Mainstream Media Control and Influence
Video created for my Media 202 class. Song is by Mr. Mrs. Smith from the Free Music archive.
By: Wyrd Design
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Mainstream Media Control and Influence - Video
The Centers for Disease Control reports that suicide is responsible for more than 40,000 deaths each year. It is also one of the leading causes of deaths among teens.
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Now, one social media giant is stepping in to help prevent self-inflicted deaths.
Social media is often seen as a culprit in the suicide epidemic among young people.
Sheryl Moore told KCCI her son was tormented online for being gay and bi-racial. In 2013, 16-year-old AJ Betts took his own life.
"Why couldn't the people who picked on AJ see this? That he was a person, that he was my baby. He was my child, Moore said.
Now, the very site AJ faced recurring bullying is launching a number of online options to help prevent suicidal behavior.
Facebook now lets users send messages to a friend who may be showing signs of depression. Users can also connect with a mental health expert for advice.
Facebook staffers will review the reported post and reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
"I appreciate that they're at least putting an effort into trying to do something about this and certainly notifying concerned others when the person is posting things that might be a concern. I don't see that that's likely to be of harm and it's likely to be helpful in some cases, said Jeff Kramer, of Eyerly Ball Community Mental Health.
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Social media giant steps in to help prevent suicides
Birmingham, Ala. (PRWEB) March 03, 2015
Flow Control magazine is celebrating 20 years as the leading source for technical information on fluid handling systems design, operation and maintenance. Since its first issue in 1995, Flow Control has been the only magazine solely dedicated to the industrial fluid handling industry.
When Flow Control magazine debuted in the mid-90s it was a game-changer, embraced immediately by readers and advertisers hungry for a resource dedicated to solutions for fluid movement, measurement and containment within the process industries, said Flow Control Publisher, Michael Christian. As we enter our third decade, the growth and innovation of the Flow Control brand continues.
Under the editorial leadership of director of content Matt Migliore for the past decade, Flow Control has earned 20 publishing industry awards since 2006, establishing itself as a consistent top performer in the industrial engineering trade journal space.
Flow Control has leveraged its many years of experience to establish a unique niche and reputation for providing high-quality information for technical professionals involved with designing operating and maintaining fluid handling systems in a wide range of industries, Migliore said.
As the Internet took force in the formative years of the magazine, Flow Control evolved and adapted its editorial reach beyond the printed word with its popular website at FlowControlNetwork.com. Today, this niche site includes all the specialized content one would expect from Flow Control, with sponsored application and technology portals, a FlowTube video section, FlowStream blog, white papers, polls, event listings, career opportunities, and more. Coupled with a range of e-newsletters and e-media tools, Flow Control has firmly positioned itself for success in the digital age.
Flow Control is now part of the newly formed Process/Flow Network, a group of business-to-business magazines with a shared focus on industrial processing industries, published by Grand View Media Group. In 2015, a special OEM/System Integrator Supplement will publish three times, and special sections on Pumps, Bearings & Seals; Oil & Gas; Valves & Actuators; Level, Temperature & Pressure Measurement; and Water & Wastewater will be included within the regular print editions of Flow Control.
We look forward to continuing to expand our focused content offerings and digital platform for our readers and advertisers in the process/flow industries, Migliore said. Thank you to everyone who has helped Flow Control get to where it is today and those who will see us through another 20 years of success.
About Flow Control Magazine: Flow Control is the leading source for technical information on fluid handling systems design, operation and maintenance. It focuses exclusively on technologies for effectively moving, measuring and containing liquids, gases and slurries. It aims to serve any industry where fluid handling is a requirement.
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Flow Control Magazine Celebrates 20-Year Anniversary
By T. Camber Warren February 25 at 8:00 AM
Editors Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts drawn from articles in anewly published special issue ofJournal of Peace Research on Communication, Information, and Political Conflict. The entire special issue has been made available by Sage Publications here. For earlier posts, see here, here, and here.
Pundits and academics alike tell us that we are supremely fortunate to be living in a new information age. However, new findings which I present in an article in a new Journal of Peace Research special issue paint a far more complicated picture of the consequences of increased human connectivity.
Ours is certainly not an age of civil peace. At this moment, neighbors are killing neighbors, in organized groups, in ongoing civil conflicts spanning at least 36 separate countries. Such violence is shocking in its brutality; but through our revulsion we tend to forget that in each of these conflicts, the lines of animosity were not simply given by nature. They were actively produced. Humans are not born knowing the difference between a Serb police officer and a Croat police officer, or the difference between a Sunni mosque and a Shia mosque. The participants had to be taught how to hate, and who to kill. In other words, the production of collective violence is always preceded by the production of a certain kind of collective idea: the idea that it is justified, or even necessary, for us to kill them.
Increasing evidence indicates that the chances of success for such an idea can be powerfully influenced by the topology of the communication infrastructure present in a country. In previous work I presented global data showing that mass communication technologies, such as newspapers, radios, and televisions, have tended to favor state integration and stability. In that work I argued that by offering large nationwide loudspeakers to entrepreneurs of political ideas, such technologies incentivize the production of big ideas, which resonate on a national scale, and thereby facilitate the generation of unified national attachments. As a consequence, states with higher levels of mass media accessibility have been far less likely to experience violent internal divisions, as it has been more difficult for political entrepreneurs in these states to succeed on the basis of appeals to narrow sectarian loyalties, in the face of competition from larger-scale producers. That is, we might say that mass communication technologies function to strengthen economies of scale in the marketplace of ideas.
At first glance, one might think that the same would be true for social communication technologies, such as cellphones, which instead facilitate private interactions between individuals. The problem is that linkages facilitated by social media technologies tend to be connections between friends and acquaintances, who tend to be quite similar to each other in terms of ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, and any number of other factors. As a result of this tendency toward homophily, social media technologies tend to promote communications that flow along preexisting social and political divisions, rather than across them.
Such technologies, rather than generating pressures towards breadth and unity, may therefore incentivize political entrepreneurs to play to the local crowd, by telling them what all local crowds want to hear: that they are special, and righteous, and that their problems are caused by outsiders and heretics who are fundamentally different from themselves. In other words, it seems plausible that the segregated nature of social communication technologies will function to weaken economies of scale in the marketplace of ideas, making it easier for smaller-scale producers to succeed in promoting radicalized justifications for collective violence, even in the face of counter-narratives promoting unity and stability.
However, in order to test this conception of ideational competition, I needed a new kind of data. While existing work in this area had made great strides with sub-national measurements focusing on a single country or a single technology, this test would require sub-national measurements of media penetration that spanned multiple countries and multiple technological forms.
To accomplish this, I relied on surveys collected by the DHS Program, which report geo-coded household characteristics, across 24 African states, with survey dates ranging from 2005 to 2010. In particular, I focused on the ownership of a radio receiver as an indicator of mass media penetration, and ownership of a cellphone as an indicator of social media penetration. These measurements were then converted into continuous estimates of media penetration over space, utilizing spatially explicit interpolation (i.e. kriging), with parameters optimized through empirical cross-validation. Finally, to avoid the difficulties associated with regression on arbitrarily-sized spatial units, I estimated point process models, which generate statistical inferences by comparing covariate values at the locations of observed events to values measured at randomly simulated control points.
The results of the optimized kriging estimation can be seen in Figure 1. Radio penetration is displayed in purple, and cellular penetration in green, with absolute levels shown in the left panels, and relative levels in the right panel. The plot makes clear that the African context contains an enormous diversity of historical trajectories, with strong variation in technological penetration both within states and across states.
Originally posted here:
Monkey Cage: Segregation kills: How social media fuels violence in African states