Media and Communications

Vietnamese adolescents enjoy freedom of exposure to exotic cultures, especially Korean Wave, which are portrayed on online teen media and they got affected. This research paper investigates the most frequently portrayed Korean celebrities’ images on teen websites and whether the images and long exposure to such images have influences on teenagers’ intention of emulating the celebrities. The four most frequently portrayed images of the celebrities, Physical Appearance, Fashion, Relationship, and Normal Life, were identified by conducting content analysis in which all articles about Korean Showbiz from a selected website, www.kenh14.vn – Channel for Teens in September 2011 and September 2012. A questionnaire was designed based on the four themes to test the hypotheses proposing that Level of Exposure to online teen media portraying Korean celebrities and Attitude towards those celebrities positively contribute to teenagers’ intention of emulating the Korean stars. Statistical results ...

This mixed-methods study investigates the effectiveness of V-Hub, a Learning Management System (LMS) implemented at VUS, a prominent language center in Vietnam, focusing on homework completion rates and teacher strategies. A survey of 27 teachers and in-depth interviews with six teachers reveal that while V-Hub's user-friendly interface and learning content is positively perceived, technical limitations, such as device compatibility issues and the absence of answer explanations, hinder its full potential. Teachers employ various strategies to motivate and support students in using V-Hub, including rewards, personalized guidance, and clear communication. The study highlights the crucial role of teachers in effectively integrating LMS into language teaching and underscores the need for platform enhancements and comprehensive teacher training to maximize the benefits of technologymediated language learning. Future research directions include exploring student perspectives, investigating the impact of specific LMS features on learning outcomes, and examining the potential for LMS materials to replace traditional textbooks.

Algorithmic imaginary-a term postulated by Bucher (2017)-conceptualizes how social media users perceive platforms' algorithms and the corresponding effects on their feelings and interactions with the platforms. The concept has evolved to adapt to the increasing intricacies of research on platforms' algorithms and their effects on users' emotions. This study synthesizes and analyzes research on user perceptions of algorithms (algorithmic imaginaries) across three major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Employing a comprehensive literature review methodology, the study examines how these imaginaries shape user emotions and behaviors. Findings reveal common themes across platforms: algorithms are perceived as opaque, manipulative, and potentially restrictive, leading to negative emotional responses. Users adopt various strategies to regain control and seek transparency. The paper underscores the need for a more inclusive approach to algorithmic literacy, involving both users and platform designers, to foster a more positive and empowering social media experience.

Ultrasonic irradiation (US) is a feasible and promising mechanical disruption technique for sludge disintegration, biodegradability acceleration, and anaerobic digestion enhancement. It is clear that many processing factors significantly affect cavitation and consequently the efficiency of sludge pretreatment. Therefore, assessment, comparison, and selection of optimal ultrasonic conditions for actual application of sludge pretreatment are sorely necessary. The objective of this work is to present an extensive review of evaluation approaches of sludge ultrasonic pretreatment efficiency based on physical, chemical, and biological properties of sludge.

Postgraduate Essentials is the fi rst online interactive course in Australia designed to build an inclusive postgraduate learning community while delivering integrated candidature information, transition advice and academic skills support to students in their fi rst year of PhD candidature. In content and focus, Postgraduate Essentials aims to complement and enhance traditional research supervision to ensure that an increasingly diverse student population has access to information, skills support and an active peer-network. It does this by facilitating new PhD students' transition to a research environment and their membership of the postgraduate student community, and by providing support to develop the academic and professional skills that underpin successful completion of common fi rst year PhD requirements. This paper refl ects on the experiences of the Language and Academic Skills (LAS) advisers on the Postgraduate Essentials project team, and on students' participation in and evaluations of the program in 2004. We focus on the unexpectedly high enrolment of on-campus students who already have access to face-to-face academic skills programs. We observe that student expectations regarding levels and modes of academic skills support, coupled with the resourceintensive nature of multimedia development, create additional demands on LAS advisers' time, skills and resources. For projects such as Postgraduate Essentials to be sustainable, we recommend a collaborative approach that utilizes the skills and expertise of key staff in different areas of teaching and support.

As a mode of open access public self-expression, blogs are one form of the unfolding massification of culture (Lovink). Though widely varied in content and style, they are characterised by a reverse chronological diary-like format, often produced by a single author, and often intimately expressive of that author's thoughts and experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of blogs as a space for the detailed and on-going expression of the day to day experiences of sufferers of serious illness. We might traditionally consider the experience of illness as absolutely private, but illness, along with the process of recovery, retains a social and cultural aspect (Kleinman et al). A growing body of literature has recognised that the Internet has become a significant space for the recovery work that accompanies the diagnosis of serious illness (Orgad; Pitts; Hardey). Empowerment and agency are often emphasised in this literature, particularly in terms of the increased access to information and support groups, but also in the dynamic performances of self enabled by different forms of online communication and Web production. I am particularly interested in the ongoing shifts in the accessibility of "private" personal experience enabled by blog culture. Although there are thousands of others like them, three "illness blogs" have recently caught my attention for their candidness, completeness and complexity, expressing in vivid depth and detail individual lives transformed by serious illness. The late US journalist and television producer Leroy Sievers maintained a high profile blog, My Cancer, and weekly podcast on the National Public Radio website until his death from metastasised colon cancer in August 2008. Sievers used his public profile and the infrastructure of the NPR website to both detail his personal experience and bring together a community of people also affected by cancer or moved by his thoughts and experiences. McCosker ...

