No abstract

No abstract

Television's coverage of the tragic events of September 11 can be viewed and understood as a paradigmatic disaster marathon. The salience of the attack's visual images, their exclusivity on the screen for a protracted period, and the invisibility of their perpetrators enhanced the attack's effectiveness. The paper highlights a number of problems that the September 11 disaster marathon poses to the profession of journalism and to society, and points out possible remedies for the future. It ends with a short discussion of the ways in which television's coverage of the event both resembled and differed from the media-event model, and of theoretical aspects of its unique dimensions as a disaster marathon.Television, Media Events, Disasters, Disaster Marathon, Terrorism, September 11,

No abstract

This article explores the uncharted territory of reflexive internet humor about networked computers. A combined quantitative-qualitative analysis of 250 texts sampled from popular websites yielded a map of the main themes underpinning this massive corpus of humor. We analyzed them in relation to three grand theories of the nature of humor -superiority, release, and incongruity -locating each theme on a matrix deriving from the theories: (i) a superiority axis, running between the powerful and weak players in the networked environment; (ii) an incongruity axis, running from the purely human to the strictly technical, and (iii) a release axis reflecting degrees of tension generated by the former two dualities. Our analysis suggests that humor about networked computers extends to a comment on the nature of humanness in a bewildering age of artificial intelligence. The communication of this reflexive comment may be shaping a global community of computer users.

No abstract

The golden age of television news gave a large majority of otherwise diverse Americans a unified, seamless, and clear-cut image of their nation, its central players, and its agenda. Carefully scheduled, edited, sequenced, and branded, heard and seen simultaneously across America, it provided a pretense of order to the chaos that is news. The permanence and stability of the nation, as expressed in a complex way by TV news, provided Americans with an all-important sense of existential security experienced on an unarticulated emotional level. Today, a disjointed news environment is crushing the nature of network news as a transitional object. Television news no longer reassures viewers by connecting them to a surmountable world out there but carries them on a loop from themselves to themselves.

This study explores the Jewish ultra-Orthodox “kosher cellphone,” a device that can be used only for voice calls. It asks why the leadership of this highly textual community didn’t stop at blocking Internet use over the kosher cellphone and went on to block texting messages as well. Using both interviews with ultra-Orthodox anti-cellphone-activists and content analysis of online discussions among community members, the study analyzes the perception of threat that underlies the prohibition of texting, and explores how this prohibition is received in the community. The findings show that in contrast to the threat posed by improper content, which affects the external boundaries of this enclave community, blocking texting stems from a perception that the technology’s configuration threatens intra-communal monitoring and the control of the dissemination of information within the communal space. Our findings add a number of dimensions to the current understanding of the nexus of new media, social control, and isolated religious communities.