The rise of BASIC in UN climate change negotiations

This paper assesses the role of the BASIC countries — Brazil, South Africa, India, and China — in UN climate change negotiations. The paper explores the formation and evolution of the group, and focuses on how the four major developing countries of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa have coordinated their positions and acted jointly to achieve an agreed outcome with other players in the recent UN Climate Change Conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, based on an analysis of their country profiles and negotiation positions on a wide range of climate issues. The paper argues that the emergence of the BASIC Group is a reflection of the ongoing power shift from EU–US agreement to BASIC–US compromise in UN climate negotiations since the early 1990s. The rise of BASIC also has its roots in recent global market dynamics and further reflects the power transformation in the economic dimension of the international system.     

Connecting restorative justice with gender-responsive programming

Despite the encouraging results of public opinion assessments on restorative justice, people are not likely to spontaneously suggest restorative measures after a crime. Restorative justice thus seems in need of a public relations strategy. This paper discusses the strategy labeling victims as the universal remedy to promote restorative justice, and the proposal of promoting restorative justice through the media by foregrounding crime victims in media reports on crime. This strategy stems from a belief that the most appealing aspect of restorative justice to the public is its thoughtfulness to victims. However, I will argue that there are three problems with this approach. These concern: (1) the victim’s position in both restorative justice theory and practice; (2) the characteristics of media reporting on crime in general and victims in particular; and (3) the risk of attaining a result opposite to the initial objective (i.e. increasing punitive attitudes instead of promoting restorative justice).     

The Intellectual and Cultural Dimensions of International Relations: Present Ironies and Future Possibilities

Reported is a study that focused on the Millennial Generation and potential differences in viewing an exhibition in person versus online. The exhibition featured the artwork of Paul-Henri Bourguignon, whose extensive body of work includes a variety of paintings and drawings that employ a wide range of styles. Some viewers traveled to the physical space of a museum gallery, while others viewed reproductions of the same works on the Internet. Informants engaged in reflexive self-interviews using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. The authors compare viewers’ responses to works experienced in person versus online and discuss implications.     

Can Twitter Add to Performance Evaluation in the Area of Performing Arts? Reflections from La Scala Opera House

ABSTRACT

Social media are continuously diffusing in performing arts organizations. Yet little is known on how social media data can contribute to the performing arts evaluation process. This article addresses this issue by investigating if and how Twitter data can add a valuable source of information to the performance evaluation process. A literature review with an empirical application on the evaluation of the performance Aida at Teatro Alla Scala provides evidence about the type of indicators that can be derived from Twitter and support a discussion about potentialities and pitfalls connected to their adoption for the evaluation of performing arts.     

How to construct your sexuality according to French magazines

Gendered magazines are a major contemporary form of mediation, (re)production and organization of (hetero)sexuality. They illustrate how sexual activity and performance become the concern and responsibility of individuals who are able to invest time and resources in the construction of a sexually-skilled self. Drawing on contemporary research, the article seeks to promote a dialogue between media and communications research, analysing French media narratives on sexuality through the reading of a selection of articles from the best-selling summer magazines aimed at 18- to 25-year-old readers. The article uses a semiodiscursive analysis to understand how didactic models are made to (re)produce specific knowledge on sexuality and to ascertain that this knowledge is coded in an expertise discourse. Through the hypothesis of a didactic ambition, three didactic models are identified, and attention is here focused on the short-coming/reparative model, that simultaneously creates a dysfunction and a fix. The analysis eventually reveals that didactic models are made to organize social life by strictly dividing sexual and therefore social roles between “men” and “women”. The moral criteria called upon regulate the ideal treatment of those didactic modalities and the discourse in magazines ends up shaping sexuality as a contemporary moral economy, a problem that should be pragmatically treated through the use of a certain type of knowledge.     

