Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Raiders Of The Lost Archive: The Report Of The Inter-Departmental Committee On The Film Industry 1942, Roddy Flynn

Irish Communication Review

In 1938, Sean Lemass, as Minister for Industry and Commerce, established a three man committee with a broad remit to examine and report on every aspect – actual and putative – of the Irish film industry. This report would examine not merely the exhibition, distribution and production of film but also its potential as a cultural force and the extent to which the established censorship regime was fulfilling its obligations to ‘protect public morality against any danger of contamination or deterioration which might threaten it through the influence of cinema’ (RICFI, 1942: 44).

Media And Protests: The Utilisation Of Communication Technologies By Environmental Movements, Liam Leonard

Irish Communication Review

A notable feature of the recent political landscape has been the increasing incidents of confrontation between grassroots and elites. These conflicts have occurred in the wake of the declining relevance of the traditional left-right dichotomy, and have been exemplified by the campaigns of opposition led by environmental groups against the globalised corporate sector. This article will examine how new forms of political expression may arise from the environmental movements’ utilisation of the new technologies of communication as a strategic tool in their campaigns of protest.

Through The Looking Glass: How The Mass Media Represent, Reflect And Refract Sexual Crime In Ireland, Michael J. Breen

Irish Communication Review

The publication of the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report (McGee, 2000) was a landmark event in the documenting of sexual crime in Ireland. The core of the report was based on the results of a survey of more than 3,000 members of the general public about their attitudes and beliefs and their own lifetime experiences of sexual violence. Commissioned by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and carried out by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, the report chronicled as never before the extent of sexual abuse and violence in Ireland.

Cultivating Habitats Of Meaning: Broadcasting, Participation And Interculturalism, Gavin Titley

Irish Communication Review

At the time of writing, buenas vistas of the digital landscape are far fewer than when this publication was first conceived. The last year (2002) has witnessed high profile European digital failures, a fraught domestic franchising process and a serious financial crisis at RTE. These factors, combined with the as yet ambiguous direction of postelection policy, conspire to make the future of digital terrestrial television very uncertain. More broadly, reports from Ireland1 and abroad suggest that there is still a significant battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of potential digital converts. At least partially this involves convincing people that proposed …

Consumption Convergence: Research Report, Deirdre Hynes

Irish Communication Review

The term ‘convergence’ has often been used over the last decade to describe the processes through which technologies, such as computers, telephony and broadcasting, have come together to spark the so-called ‘communication revolution’. This revolution has been greatly hyperbolised by a number of influential commentators in industry, government and academia. It is the aim of this paper to bring a more grounded approach to the study of convergence, in respect to consumption studies. Convergence has more noticeably been associated with the production side of technology studies, particularly in the development and emergence of new technological systems, such as ICTs. Whilst …

Regulation Of New Economy Markets: The Case Of Wired Residential Internet Service Provision, David Jacobson, Tom Weymes

Irish Communication Review

The ISP market in Ireland is relatively immature. Although Ireland’s first Service Provider IEUnet was established in 1991, it is only in the last two or three years that a choice of provider and access price points has emerged under the regulatory regime of the Office of the Director of Telecommunications Regulation (OTDR). This has been achieved through the introduction of a telecommunications licensing regime by the ODTR, the specifics of which are available from the ODTR website.2 From a position where there was only one telecommunications operator, the former PTO3 namely Eircom, there are currently 77 other licensed operators …

Online News And Changing Models Of Journalism, Brian Trench, Gary Quinn

Irish Communication Review

The move to Internet news publishing is the latest in a series of technological shifts which have required journalists not merely to adapt their daily practice but which have also – at least in the view of some – recast their role in society. For over a decade, proponents of the networked society as a new way of life have argued that responsibility for news selection and production will shift from publishers, editors and reporters to individual consumers,

News Consumption In Ireland And The European Union: Traditional Media Vs The Internet, Susan O'Donnell

Irish Communication Review

Television, radio, daily papers and the Internet all deliver news to viewers, listeners and readers. Which media are the most popular in Ireland and across the European Union? The Eurobarometer surveys offer journalism and communication researchers a very useful source of data about consumption of news in Ireland and across the EU. [1] This article analyses the latest Eurobarometer surveys, and earlier data from a national survey in Ireland, to develop a snapshot of patterns of news consumption and a profile of Internet use and users in Ireland and across the EU.

