San Antonio College Library

"From the launching of America's first newspaper to YouTube's latest phone-videoed crime, the media has always been guilty of indulging America's obsession with controversy. This encyclopedia covers 100 events in world history from the 17th century to the present - moments that alone were major and minor, but ones that exploded in the public eye when the media stepped in. Topics covered include yellow journalism, the War of the Worlds radio broadcast,...

"This book examines contemporary American consciousness, considering the factors that have driven society toward gossip and sensationalism at the cost of substance and depth." "Arden discusses the growing epidemic of acrimony, superficiality, attention deficit disorder, and complaints of ennui. He targets the reasons why American children have expressed their confused rage with deadly weapons, why a president boasts that he earned C's in college,...

"The woman who fired the first shot in "The Great Incest War" takes a critical, controversial look back at making an issue of incest."

'Sex Scene' suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass mediaufilm and television, recorded sound, and publishinguthat provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe.

"Bill O'Reilly is the very embodiment of the idea of a Culture Warrior--and in this book he lives up to the title brilliantly, with all the brashness and forthrightness at his command. He sees that America is in the midst of a fierce culture war between those who embrace traditional values and those who want to change America into a "secular-progressive" country. This is a conflict that differs in many ways from the usual liberal/conservative divide,...

"Sharing is central to how we live today: it is what we do online; it is a model of economic behavior; and it is also a type of therapeutic talk. Sharing always comes with a warm glow around it, embodying positive values such as empathy, communication, fairness, openness and equality. The Age of Sharing shows how and when sharing became caring, and explains how its meanings have changed in the digital age. Sharing, though, is also a word used to camouflage...

Media are fundamental to our sense of living in a social world. Since the beginning of modernity, media have transformed the scale on which we act as social beings. And now in the era of digital media, media themselves are being transformed as platforms, content, and producers multiply. - Yet the implications of social theory for understanding media and of media for rethinking social theory have been neglected; never before has it been more important...

This book brings together international scholars to explore concepts, topics, and issues concerning the communication environment in contemporary democratic societies. It combines qualitative and quantitative approaches to provide an interdisciplinary and global perspective that reflects the trends, theories, and issues in current media and communication research. Divided into two main sections, part 1 provides accounts of the role of media in society,...