A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen. By Cliff Zukin, Scott Keeter, Molly Andolina, Krista Jenkins, and Michael X. Delli Carpini. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 253p. $19.00. Should we be really worried about declining public engagement? Or should we accept that it is merely changing shape? This book describes substantial alterations in the ways Americans are involved in public life, particularly younger citizens, and analyzes a wide range of empirical data with the goal of understanding the implications—both negative and positive—of these emerging patterns of participation.

/pdf/a-new-engagement-political-participation-civic-life-and-the-no7rq6z3ws.pdf

A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen

Engineering space and time: moving pictures and motionless trips

Places play an important role as anchoring fictional (books, movies, songs, video games) as well as artistic universes to reality. Conversely, imaginary places affect the way people perceive real places. 'Set-jetting', which transforms film locations into tourist attractions, is a perfect example of the increasing demand for connecting fictional spaces with real places. The interaction of imaginary and real places, which has been for years an operating function of fiction, is increasing both qualitatively and quantitatively. This is not limited to cinema but also affects literature and art. Once located on a map, the fictional place becomes attractive for tourists and a potential source of profit. The connection between imaginary and real places has been transformed by recent dramatic changes in communication and information technologies, and more specifically in the domain of geospatial technologies. These technologies offer more effective ways of georeferencing locations in films, books and art ...

Connecting Real and Imaginary Places through Geospatial Technologies: Examples from Set-jetting and Art-oriented Tourism

This article discusses the specific epistemological and methodological difficulties which historians of audience face while taking stock of recent developments in the field It starts with a definition of the audience as an entity with both objective and subjective dimensions It refutes the textualist claim according to which audiences are pure discursive entities Put into historical perspective, textualism appears as less postmodern than romantic This article then warns historians against another form of less conscious, ‘rampant textualism’: being influenced by ‘grand narratives’ based on axiologies of hopes and fears triggered by the media They may provide interesting ideal-types but should not be considered as directly relevant to history The main part of this article is devoted to a typology of sources, following four categories: from above (coming from media, political, administrative elites), from the side (references to audiences in other media, including art and literature), from below (written and more recently oral expressions of audience members) and from the media themselves (both physical artefacts and media messages) It shows the advantages and drawbacks of each and explains the danger of pitching one against the other (eg ‘good’ ethnography, against ‘bad’ statistics)

Detextualizing: : How to write a history of audiences

It is an old, yet, accurate observation that the ‘newness’ of media is and most probably will continue to be a catalyst for research in media and communication studies. At the same time, there are ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1354856519834480

On the relativity of old and new media: A lifeworld perspective:

(2002). Early Swedish (Non-fiction) Cinema and Cartography. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 275-290.

Early Swedish (Non-fiction) Cinema and Cartography

This article examines how an analysis of a broader media ecology of a particular generation can offer a more complex account of past audience habits than the ones we gain from quantitative audience ratings based on one medium alone. It also shows how past surveys can be put to use anew within new theoretical frameworks. The main argument is based on a cultural studies–inspired interpretation of a home electronics survey, conducted by the Swedish public service radio’s research unit in 1985. The main focus is on members of the cohort born during the 1960s, who grew up with television and quickly became avid television users. The longitudinal analysis of television preferences within the broader media ecology of this generation sheds new light on the relationships between different media, but also on the long-term impact that a particular media ecology may have on one’s engagement with the media at later stages of life.

Reconstructing past media ecologies: The 1960s generation in Sweden

/pdf/far-east-film-festival-20-16o1qedzom.pdf

Mats Björkin

Papers

Early Swedish (Non-fiction) Cinema and Cartography

Reconstructing past media ecologies: The 1960s generation in Sweden

Far East Film Festival 20