Abstract of Articles of Media Watch May 2013

Mobile and Internet Communication: Privacy Risks for Youth in Bangladesh

FAHEEM HUSSAIN
Asian University for Women, BangladeshMOHAMMAD SAHID ULLAH
University of Chittagong, Bangladesh

This article looks into the privacy perception and vulnerability among Bangladeshi urban youth using mobile and computing devices. Based on a survey it shows a significant number of the youths are unaware about the concept of privacy in the ‘Digital Age’ and also has little or no idea about possible risks relating to shared voice and data communications. Amid the absence of any clear-cut privacy framework at the national level, this article has found that the level of trust on existing mobile telephony to be significantly higher than the Internet. This research concluded that the long term user experience (or absence of it) in mobile phone and Internet do not have any impact on Bangladeshi youths’ perception on possible privacy related vulnerabilities. Concern over data manipulation has also been identified a major influential factor in deciding youth’s online behavioral patterns.

Redefining the Virtual Self: Analysis of Facebook Discourse of College Students in Kolkata

UMA SHANKAR PANDEY
Surendranath College for Women, University of Calcutta, India

One way in which Facebook is unique for creating perceptions of individuals is the degree to which private information is presented by avenues other than revelation by the person himself. Discourses, are not just insulated linguistic ‘objects,’ but are constitutive parts of communicative acts in a particular sociocultural situation. The present study looks at a particular set of socio-economic factors which influence the Facebook discourse of undergraduate and post graduate communication students in Kolkata, India. This research posits the role of interpreting the intentionality of the discourse on the respondents. This recognizes the process in which people decide about how and when they will disclose private information on a group site. The 292 respondents to our online questionnaire classify the topicality, functionality and colloquality of their Facebook discourse among closed ended options. The objective is to relate these intentionality to factors such as broadband use, medium of education, perceived usefulness and goal directedness.

Networked Publics and Identity Construction: Towards an Era of Virtual Socialization

BIDYARANI ASEM
Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, Delhi, India

In the era of digital age where the rate of information exchange and sharing have gone extremely high, the line of demarcation between the sender and the receiver in a communication act came to be less existent. With the rise of new media technologies, social networking sites (SNS) such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. have increasingly become a common platform for networking mong people. The term ‘networked publics’ became a more appropriate term for the broad category of users in these virtual networking platforms. One of the most important characteristic features of social networking is the issue of self constructed identity and representation. This emerging trend has become the key towards virtual socialization amongst the networked publics. Based on strong theoretical backgrounds of self and identity construction, this paper tries to explore the various aspects of socialization in the virtual space through a wide array of literature surveys. Notwithstanding their privacy concerns, the willingness to self expose themselves among the public and to what extent people reveal their “self” in the process of identity construction will be highlighted thoroughly in the paper.

New Media Impacts on Journalism: Revisiting the Dynamics of News Production

PITABAS PRADHAN
Aligarh Muslim University, India

 The Arab spring of 2011, the Indian Civil Society campaign for Lokpal 2012, and the ongoing campaign for capital punishment to the Delhi gang rape accused, are among a thousands of events, worldwide, which have demonstrated the power of new media in galvanizing the masses for a cause. The advent of high speed communication channels like broadband, optical fiber, and Web 2.0 services coupled with the ubiquitous multitasking devices like smart phones and other handhelds available in multitudes of forms have tremendously increased the scale of messages output and sharing. The pull of modern technology, push of business, and most importantly the search for new ways to satisfy the self expression needs and ambitions of the new generation have made the domain of new media grow beyond expectation. The technology savvy new generations, have learnt to explore constantly expanding opportunities for communication and self expression presented by the Internet and the Web. The interactive nature of the new media technologies have significantly altered the dynamics of journalism in the cyber space to an extent of blurring the distinction between producers and consumers of messages and transformed them into pro-summers. This paper analyses the impacts of new media technology on professional journalism and the responses of the old media.

Adolescents and the Media: Teenagers Talk about Television and Negative Representations

DOROTHY HOBSON
University of Wolverhampton, West Midlands, United Kingdom

Young people are an elusive and exciting audience and user of all media. They are both the most desirable yet indefinable set of groups and individuals who must be attracted, intrigued and held in thrall if media organizations are to succeed in their quests to keep in step with their ever moving interests, This article presents the views of diverse groups of young people aged between nine and nineteen in Birmingham, United Kingdom in the winter of 2010/11 and reveals in their own words how they feel about the way that they are represented in British media. They are avid watchers of television and even more active users of new media. They reveal their eclectic and heavy viewing habits. While they are diverse in their education, social backgrounds and ethnicity, they are united in expressing their unhappiness and discontent about the way that they are represented on British television both in news coverage, documentaries and in dramas directed at them. More worrying is the fact that they feel and give evidence that this negative view of teenagers, affects the way they are perceived by other members of the public. While they are critical of British television they do single out American television as being more aspirational and optimistic.

