In Zambia, the idea of celebrity has been in contention and is often left to interpretation. Whereas the understanding of who is and is not a celebrity is commonplace in the developed world as well as their role in media economy, and sometimes politics, the ‘who?’ and ‘why’ in Zambia is...

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like...

This editors’ introduction provides a short summary of the Snowden revelations and the paradoxical political and public responses to them. It further provides an overview of the current academic debate triggered by the Snowden case and the documents leaked by him and introduces the articles...

This paper describes and makes sense of why and how China's telecommunications was undeveloped from the late Qing Dynasty through the Civil War in the 1940s. The purpose is to bring into sharp focus the imprint of global capitalism imperialism on domestic socio-spatial relations in China — and...

This manuscript investigates the facts of publication of the images of the Nanking Atrocity (December 1937–January 1938) in LIFE and LOOK magazines, two widely read United States publications, as well as the Nanking atrocity film clips that circulated to millions more in American and...

This paper deals with the phenomenon of so-called (note) card stories on YouTube. Card stories can be described as self-disclosing videos or confessions, using a new frame for telling one’s own story audio-visually to the public by combining ‘old’ (hand-written messages) and...

This case study explores how the Korea Leukemia Patient Group (KLPG) uses social media in its internal communication strategy and how that empowers its relationship with external counterparts. This study’s findings indicate that the communication strategy of the local health...

Gerbner and Gross’s cultivation theory predicts that prolonged exposure to TV violence creates fear of crime, symptomatic of a mean world syndrome. We tested the theory’s prediction in a time series model with annual changes in violence portrayal on popular US TV shows from 1972 to...

Since the nineteenth century, more kinds of news outlets and ways of presenting news grew along with telegraphic, telephonic, and digital communications, leading journalists, policymakers, and critics to assume that more events became available than ever before. Attentive audiences say in...