Re-Imagined Communities?: Ireland, Europe And The Web As Shifting Sites Of Television Discourse, Maeve Connolly

Irish Communication Review

The rise of satellite and cable across Europe during the late 1980s contributed to the restructuring of communications spaces that had previously been dominated by national broadcasters. These changes were viewed with concern by many media commentators. Summarising the debate in 1989, David Morley and Kevin Robins noted that ‘it is broadly felt that these new technologies have disturbing and damaging implications for established national (and indeed continental) identities. There is a common fear of both their potential to disaggregate fixed national audiences and communities and to create new ones across national boundaries’ (Morley and Robins, 1989: 11). It seems …

Live Life To The Power Of Ps2: Locating The Digital Games Industry In The New Media Environment, Aphra Kerr

Irish Communication Review

The digital games industry is a global entertainment business stretching from Tokyo to San Francisco to London. In May each year, game developers from around the world meet in Los Angeles to pitch their ideas to publishers, sneak a preview of other games and do licensing deals with hardware companies and Hollywood studios. The show has much in common with Melia and Cannes: it has all the glitz, the hype and the stars. The main difference is that the stars are non-human, the digital game producers are relatively unknown and this form of popular culture has been largely ignored by …

New Media As Social Facts: Researching As Shaping The Digital Landscape, James Cornford

Irish Communication Review

The emergence of new media (or digital media, or perhaps even ‘the new economy’) has certainly had some salutary effects on media studies. The advent of the Web has raised (or re-raised) a whole set of interesting questions for those concerned with researching various aspects of the media from those concerned with political economy and industrial organisation to those concerned with reception, interpretations and texts. Digital media frequently appear, even in the most sober accounts, to be some unstoppable tidal wave of change, a complex and multi-layered landscape moving so fast that researchers can only rush to try to keep …

Book Reviews: Volume 8

Irish Communication Review

Chris Frost Media Ethics and Self Regulation, reviewed by Michael Foley

Damien Kiberd (ed.) Media in Ireland: The Search for Ethical Journalism, reviewed by David Quin

Peter Mason and Derrick Smith Magazine Law: A Practical Guide, reviewed by Eavan Murphy

Global Theory And Touristic Encounters, Gavan Titley

Irish Communication Review

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the tourist industry is providing one in nine jobs and eighty per cent of travellers come from just twenty countries. In other words, in a changing global economy, tourism is a matter of economic imperative for the Majority World, and privileged mobility for the Minority.

Fear Of Social Isolation: Testing An Assumption From The Spiral Of Silence, Pamela J. Shoemaker, Michael Breen, Marjorie Stamper

Irish Communication Review

This study is designed specifically to test the fear of isolation assumption and to explore its position in the Spiral of Silence model. It has been unclear from the literature whether fear of isolation is antecedent to opinion formation and dominant opinion assessment or an intervening variable between opinion formation and willingness to voice the opinion. Path analyses are used to empirically investigate the relationship of the fear of isolation variable to other variables in the model.

Media Education In Ireland: An Overview, Brian O'Neill

Irish Communication Review

The Irish educational system is frequently celebrated as a world class system that is held in high domestic esteem, has contributed substantially to Ireland’s economic success and been compared very favourably with our counterparts elsewhere in the European Union. Such contentment belies the fact that it has also been a system very slow to change, is notoriously centralised and has only in the last decade instituted significant legislative reform that will enable and facilitate the growth of new curricular areas such as media studies – the topic of this article – an area in which Ireland lags substantially behind our …

The Case For Irish Newspapers Entering The Interactive Digital Market, Colm Murphy

Irish Communication Review

For over 300 years the newspaper business has been inseparable from ink on a page. But the growing use of digital distribution technology such as the world wide web, wireless application protocol for mobile phones and the potential for interactive digital television makes readers simultaneously easier to reach but harder to retain. Newspaper readership is no longer confined to the technology of print. This opens new opportunities for publishers but aggressive players from the software, telecommunications and retailing sectors are also exploiting this new technology and encroaching on newspapers’ traditional market.

Driving Ireland Past The Chequered Flag: Jordan Grand Prix, Formula One And National Identity, Eoin Kirk

Irish Communication Review

Sport has changed. The nineteenth century rationale of amateurism, fair play and recreational participation has given way in the age of mass media and late capitalism to the staging of sport as commercial entertainment (Wenner, 1998; Whitson. 1998). While televised sport may work to create connections between people who have not yet met and are not likely to do so, it too, has slowly transformed these very relationships between sporting individuals and teams and the communities they supposedly represent (Whitson, 1998; Rowe et. aI, 1998). Can the needs of national and international television, global commercial forces, transnational fans and audiences …

Anti-Communism And Media Surveillance In Ireland 1948-50, John Horgan

Irish Communication Review

Ireland in the immediate post-war period offers, to the student of Cold War politics and intrigues, some unusual insights into the nature of political surveillance in general and to the surveillance of the press in particular, according to documents recently released by the US State department and made available in the US National Archives in Washington.1 Politically, the situation was becoming more volatile. Fianna Fáil, which had been in power continuously since 1942 and had won its most recent election in 1944, was coming under increasingly vocal criticism from two key groups of erstwhile supporters: urban workers, who had been …

Escaping The Evil Avenger And The Supercrip: Images Of Disability In Popular Television, Alison Harnett

Irish Communication Review

This article examines the extent and significance of the under-representation of the disabled community in fictional film and television, arguing that when it is portrayed onscreen, the images are often inaccurate or unfair. Whereas media treatment of women, the gay community, or ethnic minorities has received considerable academic attention, no such priority has been given to the nature of the portrayal of the disabled, or the lack of proportional visibility on our screens.

