GC Times Talk

This volume examines the consequences, implications, and opportunities associated with issues of diversity in the electronic media. With a focus on race and gender, the chapters represent diverse approaches, including social scientific, humanistic, critical, and rhetorical. The contributors consider race and gender issues in both historical and contemporary electronic media, and their work is presented in three sections: content, context (audiences, effects, and reception), and culture (media industries, policy, and production). In this book, the authors investigate, problematize, and theorize a variety of concerns which at their core relate to issues of difference. How do we use media to construct and understand different social groups? How do the media represent and affect our engagement with and responses to different social groups? How can we understand these processes and the environment within which they occur? Although this book focuses on the differences associated with race and gender, the questions raised by and the theoretical perspectives presented in the chapters are applicable to other forms of socially-constructed difference. Chapters 5, 10, 12, and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

Over the past twenty years, Howard J. Ehrlich conducted the first national surveys of ethnoviolence, helped design the protocol for identifying hate crimes, and has served as the director of The Prejudice Institute. This collection of essays is the result of his unparalleled research in this vital area of study. Ehrlich introduces the ten dimensions of America's social heritage that are necessary for a complete understanding of prejudice and coherently explains the complex differencesbetween ethnoviolence and hate crimes. Through analysis of network television news programs and in-depth interviews with newspaper editors and reporters, Ehrlich explores how our mainstream media maintains racial and ethnic stereotypes. Case studies (the Oklahoma City bombing, Rodney King riots, Columbine High School shootings, and Hurricane Katrina) show how traumatic events are manipulated by political elites and the news media to shape intergroup relations. Ehrlich concludes with a personaland political look at the concentration of power in the United States and the increasing incidence of political ignorance as a tool of oppression.

In the age of iDeology - in which individual access and participation to technology is about to replace the rich texture of religion, culture, tradition and political convictions - the social impact of media discourse only magnifies. This volume is an attempt to explore the influence of ever-available communication content on the minds and behavior of a population that has made the permanent and often obsessive use of communication technology a defining element of social orientation. Unlike the many accounts that focus on the remarkably redefined patterns in the context of Western society - ranging from twittering Presidents to the emerging populist movements all over Europe - this volume portrays the situation from the frequently neglected perspective of the global periphery. As opposed to simply transfer and measure perspectives taken from a Western point of view, the clear intention of this volume is to provide ample space for the sincere and explorative consideration of local characteristics and settings of the different social, cultural and political contexts and therefore contribute to providing the ground for future research.