It should not be surprising that an ultra-violent image of the final hours of Jesus' life emerged in a post September 11, 2001 global media context. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004) was willed into production by a conservative and perhaps reactive desire for cultural renewal at a time when the certainty of Western cultural dominance had been violently challenged. By focusing exclusively on the capture, torture, humiliation, and death of Jesus, the film presented an intriguing approach to the "classically over determined" (Groebner, 2004: 88), yet foundational Christian sign of Christ on the cross by reviving the Passion images and plays of late medieval Europe. In the process, the film courted controversy for its depiction of Jewish culpability, but was nonetheless highly successful at the box office around the world and in the US in particular. [1] This success could not have been possible without the acceptance by Christian groups of the film's graphic violence.

In a variety of formats, chat shows have always been a staple of what Frances Bonner calls 'ordinary television'. 1 They fill the gaps left over by drama and news events, they take up space during the day or later at night, they offer a sense of familiarity and regularity that audiences can dip in and out of, or else watch in a habituated state of distraction. 2 One particular type of the genre focuses on interviews or discussions with celebrities, stars and other prominent people. Intimacy of this kind works best later at night, and in the interview, the chat show presents the regular possibility of slipping behind the façade of the star profile, finding moments of that highly prized and elusive privacy that stars guard like a treasure. The best of these programs capture a glimpse beneath the surface, a fragment of the private lives of the famous.

Whether understood as sensation, perception, experience, or image, pain is caught within a conceptual bind. Like other modes of sensory and perceptual encounter, it undermines the linguistic and representational cannons of late twentieth century media and cultural theory by insisting on bodily processes, affect and sensation over language and meaning. To think of pain representationally as an object of meaning making processes elides the physical and affective forces that underpin it. On the other hand, pain is also constrained within biomedical knowledge and practice as a kind of signalling event within the body, warning of physical damage. And in its "aberrant" forms, such as chronic pain, phantom limb pain or collective trauma, it often defies or resists biomedical models and treatment. By always exceeding these domains, pain problematises them. This paper aims to think through pain as productive force as it operates across these distinct domains of science and aesthetics, image and culture by bringing together the neuroscience of nociception (the sensation and perception of pain) with contemporary theories of affect.

Blogs have been used extensively to self-document the intimate and often intensive experiences of living with serious illness, charting their author’s health and treatment often over many years, connecting with others and drawing attention and concern along the way. This paper analyses a selection of typical ‘cancer blogs’ with the aim of understanding the kinds of personal investment, or labour, involved in the process of forming and maintaining them over a sustained period. Where previous research has investigated what is often seen as the ‘empowering’ role of these blogs, we attempt to qualify these claims. Our qualitative, case study analysis draws on and expands the theory and debates around the nature of immaterial and affective labour. We highlight the value of cancer blogging as personal, in the form of identity and affect management, network-enabling in generating online spaces for shared experience and support, and social in what is recouped in the forms of non-institutional management of serious illness. In addition, this labour helps to shape the broader social understanding of cancer, its experience and personal affects.

In recent years, the massive devastation and suffering caused by global-scale disasters has fuelled intense flows of Web-based media and communicative exchange. Where studies of traditional broadcast disaster media have often sought to identify the frames that position victims and viewers, this paper focuses on those forms of emerging media that operate outside of and to some extent work to de-frame institutional coverage through modes of affect. A heightened affectivity can be identified in the modality of ‘rawness’ that characterizes contemporary social and mobile production of media from zones of disaster. The analysis engages specifically with some key forms of raw media circulating after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. Ultimately, in the context of post-disaster media, new modes of visual witnessing and distributed encounter facilitate the de-framing of disastrous events in a way that tethers global engagement and attention directly to the flow of affect.

This article explores the productive role of provocation in YouTube publics in the context of two culturally and geographically situated visual events that took place in New Zealand throughout 2011. Through qualitative analysis of the extensive comments fields for the two videos, the article examines the nature of participatory acts associated with what has been called at different times flaming, hating or trolling. The article argues that such acts can only be properly understood within their cultural and geographic context and in their ability to affect and extend ‘agonistic’ publics. The analysis addresses online passion, conflict and vitriol through the notion of ‘acts of citizenship’, as productive forms of provocation.