Race To The Park: Simmel, The Stranger And The State, Tanya M. Cassidy

Irish Communication Review

In 1909, Georg Simmel opens his essay entitled ‘Bridge and Door’ in the following way, ‘[t]he image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in external nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated’ (Simmel, 1997: 170). Ambivalence, meaning occupying two spaces at one and the same time, provides a stabilising social paradigm, and not a provisional condition of uncertainty. This paper discusses a socio-political drama in Ireland which makes active use of an ambivalent rhetoric, specifically linking notions of transcending boundaries.

Cultural And Structural Change In Irish Television Drama, Edward Brennan

Irish Communication Review

According to Devereux (1998), RTÉ drama, and RTÉ television in general, excludes society’s powerless. This is, in his view, a result of the ideology of RTÉ drama producers. Devereux’s research on RTÉ drama concentrates on Glenroe1. It states that Glenroe fails to represent adequately those who are marginalised in Irish society. In passing, Devereux mentions some material and organisational constraints which may help to explain why this is so.

Book Reviews: Volume 7

Irish Communication Review

Quality Assessment of Television, reviewed by Adrian Moynes

Communication Concepts 6: Agenda-Setting, reviewed by David Quin

News on a knife-edge: Gemini journalism and a global agenda, reviewed by David Quin

Teilifís Na Gaeilge As A Public Sphere, Iarfhlaith Watson

Irish Communication Review

This paper employs the Irish language media to argue for a normative ideal of public access using the concept 'public sphere'. Public sphere as an ideal type contains a democratic potential which allows for universal participation in the formation of public opinion. Two problems exist with the public sphere as a concept in so far as the ideal does not correspond to the reality. On the one hand, it can be argued that the market dominates the public sphere and hampers the democratic, spontaneous and autonomous formation of public opinion. On the other, it can also be argued that the …

New Toys For Boys, Paul O'Brien

Irish Communication Review

In 'Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life', Ellen Ullman writes that a senior (male) engineer once asked her why she left full-time engineering for consulting. She replied that she found the engineering culture very 'teenage-boy puerile'. The engineer replied to the effect that such loss of talent was too bad.

Content Matters: The Media And Cultural Industries In Ireland's National Information Strategy, Paschal Preston

Irish Communication Review

When, in the spring of 1996, the Irish government appointed an official Information Society Steering Committee (ISSC) with a brief to develop a national 'information society strategy and action plan' it was following a significant international policy trend. In so doing, Ireland became the latest member of the OECD to launch a policy and research initiative focused on the economic and social implications of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This latest wave of official policy and research interest

Dancing About Architecture : Postmodernism And Irish Popular Music, Stephen Ryan

Irish Communication Review

Listening to Bono of U2 in a recent radio interview, I was struck by a comment he made. He was talking about contemporary and past musics, and how the past and the present are tied up with hopes and fears about the future. It was, he argued, a case of the difference between yesterdays tomorrow and todays tomorrow. Yesterday's tomorrow was about a confidence for the future, a belief that progress was more or less inevitable and, for music, that artistic creativity would continue to blossom and produce great works.

Ireland's Alternative Press: Writing From The Margins, Lance Pettit

Irish Communication Review

Given the relative scarcity of published sources on the press in Ireland, it is perhaps not surprising that there is little writing on alternative publications. An Phoblacht/Republican News (AP) Gay Community News (GCN) and The Big Issues (BI) might appear to exemplify O'Sullivan's definition of 'alternative media'. This article provides an examination of the term using examples that are specific to the social and political context of Ireland in the 1990s.

Maple And Shamrock: Seeking A Strategy For Survival In The Audiovisual Jungle, Colum Kenny

Irish Communication Review

Attempting to assess what the future might hold for Irish broadcasters and producers, especially in the light of digital and multimedia developments and of increasing competition, I recently paid a visit to Ontario and Quebec, two adjacent provinces of Canada. It is a country where audiovisual matters have long been taken seriously. Canada's proximity to the U.S. 'elephant', as that neighbour is sometimes known, concentrates the northern state's collective mind on survival strategies. Previous trips to Canada, including attendance at the Toronto Film Festival and participation as a guest in the Banff Television Festival in Alberta, had induced in the …

Book Reviews: Volume 6

Irish Communication Review

S. Hornig Priest Doing Media Research, reviewed by Eoin Devereux

Groombridge and J. Hay (eds.) The Price of Choice - Public service broadcasting in a competitive European market place, reviewed by Amanda Dunne

I. Ang Living Room Wars - Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, reviewed by Ciaran McConaghy

S. Aronowitz, B. Martinsons and M. Menser (eds.) TechnoScience and Cyber Culture, reviewed by Brian Torode

Is Advertising On Television To Children A Problem?, Brian Young

Irish Communication Review

Why are people concerned about television advertising and its influence on children? Is this concern justified? These are the two main points I want to consider in this paper.