Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Whose Development? Framing Of Ireland's Aid Communities By Institutional Sources And The Media During And After The Celtic Tiger, Cliona Barnes, Anthony Cawley

Irish Communication Review

IN SEPTEMBER 2006 THE GOVERNMENT’S newly published White Paper on Irish Aid was presented to the media and the public as a statement of Ireland’s new position in, and increased responsibilities to, the international community. The economic success of the Celtic Tiger era had endowed the State not only with the means but also with the obligation to strengthen its aid commitments to developing nations.

Representations Of The Knowledge Economy: Irish Newspapers' Discourses On A Key Policy Idea, Brian Trench

Irish Communication Review

FROM TIME TO TIME, notions take hold in society in such a way that they become reference ideas across diverse social sectors, and terms associated with these reference ideas proliferate in public discourses and media of various kinds. This is notably true for the ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge society’; these terms have largely displaced other terms to describe the particular character of advanced economies and societies in the early 21st century. Other terms have struggled to co-exist: ‘information society’ seems passé; ‘services society’, ‘audit society’ and ‘risk society’ are marginal or niche terms; ‘innovation society’ has had intermittent periods of …

Book Reviews: Volume 10

Irish Communication Review

Tony Harcup The Ethical Journalist, reviewed by Michael Foley

John David Bourchier: An Irish Journalist In The Balkans, Michael Foley

Irish Communication Review

In 1920, the funeral took place at the Rila Monastery in Bulgaria's Rhodope Mountains of the journalist John David Bourchier (1850-1920) of Bruff, Baggotstown, Co Limerick, Ireland. One newspaper in Sofia led with the headline: 'Our Bourchier is dead.' When news of his death became known in Sofia, a crowd gathered outside the hotel where he had lived on and off for 30 years. His funeral service was in the Alexander Nevski Memorial Church, a stunning monument of neo-Byzantine architecture that commemorates the Russian soldiers who died in the fight for Bulgarian freedom in 1877, from what is still referred …

Censorship And Secrecy: The Political Economy Of Communication And The Military, Tom Clonan

Irish Communication Review

The political economy of communication encompasses a broad body of literature that explores linkages between mass communication media and power brokers or ‘elites’ at a societal level (Boyd-Barrett and Newbold, 1995; Chomsky, 1996; Downing et al., 1995; Golding and Murdock, 1996; Herman et al., 1998; Keeble, 2000; Kellner, 2001; Mc Chesney and Wood, 998; Mosco, 1996; Schiller, 1992). The literature focuses on a number of key power brokers within society such as the legislature, judiciary and a wide variety of powerful state agencies, including the armed forces, that would seek in their interactions with media organisations to regulate, control and …

Journalism Education In Ireland, Nora French

Irish Communication Review

The start of journalism education in Ireland is generally dated from the 1960s with the setting up of the journalism course in the College of Commerce, Rathmines. However, there were some earlier initiatives in the first decade of the 20th century. A series of lectures was organised by the Institute of Journalists in Trinity College Dublin in 1908-9 (Hunter, 1982; Institute of Journalists, 1909) and journalism is said to have become a degree subject in Queens College/University College Cork around the same time (Stephenson and Mory, 1990; Murphy, 1995). These efforts appear to have rapidly faded. They coincide with similar …

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.