Bourgeois Myth versus Media Poetry in Prime-time: Re-visiting Mark Frost and David Lynch's Twin Peaks

This article explores IVIark Frost and David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks from the perspective of the two dominant world-views it dramatized. The world-view based in bourgeois myth can be described as employing significations that are always present in naturally and mythically transcendent terms. The other world-view is generated by media poetry, which is a virtual mode of signification that re-mediates linguistic/audio/visual phenomena with contingent capacities for meaning. That generative potential for signification is an aspect of all media use, but media poetry specifically highlights and exploits the capacity of new multi-media to enhance “poetic” possibilities for meaning-making. This may occur through either the actual use of virtual media, through a critical ambiguity with regard to official ideologies and formal/generic con-straints, or through thematic content that destabilizes fixed meanings/representations and entertains possibilities for alternative significations. The article makes the case that the adolescent characters in the show specifically embody the productive world-view inherent in media poetry, and the “poetic” challenges they present to adult, mythic society allow for the continual re-mediation of any and all bourgeois myths. Those adolescents, especially Laura Palmer, embody cultural meanings that refuse ideological codification; that is, that can still become. Twin Peaks, as the article demonstrates, is a striking example of media poetry since it was aired on prime-time network television; it still deserves attention for the stunning ways it remediated the mythic nature of American, middle-class society.     

A Quarter Century of News Coverage of Candidates in Presidential Nomination Campaigns

Abstract

This paper analyzes network news coverage of presidential nomination candidates during the pre-primary and primaries seasons from 1975 to 2000. Using data from the Vanderbilt Television Archives, we find that the network news programs are giving less coverage to the candidates. The decline corresponds to the front-loaded primary schedule, which produces a presumptive nominee sooner and effectively ends coverage of the nomination campaign. We also analyze news coverage of US senators and representatives campaigning for the presidency. Legislators' news coverage varies with their position in Congress and their position in or at the polls.     

Mass Media Paradoxes in the Bulgarian Elections of 2001

ABSTRACT

Electoral year '01 marked another headway of the country along the road of its democratic development.

For the first time after 1989, the parliamentary elections (fifth in a row) were not held before their time, but after a normally completed cycle. The unproductive bipolar model of alternating the main political opponents was broken. A new and unusual player of royal blood emerged, who, without any firm structures, with little funds, and under the conditions of political and media hostility, won firmly the majority vote.

For the first time since the outset of transition, a representative of the Left qualified for the presidential post, which was the most articulate acknowledgement that the Left has changed and the most eloquent criticism of the former bearers of public confidence.

Both parliamentary and presidential elections '01 took part under the conditions of a free media system and after the advent of Internet into political campaigning, information, and analysis. Both campaigns and election returns, however, manifested grave professional problems in the domain of sociology and the media that failed to meet the principal requirement for unbiased information and predictability of developments and results. In this situation, the society manifested considerable civil advancement. The paradox of that electoral year was that both Par-Lilia Raycheva is affiliated with the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication, The St. Kliment Ohridsky Sofia University, Bulgaria. Parliament and President were elected contrary to sociological forecasts and attitudes.     

传媒对犯罪的消极影响

传媒的低俗倾向直接影响人对事物的认知,刺激犯罪欲望;传媒传播的有害信息,对犯罪人有一定的暗示作用;传媒展现的犯罪模式可能成为犯罪人仿效的范例,从而导致犯罪行为的发生。因此,传媒对犯罪的消极影响我们必须足够重视,及时预警。     

Online Opposition in Singapore: Communications Outreach Without Electoral Gain

While “new media” have substantially altered the landscape for information dissemination and social mobilisation, these media are neither all alike in their ideological leanings or intentions, nor independently capable of identity transformation and mobilisation. The paper explores these new media in the context of Malaysia since the late 1990s. It differentiates among news sites and organisational websites, which transmit (often previously proscribed) information to domestic and foreign audiences, with potentially significant effects on “civicness” and mobilisation; blogs, which tend to be primarily personalised, monological and often unfiltered; and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which have eroded the anonymity of online interaction but represent the apex of self-selected communities. “Old media” still populate this landscape as well, from newspapers and other media sources, to public lectures, to leaflets and other ad hoc publications. Even apart from common caveats as to who has access, criteria for evaluation of these new and old media as tools for political change must vary, including differing degrees of information-provision and edification, interest articulation and aggregation, and transformation of collective identities so as to enable new patterns of mobilisation for collective action.