Literature Review on Popular Culture and New Media

Compiled by Hauwa Otori

Popular culture is defined as what is socially acceptable among the masses. With old media, television programs were programmed for a particular time. If your favorite primetime show came and went, your only option was to fake your way through the water cooler conversation the next day and hope that no one caught on to you. According to Chris Andersen, new media has created a fragmented culture through what he calls The Long Tail effect on popular culture. The theory basically says that with more and more content and available media platforms, our culture and economy is continuously moving away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products and markets at the top of the demand curve and moving towards a huge number of niches in the tail. On the other hand; however, it can be argued that new media also allows a shared culture through other mechanisms such as recommendations, tagging, most viewed, most commented, etc. Below is a list of related sources that will help gain a better idea of whether new media leads to a shared or fragmented popular culture.



On-going Scholarly Sources

• The Extinction of Mass Culture by Marc Gunther, Fortune Senior Writer
  http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/11/news/economy/pluggedin_gunther.fortune/index.htm

• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, 2004

• Rethinking the fragmentation of the cyberpublic: from consensus to contestation; New Media & Society, Vol.9, No. 5, 827-847 (2007)
  http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/9/5/827

• Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach by James Lull, 2000

• New Media Cultures by P. David Marshall
  http://www.newmediacultures.co.uk/

• Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York:
  New York University Press, 2006.

• Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. USA, 2006.
  

On-Going Blog Sources

• http://www.tedfreidman.com/ – TedLog – Culture, Politics, and Technology

• http://www.longtail.com/ – blog based off of the article entitled The Long Tail by Chris Anderson – both basically talk about the relationship between the increasing number of media outlets and decreasing amount of choices

• Logic + Emotion: Influence Ripples + Social Fragmentation
  http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2007/09/influence-rippl.html

• http://www.prsquared.com/2005/10/cultural_fragmentation_the_lon.html
  

Literature Review on Politics in New Media

Political issues are constantly being discussed, announced, and made fun of in our American culture. Everyone knows about political scandals, trend issues such as "going green" and "global warming." And now, it seems like new media is taking over the field of politics. There is more and more evidence of political issues, elections, campaigning, etc. going on in these new media spaces. The following are resources that address and discuss these issues of politics and new media and whether what is being posted in these new media spaces is an accurate representation of culture or fragmented one.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinion/ssi/images/Toles/c_08272006_520.gif)

Scholarly Sources:

Hervé Glevarec and Michel Pinet. From liberalization to fragmentation: a sociology of French radio audiences since the 1990s and the consequences for cultural industries theory. Media, Culture & Society 2008 30: 215-238. http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/30/2/215

Michael J. Barker. Democracy or polyarchy? US-funded media developments in Afghanistan and Iraq post 9/11. Media, Culture & Society 2008 30: 109-130 http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/30/1/109

Floris Müller, Liesbet van Zoonen, and Laurens de Roode. We can't `Just do it' alone! An analysis of Nike's (potential) contributions to anti-racism in soccer. Media, Culture & Society 2008 30: 23-39 http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/30/1/23

Nick Couldry and Tim Markham. Troubled closeness or satisfied distance? Researching media consumption and public orientation. Media, Culture & Society 2008 30: 5-21. http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/30/1/5

Andrew Carvin, "Mitch Kapor: The Case for Wikifying Politics" (2006) http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2006/08/m

Pew, "The Internet's Broader Role in Campaign 2008" (2008) http://pewresearch.org/pubs/689/the-internets-broader-role-in-campaign-2008

Jenkins: "Answering Questions from a Snowman: The YouTube Debate and Its Aftermath" (2007) http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/answering_questions_from_a_sno.html

Davis, Richard. 1998. New media and American politics. Oxford University Press.

http://books.google.com/books?id=f-Ka0nSKaFoC&printsec=frontcover

Rachel K. Gibson and Stephen J. Ward. U.K. Political Parties and the Internet: "Politics as Usual" in the New Media? The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 1998 3: 14-38.

Bennet, Lance W. & Entman, Robert M. (2001). Mediated Politics: Communication in the future of Democracy. Cambridge University Press.

Holmes, David. (1997). Virtual Politics: identity and community in cyberspace. Sage Publications Technology.

Kahn, Richard & Kellner, Douglas. (2004). New media nad internet activism: from the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to blogging. SAGE Publications. 6 (1): 87-95.

Literature Review on New Media in Education

Compiled by Jeanne Lee

The modern curriculum in the West has developed in such a way that does not only purposes to improve literacy and morality amongst students, but is also designed to develop students’ understanding of social roles and their place in society. On average in 2004, American children between the ages of 6 and 17 spent four hours a week devoted to homework and 32.5 hours per week in school. Altogether, time spent on academics has increased over 7.5 hours per week compared to 20 years ago (Swanbrow, 2004). As new media proliferates and becomes more accessible to schools and their students, it is both imperative and remarkable to note what implications this may have on what is taught in school, how things are taught in school, and what students learn, which all then work to shape the nature of a shared or fragmented culture.

Sources:
Mazzarella, R. S. (Ed.). (2007). 20 Questions about Youth & the Media. New York: Peter Lang.
Swanbrow, D. (2004, December 6). U.S. children and teens spend more time on academics. The University Records Online. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.ur.umich.edu/0405/Dec06_04/20.shtml

News and Magazine Sources

• Mendels, P. (1999, September 22). Study finds problems with web class. NY Times. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/cyber/education/22education.html
• Wallis, C. & Steptoe, S. (2006, December 10). How to bring our schools out of the 20th century. Time Magazine. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480-1,00.html
• http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/
  

Academic Sources
At Columbia University:

• Johnson, M. (2006, February 24). CCNMTL brings new media education to new frontiers. