bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Zapatistas –
EZLN
(Zapatista National Liberation Army)
Authors: Dellacioppa Kara
Published: September 2017

The EZLN is an indigenous, peasant‐based social movement and guerrilla organization located in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. It rose up in arms against the Mexican government and army on January 1, 1994, declaring its opposition to the Mexican government's incorporation into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the historical neglect of Mexico's indigenous peoples, and the lack of democracy within Mexico. The EZLN has roots in the National Liberation Front (FLN), a clandestine guerrilla movement with socialist principles that has its origins in the student protest movement of 1968. It is also influenced by indigenous, peasant, labor, and catechist organizations that emerged in Chiapas in the 1970s during a period of political awakening for indigenous people in the region.
Accountability of the Media
Authors: Min Young
Published: September 2017

The accountability of the media is a normative notion that underlies the balance of freedom and social responsibility across media structure, performance, and product. In order to grasp the concept, we need to understand how closely related the two competing values of freedom and responsibility are.
Accounting Research
Authors: Buttny Richard
Published: September 2017

Research on verbal accounting examines how language is used to retrospectively explain or make sense of events. Citing one's motive or describing the context may serve to portray events in a different way – as understandable, excusable, or less culpable. An accounting can range from a lengthy discourse (a narrative or courtroom cross‐examination) to a single word or nonverbal substitute, e.g., a shoulder shrug. In routine circumstances accounts are not necessary; persons, actions, and events speak for themselves. The need for accounts typically arises when something problematic or out of the ordinary occurs. Another's question, challenge, or blame makes an account relevant from the actor (Goffman 1971).
Accounting Research
Authors: Buttny Richard
Published: September 2017

Research on verbal accounting examines how language is used to explain or make sense of events retrospectively. Citing one's motive or describing the context may serve to portray events in a different way – as understandable, excusable, or less culpable. An accounting can range from a lengthy discourse (a narrative or courtroom cross‐examination) to a single word or nonverbal substitute (e.g., a shoulder shrug). In routine circumstances, accounts are not necessary; persons, actions, and events speak for themselves. The need for accounts typically arises when something problematic or out of the ordinary occurs. Another's question, challenge, or blame makes an account relevant from the actor (Goffman 1971).
Advertisement Campaign Management
Authors: Kanso Ali M.
Published: September 2017

The key to unified and successful advertising campaigns is solid management. Each advertising campaign contains visible as well as unseen aspects. To the average consumer, a campaign is a series of advertising messages that look or sound alike. To the practitioner, a campaign embodies a wide range of activities that may include brainstorming, consumer → Surveys, or media analysis. What distinguishes one campaign from another is the degree to which each aspect is connected and whether or not the effort achieves measurable objectives. A campaign may start out as cohesive but at the end the messages may lose focus due to lack of careful planning and strategic execution (→ Advertising Strategies).
Advertisement Campaign Management
Authors: Kanso Ali M.
Published: September 2017

The key to unified and successful advertising campaigns is solid management. To the average consumer, a campaign is a series of advertising messages that look or sound alike. To the practitioner, a campaign embodies a wide range of activities that may include brainstorming, consumer → surveys, or media analysis. What distinguishes one campaign from another is the degree to which each aspect is connected and whether or not the effort achieves measurable objectives.
Advertising Effectiveness, Measurement of
Authors: Bronner Fred E.
Published: September 2017

In the 1990s, accountability of advertising came high on the agenda in the commercial communication world. As a result a growing need for knowledge about the way the media environment influenced advertising effectiveness emerged. Standardized tools and new media studies were developed. And after 2000, greater actionability for media planners even on a day‐to‐day basis was incorporated into these measurement tools. Nowadays there is little argument in the commercial as well as academic world that campaigns should be monitored to better manage them in the marketplace (→ Advertisement Campaign Management).
Affects and Media Exposure
Authors: Konijn Elly A.
Published: September 2017

This entry covers the role of affect, mood, and emotions in exposure to media content. The influence of affect, mood, and emotions in media exposure on the impact of media is indisputable (Döveling et al. 2010; Konijn 2013). Formerly, the emphasis was largely on cognitive aspects such as recall, learning, thoughts, and beliefs. The affective aspects were reserved for entertainment media, mostly limited to processes of involvement and gratifications (→ Involvement with Media Content; Entertainment, Effects of). Nowadays, the borders between entertainment and → news and information are blurred. Entertainment programs likeThe SimpsonsandSurvivalclaim to be reality‐based (→ Reality TV), whereas news items and information programming (e.g., → Infotainment) increasingly make use of emotionalizing cues such as personal anecdotes and zooming in on “crying faces” (→ Narrative News Story; Soft News). For example, the Fox News broadcast of the invasion of Iraq by the US army in the Second Gulf War appeared like a → video game such as America's Army, including the upbeat music. The attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York (9/11) seemed a gruesome science fiction at first hand, whereas fiction‐based TV shows likeERinform on real‐life hospital affairs. Recently, Internet clips from the Islamic State (IS) showing beheadings are another example where “news” and “entertainment” become blurred.
Agenda‐Setting Effects
Authors: Weaver David H.
Published: September 2017

One of the most oft‐cited approaches to studying media effects that emerged in the early 1970s is known as the agenda‐setting effect (or function) of mass media. First tested empirically in the 1968 US presidential election by University of North Carolina journalism professors Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (McCombs & Shaw 1972), this approach originally focused on the ability of the mass media to tell the public what to think
about
rather than what to think. This was a sharp break from previous media effects studies that had focused on what people thought (their opinions and attitudes) and on behaviors such as voting and purchasing various goods and services (→ Media Effects, History of).
Antitrust Regulation
Authors: Brown Duncan H.
Published: September 2017

As a neo‐liberal approach to media policymaking has spread, many nations have relied more heavily on competition and the marketplace to shape the structure and output of their electronic media industries. The result has been a greater reliance on antitrust laws designed to maintain a competitive marketplace rather than industry‐specific regulations (→ Media Policy; Media Economics). Indeed, this faith in the marketplace to produce optimal outcomes has been so great that it has often led to a view that promoting competition is virtually the only concern policymakers should have. But there has also been a countervailing force at work. In an era of growing media globalization and regionalization, many governments have seen the need to allow media corporations to grow in order to compete in this new global media economy. The result has often been a reluctance to apply antitrust laws as rigorously as in the past (→ Globalization of the Media; Media Conglomerates).
Apologies and Remedial Episodes
Authors: Kotani Mariko
Published: September 2017

Apology is an action in which one admits the wrongful nature of an act and one's responsibility for it in dealing with some type of problematic situation; for instance violations of social expectations, offenses, rule‐breaking behaviors, social predicaments, and embarrassment. The concept can be traced back toapologia, the speech of self‐defense identified in Greek rhetoric. The first scholar to give much attention to this action in face‐to‐face settings was → Erving Goffman, who treated it as part of a remedial interchange. The remedial interchange is a sequence of exchanges in which one tries to change the meaning of an action that is potentially offensive to one that is acceptable through the uses of such acts as excuses, justifications, and apologies (→ Accounting Research).
Attitudes
Authors: Roskos‐Ewoldsen David R.
Published: September 2017

Attitudes have long been a focus of study by social scientists. In the first edition of theHandbook of social psychologyin 1935, Gordon Allport referred to attitudes as an indispensable concept for social psychology. Today, attitudes have become an essential concept for the social sciences. Attitudes, defined as an evaluative response to an object or thing, are critical to the study of → Persuasion; person → Perception; reactions to politicians, racism, and stereotyping (→ stereotypes); responses to the media; and so on. This entry will provide an overview of the nature of attitudes and how to measure them, summarize the tripartite model of attitudes, and review recent research on explicit and implicit attitudes.
Canada: Media System
Authors: Beaty Bart
Published: September 2017

Canada is the world's second‐largest country by land area, occupying most of the northern part of North America between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and extending north to the Arctic Ocean. Originally founded as a union of British and former French colonies, Canada became a dominion in 1867 and gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1982. It is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary democracy comprised of ten provinces and three territories. An officially bilingual nation, nearly 60 per cent of the population have English as a mother tongue, while 23 percent have French. Canada adopted an official policy of multiculturalism in 1988, and its population of nearly 33 million people is composed of no fewer than 34 ethnic groups that number at least 100,000 people. Canada is a technologically advanced and industrialized nation whose diversified economy is heavily reliant on trade with the United States, with which it shares land borders to the south and northwest.
Caricature
Authors: Knieper Thomas
Published: September 2017

A caricature is an exaggerated and distorted image of a person or thing, which is characterized by visual likeness, immediate recognizability, and pictorial wit, irony, or satire (→ Visual Representation). This visual burlesque can be insulting or flattering. It is not uncommon that a caricature offends the sensibilities of a depicted person. Caricatures can serve editorial, illustrative, entertainment, or commercial purposes, as part of political cartoons, illustrations for books and articles, standalone artwork, or use in publicity and advertisements (→ Advertisement, Visual Characteristics of; Book; Cartoons; Political Communication). Caricatures can be standalone drawings or well‐integrated depictions in a broader context. For example, caricatures of politicians can be one part of an editorial cartoon that comments on a political issue (→ Political Media Use).
Catharsis Theory
Authors: Glaab Sonja
Published: September 2017

Catharsis theory has played an important role in the discussion about the effects of violence in the mass media for many years (→ Violence as Media Content, Effects of). The term “catharsis” is derived from the Greekkatharsiswhich means cleansing, purging, or purification. In the form the theory is used in communication research, it implies that the execution of an aggressive action under certain conditions diminishes the aggressive drive and therefore reduces the likelihood of further aggressive actions. The crucial point in catharsis theory is that the observed aggressive action does not necessarily need to be executed in reality – it can instead take place in the actor's fantasy or in the media (symbolic catharsis).
Central America: Media Systems
Authors: Priess Frank
Published: September 2017

Geographically, Central America includes parts of Mexico (→ Mexico: Media System), i.e., the southern part of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, but traditionally it is composed of the countries of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. With the exception of Belize, which is a small country with about 300,000 inhabitants that did not gain its independence from Great Britain until 1981, all were Spanish colonies. The current Panamanian territory was part of Colombia until 1913. All of these countries gained their independence between 1821 and 1859. Of 43 million Central Americans, 13 million live in Guatemala. The geographic position of Panama and the political stability of Costa Rica have allowed both of these countries to develop economically, but the rest of the countries in the region display extreme poverty, particularly evident in areas inhabited by indigenous groups. After several decades of internal turmoil, civil war, and dictatorships, Central America has recovered its essence. Since the 1980s, it has recovered its peace. Even though democracy and competitive elections are now a fact within the isthmus, the influence of remote times still prevails.
Change Management and Communication
Authors: Zorn Theodore E.
Published: September 2017

Change management in the context of organizations is the process of planning, directing, and controlling a transition from one set of organizational conditions to another. Change management has been studied for many years in the management and organization studies disciplines. It has not traditionally been considered a communication process, although models of change management typically have included communication as a component of effective change management (→ Organizational Communication; Strategic Communication).
Child Protection, Media Regulations for
Authors: Montgomery Kathryn C.
Published: September 2017

In democratic societies, the fundamental, core principle of freedom of speech must often be balanced with the need to protect children from harm. This issue has dominated the public debate over children and the media throughout the twentieth century, often moving to the forefront during the entry of a new medium, when parental anxieties are particularly high (→ Media Use and Child Development). Since the earliest days of television and continuing into the digital age, parents' groups, health professionals, and educators have organized numerous campaigns to protect young people from various kinds of harmful media content, often calling on the government to enact safeguards (→ Violence as Media Content, Effects on Children of).
China Central Television CCTV News
Authors: Jirik John , Xiaoping Li
Published: September 2017

CCTV News (formerly CCTV‐9) is the global 24‐hour English‐language channel run by China Central Television (CCTV), the state‐owned broadcaster of the People's Republic of China (PRC; → China: Media System; Newscast, 24‐Hour). CCTV News has a dual function: (1) to provide news and information about the PRC and Taiwan that does not contradict government policy, and (2) to provide news and information about world affairs from a PRC perspective. CCTV News is available globally via satellite, cable, and the → Internet (→ Cable Television; Satellite Television). Its target audience is foreigners, both inside and outside the PRC. It plays a key role in
wai xuan
(external publicity), projecting for the PRC what Joseph Nye (2004) called “soft power.”
C
hina: Media System
Authors: Zhou Shuhua
Published: September 2017

For centuries, China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation. After World War II, the Communists, under Chairman Mao Zedong, founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, which centralized control over almost every facet of Chinese life. After 1978, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, gradually introduced market‐oriented reforms and decentralized economic decision‐making. Political controls remain tight even while economic controls have continued to be relaxed under President Jiang Zemin (1993–2003), President Hu Jintao (2003–2012), and now President Xi Jinping (2012–).
Cinematography
Authors: Keating Patrick
Published: September 2017

Cinematography is the technique of photographing motion pictures. The art of cinematography involves working with three distinct sets of tools: the camera, the film, and the lighting. We can make useful distinctions among cinematography,
mise en scène
, and editing. Whereas mise en scène involves the arrangement of details in front of the camera, cinematography involves the act of capturing this arrangement on film (→ Film Production). The result of this process is a set of shots that can be cut together in the process of editing. Although these distinctions are not always clear‐cut, cinematography is one of the major components of a film's visual style, playing a powerful role in shaping the spectator's experience of cinematic time and space.
Circulation
Authors: Shaver Dan
Published: September 2017

Circulation is the fundamental audience measure for print publications such as → newspapers and → magazines. Its importance lies in the fundamental relationship between circulation and advertising rates in the business models of most print publications.
Citizen Journalism, History of
Authors: Matheson Donald
Published: September 2017

The history of the idea of →citizen journalismis closely associated with the rapid rise of the → Internet as a medium of → news and public information. Citizens have certainly participated in newsmaking from the start of modern news, but journalism's industrialization in the mid‐nineteenth century and later its professionalization marginalized that involvement (→ Journalism, History of). It was with the rapid growth of the Internet in the 1990s that attempts to conflate the categories of journalist and citizen gathered force. Other terms, including “participatory media,” “network journalism,” and “Journalism 2.0,” have also become popular over time, particularly as producing media on the Internet has become more commonplace and as news practice has begun to accommodate those producers (→ Journalism; Web 2.0 and the News).
Climate of Opinion
Authors: Jeffres Leo W.
Published: September 2017

Like many concepts in the social sciences, the “climate of opinion” is a metaphor borrowed from the physical world to describe a phenomenon that is not only important to the general public and policymakers but also to major mass communication theories. The
climate of opinion
refers to the “perceived popularity” of opinions (Sutherland & Galloway 1981). Political communication scholars often differentiate between → public opinion and popular opinion, between organized community on the one hand and mass or crowd on the other, between opinions based on consensus and unifying tradition and aggregated views of the moment. Policymakers generally respond to the former referents in each of these pairs, to public opinion, rather than to the latter, popular opinions, expressed in polls reported by the media (→ Polls and the Media; Public Opinion Polling; Survey). Scholars have examined how the climate of opinion affects → political discourse and the perceived freedom to talk (Wyatt et al. 2000).
Cluster Analysis
Authors: Emmer Martin
Published: September 2017

Cluster analysis is a collective term for a broad variety of statistical methods and procedures which share the purpose of reducing the complexity of large collections of elements by arranging these objects into groups. Clustering procedures try to identify homogeneous groups (clusters) of entities within an empirical data set by comparing their attributes. The elements being clustered are predominantly the objects (cases, arranged in rows of a common data matrix) of an observation, but nothing stands against clustering the variables (columns in a data matrix) likewise. Thus cluster analysis is closely related to methods of → factor analysis.
CNN
Authors: Volkmer Ingrid
Published: September 2017

Cable News Network (CNN) has become an icon of the globalized news world (→ news; Television News). CNN's rise as one of the most prominent global news organizations is based on a successful strategic integration of three key spheres of → journalism: (1) an innovative approach to internationalization (→ International News Reporting); (2) the invention of unique presentation styles, such as “breaking news”; and (3) a continuous implementation of state‐of‐the‐art technologies in order to reach clearly defined target audience segments (→ News Production and Technology).
Code
Authors: Craig Robert L.
Published: September 2017

A code is a term in → semiotics that designates a set of related signs or signifying practices that correspond to a system of → meaning. While each → Sign has a unique signifier, what is signified is generally understood as a marker of difference within a larger group of signs. For instance, the number sign “2” has no meaning without the number system as a whole; when listeners hear the word “2,” they inherently understand that it represents a specific quantity different from 3, 4, and 5, etc., which were not uttered by the speaker (→ Sign Systems). Likewise, together color names comprise a code that corresponds to the color spectrum; “red” is meaningful as a sign because it is not green or blue. Morse code is a set system of dots and dashes that correspond to the alphabet. Knowing the whole code allows an encoder and decoder to communicate by selecting configurations from the code.
Coding
Authors: Rössler Patrick
Published: September 2017

The term “coding” has different meanings in empirical research. Generally speaking, coding becomes relevant whenever data at hand are unstructured, and coding then provides a structure for a systematic analysis of these data. In quantitative research using standardized instruments, coding is the process of tagging data about a given unit of analysis, in order to assign these units to a category (→ Quantitative Methodology). Usually, these categories correspond to numbers that allow the information to be processed by statistical software.
Cognition
Authors: Shedletsky Lenny
Published: September 2017

Cognitionrefers to (1) the wide variety of mental entities we locate within the mind, including thoughts, → meanings, ideas, → attitudes, knowledge, beliefs, perceptions, intentions, memories, images, dreams, states of mind, consciousness and subconsciousness, and (2) the operations of the mind, such as association, search, comparison, → attention, and inference. Cognition is thinking.
Commodification of the Media
Authors: Murdock Graham
Published: September 2017

All the goods and services used in everyday life possess intrinsic qualities that meet human wants, and even those that cater to basic needs, like hunger, may also satisfy a desire for beauty or a wish to communicate. Food is more enjoyable if made with love or artistically presented and served with style. These material and aesthetic qualities, as defined by social convention, constitute a good's value to its users: its use value. At the same time, in modern capitalist economies, goods also have a value in the marketplace: an exchange value. When a good is produced with the express aim of selling it at a price, it becomes a “commodity.” In order to expand, capitalism required all goods to be converted into commodities. Analyzing this process of commodification and its impact on the diversity and availability of cultural goods is central to the account of media systems in industrialized, market‐economy countries from the perspective of political economy (→ Political Economy of the Media).
Commodity Feminism
Authors: Gill Rosalind
Published: September 2017

Commodity feminism refers to the way feminist ideas and icons are appropriated for commercial purposes, emptied of their political significance and offered back to the public in a commodified form – usually in advertising. The term pays homage to Marx's notion of “commodity fetishism” and is often framed within contemporary Marxist and feminist terms.
Communibiology
Authors: Beatty Michael J.
Published: September 2017

An important and enduring question for communication science concerns why people interact in the ways they do. This issue has been simplistically framed as a “nature–nurture” question although the process is substantially more complex than can be captured by a dichotomous metric. Until the early 1970s, genetic inheritance played a central role in accounts of psychological development. Critics, however, argued that the correlations in the 0.50 region between identical twins' personality scores indicated that no more than 25 percent of the variance in personality was attributable to genetic inheritance (→ Correlation Analysis; Regression Analysis).
Communication as an Academic Field: Africa
Authors: de Beer Arnold S.
Published: September 2017

Present‐day communication education in Africa has not been able to build on a rich tradition of a longstanding university system. Widespread university education in Africa is a postcolonial phenomenon, with North Africa and South Africa being the main exceptions. Like other academic disciplines, communication studies suffers much of this postcolonial legacy, be it the effect of the general education system, the role of universities in general, or the media and other communication systems, which have to struggle against oppressive state regimes and survive in a globalizing world (Bourgault 1995; Barratt & Berger 2007; → Globalization of the Media; Globalization Theories).
Communication as an Academic Field: East Asia
Authors: Kim Min‐Sun , Chen Guo‐Ming , Miyahara Akira
Published: September 2017

The community of East Asian communication researchers has been growing rapidly in recent years, which shows that communication studies in East Asia has reached a certain level of maturity (Miike & Chen 2006). In the United States the academic study of communication began after World War I. In East Asian culture, however, the academic study of communication has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Focusing on three East Asian countries (Greater China, South Korea, and Japan), we shall review major research and educational trends in the field of communication.
Communication as an Academic Field: Eastern Europe and Russia
Authors: Jirák Jan , Köpplová Barbara
Published: September 2017

Media communication, mass communication, political communication, and other aspects of social communication represent a dynamic academic field in contemporary central and eastern Europe and Russia. In particular, communication on the societal level, which was the subject of the most visible and remarkable changes during the 1990s (reintroduction of “free” media and deep structural change of the media system, establishment of media and advertising markets, consequences of the commercialization of media), as well as some traces of older tradition and huge inspiration from western Europe and the USA, led to the establishment of communication and media studies as a new field of academic interest in many universities in the region. Some development can be found in studies of interpersonal and organizational communication, too, but those areas are traditionally covered by established fields, in which they have largely remained.
Communication as an Academic Field: Middle East, Israel
Authors: Adoni Hanna , First Anat
Published: September 2017

The
institutionalization
of communication as an academic field in Israel began with the establishment of the Communication Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1966 when founded by → Elihu Katz, and through the 1990s, the Communication Institute acted as a sole academic authority, a conceptual model, and a source of faculty recruitment for communication departments in the other Israeli institutions of higher education. Today, 18 academic programs in communication operate in Israel, offering various academic degrees. The basic orientation of these programs is theoretical; yet, the professional practicum, taught by senior Israeli journalists, forms an integral part of the curriculum. About 200 practicing communication scholars are members of the Israel Communication Association (ISCA) founded in the mid‐1990s. Most of them are also members of the ICA, IAMCR, and other professional organizations.
Communication as an Academic Field: Middle East, Israel
Authors: Adoni Hanna , First Anat
Published: September 2017

The
institutionalization
of communication as an academic field in Israel began with the establishment of the Communication Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1966 when founded by → Elihu Katz, and through the 1990s, the Communication Institute acted as a sole academic authority, a conceptual model, and a source of faculty recruitment for communication departments in the other Israeli institutions of higher education. Today, 20 academic programs in communication operate in Israel, offering various academic degrees. The basic orientation of these programs is theoretical; yet the professional practicum, taught by senior Israeli journalists, forms an integral part of the curriculum. About 200 practicing communication scholars are members of the Israel Communication Association (ISCA), founded in the mid‐1990s. Most of them are also members of the → International Communication Association (ICA), → International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), and other professional organizations.
Communication as an Academic Field: Western Europe
Authors: McQuail Denis
Published: September 2017

Communications and media as a field of research in Europe scarcely predates World War II and, with minor exceptions, did not develop as a full program of study until the last quarter of the twentieth century. The main exception was Germany, where a press science (Zeitungswissenschaft) was quite well established in some German universities before the war and was later restored under the name ofPublizistik(→ Communication and Media Studies, History to 1968).
Communication Evaluation Research
Authors: Bertrand Jane T.
Published: September 2017

This entry addresses research that evaluates communication programs designed to bring about change in individual behavior and social norms. These programs or campaigns may focus on health, agriculture, environment, water and sanitation, democracy and governance, gender equity, human rights, and related areas. They
can be referred to by
different labels: → strategic communication, behavior change communication, information‐education communication, communication for social change, and → development communication, among others (→ Health Campaigns for Development). Communication evaluation research serves both to guide the design of such programs and to determine their effectiveness in achieving their objectives (→ Communication and Social Change: Research Methods). The myriad of communication forms used in such programs generally fall into three categories: mass media, community mobilization, and interpersonal communication/counseling (IPC/C).
Communication Inequality
Authors: Ramanadhan Shoba , Viswanath K.
Published: September 2017

Communication inequality refers to differences in the generation, manipulation, and distribution of → Information among social groups, as well as differences in: (1) access to and use of information channels, (2) attention to media content, (3) recall, knowledge, and comprehension, and (4) capacity to act on relevant information among individuals (Viswanath 2006). The intellectual origins of the communication inequality theory can be traced to the knowledge gap hypothesis by Tichenor et al. (1970), an early formalization of inequalities in communication research (→ Knowledge Gap Effects). According to this hypothesis, benefits from information flows on a given topic are more likely to be accrued by people of higher socio‐economic status compared to people of lower socio‐economic status, thus widening the existing gaps rather than narrowing them, drawing attention to the unequal media effects. Subsequently, the term → “digital divide” made its way through both scholarly and popular literatures, drawing attention to the unequal access to the → Internet among different social groups. Viswanath expanded on these formulations of access to one medium (the Internet) and → Media Effects on knowledge to incorporate the thesis of inequalities across the communication continuum as well as across information delivery systems (Viswanath 2005, 2006). In its current formulation, the communication inequality thesis draws attention to disparities across the communication continuum, starting with access to learning, and the consequences of the disparities. Moreover, it argues that the inequalities may manifest at both individual and group levels.
Communication Infrastructure
Authors: Gillwald Alison
Published: September 2017

Communication infrastructure refers to the backbone of the communications system upon which various broadcasting and telecommunication services are operated. This can be built from copper cable, fiber, or wireless technologies utilizing the radio frequency spectrum, such as microwave and satellite. The infrastructure is the core component that connects upstream production, such as voice, data and audiovisual services, with downstream consumers.
Communication Law and Policy: Asia
Authors: Weisenhaus Doreen
Published: September 2017

Communication law and policy in Asia covers a spectrum of issues involving widely varying political, cultural, and legal contexts across dozens of countries in the world's largest and most populous continent. While it can be difficult to generalize legal trends in the region because of a lack of conformity of interests and laws, or of what even constitutes Asia, several observations about the more significant developments at both the public level of media–government conflict and at the private level involving civil litigation can be made.
Communication Law and Policy: Middle East
Authors: Najjar Orayb Aref
Published: September 2017

Twenty‐two countries belong to the Arab League, established in 1945. Most of those countries were ruled by the Ottomans, British, French, or Italians. Thus, Arab countries have largely adopted legislation based mostly on the legal systems of their former colonial rulers. Egypt, however, has a longer and more established legal tradition that dates back to the Egyptian constitution of 1923, while some Gulf nations that were British “protectorates” until 1971 have a less tested or developed legal tradition. The normative sources regulating speech rights in Israel consist of a number of British mandatory statutes incorporated into Israeli law in 1948 from the Law and Administration Ordinance, as well as Israeli legislation enacted by the Knesset after the establishment of the state.
Communication Research and Politics
Authors: Nordenstreng Kaarle
Published: September 2017

Communication research is intimately related to politics, especially if politics is understood widely as the deliberate management of society. Research on media and other aspects of communication such as election campaigns has typically been inspired and financed by political motives (→ Election Campaign Communication). On the other hand, research has influenced politics by producing concepts and findings about how communication really works in society. Historically, the origins of communication research are deeply rooted in politics, beginning with the rhetoric of antiquity (→ Rhetoric and Politics; Rhetorical Studies) and ending with studies around each new medium – the press in the seventeenth century, film in the early twentieth century, → Radio and → Television in the mid‐twentieth century, and the → Internet toward the new millennium (→ Media History). Histories of the field leave no doubt that each school of thought was founded as a consequence of a more or less direct political call of the day (Hardt 2001; Pietilä 2005; → Communication and Media Studies, History to 1968). It is less obvious what has been the opposite direction of influence – whether research has had a notable impact on politics.
Communication and Social Change: Research Methods
Authors: Pollock John C.
Published: September 2017

Modern research methods for social/behavioral change reflect a tension between collecting data at the individual level while making inferences at macro‐levels such as health‐care systems, communities, and nations. This tension becomes more palpable when measuring the concerns of historically underserved, difficult‐to‐reach populations, those suffering the greatest inequalities in access to information, civic participation, and, in particular, health‐care. Research questions are explored by focusing on multiple levels of analysis, multidisciplinary approaches, targeted methods/measures, flexible measures of “community,” and converging methodologies for maximizing evaluation validity.
Communication Technology and Democracy
Authors: Carpentier Nico
Published: September 2017

Communication technologies have been seen both as instrumental and as destructive to democratic processes. The advent of the print media is intrinsically linked with the struggle for civil liberties and the construction of contemporary nations. At the same time their destructive capacities became equally clear when, for instance, at the end of the nineteenth century Hearst propagated war against Spain, and the French newspapers assisted in dividing the country during the Dreyfus affair, some of them relying heavily on anti‐Semitic imagery. Similarly, the audiovisual media brought political voices and faces into the living room, but after Goebbels's usage of the radio waves, their democratic capacity could no longer be taken for granted. Communication technologies are not necessary neutral instruments in the service of Enlightenment. They are always embedded in ideological constellations that may be democratic, but also may be totalitarian.
Communication Technology and Development
Authors: Hudson Heather E.
Published: September 2017

Information is critical to the social and economic activities that comprise the development process. Communication technology as a means of sharing information is not simply a connection between people, but a link in the chain of the development process itself (→ Development Communication; Technology and Communication). In general, the ability to access and share information can contribute to the development process by improving:
Communication Technology Standards
Authors: Hawkins Richard
Published: September 2017

Communication technology standards are technical specifications that enable technological components from different suppliers to work together within a given communication system. Some standards refer to the physical interfaces between network and terminal equipment. Others refer to logical elements expressed in algorithms and embodied in software. In digital systems, many standards involve both physical and logical elements; a standardized physical interface is supported by standardized software elements. Standards are essential to telecommunication, broadcasting and computer networks. More recently they have become crucial elements in the integration of digital networking and services environments.
Communities of Practice
Authors: Ostermann Ana Cristina
Published: September 2017

Communities of practice are groups of people who share similar interests and objectives. In pursuing these interests and objectives, they make use of common practices, work with similar artifacts, and use a common language (Wenger 1998). The concept of community of practice was first coined by Lave and Wenger (1991), when discussing learning processes within a new framework, that of “situated learning.” In that publication, the authors explored the activities of certain groups, such as of nondrinking alcoholics, butchers, and midwives in Yucutan. These groups were related in their modes of learning, characterized by Lave and Wenger as “apprenticeship.” The authors conceived knowledge as a social process in which individuals participated in mutual learning at different levels, which depended on their authority in the group – whether a person was a newcomer or a long‐timer. It was specifically the process through which a newcomer learnt from the more longstanding members that comprised the core notion of community of practice. Lave and Wenger named this process Legitimate Peripherical Participation (LLP).
Community Video
Authors: Stoney George C.
Published: September 2017

Community video is one form of → community media. It is best defined by its objective, which is to stimulate participation in public affairs. The defining phrase might be “with the people, not just about them.”
Comparative Research
Authors: Wirth Werner , Kolb Steffen
Published: September 2017

A specific comparative research methodology is known in most social sciences. Its definition often refers to countries and cultures at the same time, because cultural differences
between
countries can be rather small (e.g., in Scandinavian countries), whereas very different cultural or ethnic groups may live
within
one country (e.g., minorities in the United States). Comparative studies have their problems on every level of research, i.e., from theory to types of research questions, → operationalization, instruments, sampling, and interpretation of results (→ Sampling, Random; Sampling, Nonrandom).
Comprehension
Authors: Grabois Howard
Published: September 2017

