Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

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.