Society, 18(5), 557-576. doi:10.1080/15205436.2015.1045300Harrington, S. (2008). Popular news in the 21st century Time for a new critical approach? Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 9(3), 266-284. doi:10.1177/1464884907089008López-Rico, C.-M., & Peris-Blanes, À. (2017). Agenda e imagen de los candidatos de las elecciones generales de 2015 en España en programas televisivos de infoentretenimiento. El Profesional de la Información, 26(4), 611. doi:10.3145/epi.2017.jul.05Maruyama, M., Robertson, S. P., Douglas, S., Raine, R., & Semaan, B. (2017). Social Watching a Civic Broadcast. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. doi:10.1145/2998181.2998340Medhat, W., Hassan, A., & Korashy, H. (2014). Sentiment analysis algorithms and applications: A survey. Ain Shams Engineering Journal, 5(4), 1093-1113. doi:10.1016/j.asej.2014.04.011Saif, H., He, Y., & Alani, H. (2012). Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 508-524. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35176-1_32Shah, D. V., Hanna, A., Bucy, E. P., Lassen, D. S., Van Thomme, J., Bialik, K., … Pevehouse, J. C. W. (2016). Dual Screening During Presidential Debates. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(14), 1816-1843. doi:10.1177/0002764216676245Sullivan, D. G., & Masters, R. D. (1988). «Happy Warriors»: Leaders’ Facial Displays, Viewers’ Emotions, and Political Support. American Journal of Political Science, 32(2), 345. doi:10.2307/2111127Thelwall, M., Buckley, K., Paltoglou, G., Cai, D., & Kappas, A. (2010). Sentiment strength detection in short informal text. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(12), 2544-2558. doi:10.1002/asi.21416Vergeer, M., & Franses, P. H. (2015). Live audience responses to live televised election debates: time series analysis of issue salience and party salience on audience behavior. Information, Communication & Society, 19(10), 1390-1410. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1093526Vilares, D., Thelwall, M., & Alonso, M. A. (2015). The megaphone of the people? Spanish SentiStrength for real-time analysis of political tweets. Journal of Information Science, 41(6), 799-813. doi:10.1177/0165551515598926Wohn, D. Y., & Na, E.-K. (2011). Tweeting about TV: Sharing television viewing experiences via social media message streams. First Monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v16i3.336

Popularizing Party Journalism in China in the Age of Social Media: The Case of Xinhua News Agency

The phenomenon of the “popularization” of journalism has become widespread in the process of media marketization, globalization and digitalization. This phenomenon has been studied mostly in the Anglo-American context. This article instead draws attention to China, where the tendency toward popularizing (party) journalism is also occurring but taking a rather different form. It focuses on the case of Xinhua News Agency—the pioneer as well as the most representative case of traditional party journalism in the country. The article considers to what extent Xinhua’s online media content concerning the ruling party since 1949—the Communist Party of China—has been popularized both in terms of content and style. The changes to online media content made by Xinhua are indicative of the extent to which it is possible to combine the status of a state-owned central news organization with a new journalistic orientation that seeks to make the messages from and about the party more appealing to technology-savvy and entertainment-driven audiences in the new media environment in mainland China

Comparing international coverage of 9/11 : towards an interdisciplinary explanation of the construction of news

This article presents an interdisciplinary model attempting to explain how news is constructed by relying on the contributions of different fields of study: News Sociology, Political Communications, International Communications, International Relations. It is a first step towards developing a holistic theoretical approach to what shapes the news, which bridges current micro to macro approaches. More precisely the model explains news variation across different media organization and countries by focusing on the different way the sense of newsworthiness of journalists is affected by three main variables: national interest, national journalistic culture, and editorial policy of each media organization. The model is developed on the basis of an investigation into what shaped the media coverage of 9/11 in eight elite newspapers across the US, France, Italy and Pakistan

Socioeconomic Inequalities in Childhood Undernutrition in India: Analyzing Trends between 1992 and 2005

India experienced a rapid economic boom between 1991 and 2007. However, this economic growth has not translated into improved nutritional status among young Indian children. Additionally, no study has assessed the trends in social disparities in childhood undernutrition in the Indian context. We examined the trends in social disparities in underweight and stunting among Indian children aged less than three years using nationally representative data.We analyzed data from the three cross-sectional rounds of National Family Health Survey of India from 1992, 1998 and 2005. The social factors of interest were: household wealth, maternal education, caste, and urban residence. Using multilevel modeling to account for the nested structure and clustering of data, we fit multivariable logistic regression models to quantify the association between the social factors and the binary outcome variables. The final models additionally included age, gender, birth order of child, religion, and age of mother. We analyzed the trend by testing for interaction of the social factor and survey year in a dataset pooled from all three surveys.While the overall prevalence rates of undernutrition among Indian children less than three decreased over the 1992-2005 period, social disparities in undernutrition over these 14 years either widened or stayed the same. The absolute rates of undernutrition decreased for everyone regardless of their social status. The disparities by household wealth were greater than the disparities by maternal education. There were no disparities in undernutrition by caste, gender or rural residence.There was a steady decrease in the rates of stunting in the 1992-2005 period, while the decline in underweight was greater between 1992 and 1998 than between 1998 and 2005. Social disparities in childhood undernutrition in India either widened or stayed the same during a time of major economic growth. While the advantages of economic growth might be reaching everyone, children from better-off households, with better educated mothers appear to have benefited to a greater extent than less privileged children. The high rates of undernutrition (even among the socially advantaged groups) and the persistent social disparities need to be addressed in an urgent and comprehensive manner

Baidu, Weibo and Renren: The Global Political Economy of Social Media in China

The task of this work is to conduct a global political-economic analysis of China's major social media platforms in the context of transformations of the Chinese economy. It analyses Chinese social media's commodity and capital form. It compares the political economy of Baidu (search engine), Weibo (microblog) and Renren (social networking site) to the political economy of the US platforms Google (search engine), Twitter (microblog) and Facebook (social networking site) in order to analyse differences and commonalities. The comparative analysis focuses on aspects such as profits, the role of advertising, the boards of directors, shareholders, financial market values, terms of use and usage policies. The analysis is framed by the question to which extent China has a capitalist or socialist economy

Finding Larger Transnational Media Markets : Media Practices of the Vietnamese Diasporic Community

Addressing a concern about the absence of Vietnamese migrants in the Czech media landscape, this chapter first reviews various life contexts of the different Vietnamese populations in the Czech Republic (CR) and then discusses how they have generally lacked participation in the Czech media landscape because of their adoption of transnational media practices. This study also demonstrates how the diasporic community has failed to establish a conventional form of diasporic media but instead has found new translocal information outlets on social media. While the old and new first generations have relied more on media outlets from their country of origin, young migrant children have explored media markets beyond the binational border. However, Vietnamese migrants have recently begun to use social media platforms as networked information outlets, reaching a variety of communities and media outlets located in the CR, Vietnam and their own diasporic community

The soft power of popular cinema: the case of India

Among BRICS nations, India has the most developed and globalised film industry, and the Indian government as well as corporations are increasingly deploying the power of Bollywood in their international interactions. India’s soft power, arising from its cultural and civilizational influence outside its territorial boundaries, has a long history. Focusing on contemporary India’s thriving Hindi film industry, this article suggests that the globalisation of the country’s popular cinema, aided by a large diaspora, has created possibilities of promoting India’s public diplomacy. It examines the global imprint of this cinema as an instrument of soft power