Human beings are uniquely able to understand sophisticated concepts through the use of language. Issues relating to comprehension encompass a wide variety of areas in linguistics, communication, and cognitive studies. Constructs regarding comprehension can be broadly divided into two theoretically diverse approaches, which diverge on the emphasis they place on cognition as an individual, self‐contained process, or as a culturally situated one.
Computer Games and Child Development
Authors: Sherry John L. , Bowman Nicholas David
Published: September 2017

Video games are a prevalent and profitable facet of the modern media entertainment industry (→ Video Games). Although children (anyone under the age of 18) comprise only 31 percent of the $10 billion US video game market, their numbers are increasing. Whereas in the 1990s, only 60 percent of middle‐school‐aged children reported playing video games on a consistent basis, a 2001 study by the National Institute on Media and the Family reported over 92 percent of US children played video games, an increase of over 30 percent. Worldwide, the video game industry is expected to grow to over $46.5 billion by the year 2010, with a growing portion of this market comprised of children.
Computer Games and Child Development
Authors: Sherry John L. , Bowman Nicholas David
Published: September 2017

Computer or → video games are a prevalent and profitable facet of the modern media entertainment industry. It is estimated that in the United States 75 percent of children (anyone under the age of 18) are video game players and the amount of time they spend gaming daily is increasing. Rideout et al.'s (2010) study for the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the average time children play games daily in the USA more than doubled from 26 minutes to 1 hour and 13 minutes between 1999 and 2009. Worldwide, the trend is similar, with the global video game market generating over $90 billion in 2013. As of 2014, the Entertainment Software Association reported that the average US household had at least one dedicated video game console, the US gaming industry generated over $15 billion in sales during 2013.
Consistency Theories
Authors: Trepte Sabine
Published: September 2017

In social psychology, consistency theories constitute a body of four theories: → Leon Festinger's → cognitive dissonance theory (1957), Fritz Heider's balance theory (1946, 1958), Charles Osgood and Percy Tannenbaum's consistency theory (1955), and Rosenberg's model of affective–cognitive consistency (1956).
Consistency Theories
Authors: Trepte Sabine
Published: September 2017

In social psychology, consistency theories constitute a body of four theories: → Leon Festinger's → cognitive dissonance theory (1957), Fritz Heider's balance theory (1946, 1958), Charles Osgood and Percy Tannenbaum's consistency theory (1955), and Rosenberg's model of affective–cognitive consistency (1956).
Consumer Culture
Authors: McAllister Matthew P.
Published: September 2017

Consumer culture, the creation and cultivation of self‐ and social meaning from the marketing, purchase, and display of commodified goods, is a central characteristic of modern and postmodern society. Although related to other forms of culture, such as commercial culture, material culture, and popular culture, it is a theoretically distinct realm that includes the symbolic qualities attributed to mass‐produced goods, brand logos, product packaging, advertising campaigns, retail spaces, shopping activities, and consumption‐centered media content. How these symbolic goods and activities relate to modern life, the self and social groups – and their destructive and/or emancipatory implications – have comprised much scholarship and debate in the humanities and social sciences.
Content Analysis, Qualitative
Authors: Scheufele Bertram
Published: September 2017

Like quantitative content analysis, qualitative content analysis is an empirical method of social sciences for analyzing live or recorded human communication such as → Newspaper articles, protocols of → television news or programs, transcripts of → interviews, or protocols from → observations (→ Content Analysis, Quantitative). This written or transcribed material is called text material in this context (→ Text and Intertextuality). From a general perspective, there are two main differences between quantitative and qualitative content analysis. First, quantitative content analysis works deductively and measures quantitatively. In this respect, quantitative content analysis decomposes the text material into different parts and assigns numeric codes to these elements or parts. Of course, such parts are not just words, but are rather issues, statements, arguments, or bundles of → meaning. By contrast, however, qualitative content analysis works inductively by summarizing and classifying elements or parts of the text material and assigning labels or categories to them. In this respect, qualitative content analysis searches rather for “coherent” meaning structures in the text material.
Copy Test and Starch Test
Authors: Schulz Rüdiger
Published: September 2017

The term “copy test” refers to a group of different test methods designed to measure the usage of adverts or editorials in the print media. During the course of an interview, readers who state that they have read the test issue of a → magazine or → Newspaper are shown an original copy of the issue in question. The interviewer then goes through this copy with the respondent page by page, asking questions about all, or certain, selected adverts or editorials to establish whether each one was “read in full,” “only glanced at” or “paid no attention at all” (→ Readership Research; Test Theory).