Bollywood Nuances Affecting Italian Television

MONIA ACCIARI
Swansea University, United Kingdom

Since the 1990s, Bollywood cinema arrived in Europe and successfully settled away from the Indian subcontinent, proposing a diverse, variegated and multisensorial experience not only for South Asians living abroad, but also for the locals. Interestingly, the plural mediatic nature of these kinds of films have penetrated European countries in different ways; some were enthusiastic for the joyfulness of songs, others began reviving connections between hippy culture and Bollywood atmosphere, while Italy, the country under investigation in this article, initiated a series of television programs profoundly inspired by the new and compelling Bollywood wave. The television programs analyzed in this article have the scope to unearth how Bollywood cinema has penetrated the small screen of Italy. Also, this article answers the following question: what are the dynamics that have characterized the artistic encounter between two very different ways of expression? Firstly, the work of Russian Semiologist Yuri Lotman on semiosphere is taken into account in an attempt to highlight how the world of Bollywood and the one of Italian television, considered as two diverse semiospheres, have influenced each other in the endeavor to see a process of exchange and fusion. On a second level, the fusion of formats, such as sitcoms with Bollywood nuances, could produce an interesting reflection on genre. A brief literature review on genre theory has been offered to frame the possibility for the emergence of a new genre, the fusion genre, at the base of this encounter.

CBC and the Science Academy: A Participatory Journey

NICOLE BLANCHETT NEHELI
Sheridan College Institute of Technology, Canada

 The publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has a unique, participatory relationship with the science academy that showcases scientific discovery on the Geologic Journey II website—a site run by CBC. Although academics work on interesting projects that have great relevance to those outside academic circles, their work is generally published in journals or texts that are not often accessed or, in some cases, understood by the general public. On Geologic Journey II, a site created in conjunction with the development of a documentary project, contemporary research is highlighted in a manner that makes it easily accessible to a much wider audience. Through the lens of media logic, using the theories of convergence culture and the public sphere, in this paper, I explore how the partnership between CBC and the science academy invigorates public discourse, and why building relationships with community partners makes good business sense for a public broadcaster.

Freshman 15: Are Universities Doing Enough?

STEVEN McCORKLE
University of Alabama, USAKEVIN ARMSTRONG
Mississippi State University, USAMARK GOODMAN
Mississippi State University, USAJANICE GIDDENS
Clarkson Community Center, Atlanta, USA

Freshman 15 has been identified as a major medical issue on college campuses for over a decade. Scholars have indicated that Freshman 15 treatment options need to include physical fitness, nutrition, and counseling. Our analysis of the web sites of 45 major universities indicates that most schools need to improve their communication methods if they are going to successfully provide intervention to their students.

Audience at Play: An Inquiry into the Song Kolaveri Di

SHUBHDA ARORA
Mudra Institute of Communications Ahmedabad, India

The discourse in communication studies has looked at audiences as active seekers of pleasure through communicative play. This perspective has been talked about extensively by William Stephenson (1988) through his play theory of mass communication. Stephenson refutes Freud who considered play to be an unconscious, passive and an escapist defence mechanism. This paper furthers this understanding of play in the present day of digitization and virtual media technologies. The study proposes that the users of the Internet (virtual audiences) get actively co-opted into the creation and recreation of media content through play. Participative play on the Internet can be equated to what Caillois (2001) has described as Paideia (primitive, pure play of carefree gaiety). Paideia in its new Internet avatar may manifest itself in the form of shares and likes, posts and reposts, comments and recommendations on content sharing and social networking sites. This carefree act of pure play can be attributed to the absence of a proper regulatory framework on social interactions in the cyberspace which in turn makes the play elusive and the players’ (audience) behaviour very unpredictable.

Constraints in Screen Translation: The Socio- Cultural Dimensions of Dubbing and Subtitling

LOVJI K. N
Vimala College, University of Calicut, India

Whether domesticating or foreignising in its approach, any form of audiovisual translation ultimately plays a unique role in developing both national identities and national stereotypes. The transmission of cultural values in screen translation has received very little attention in the literature and remains one of the most pressing areas of research in translation studies. (Mona Baker and Braño Hochel 1997:76) The term audiovisual translation refers to both the translation of the distribution format and its contents. Even though the technical responsibilities of audiovisual translators may become limited, their creative and linguistic abilities, as well as their capacity to match words with both images and sounds continue to be tested. The present paper reflects the pace and breadth of the linguistic and cultural challenges that the translators encounter while translating, subtitling and dubbing films.

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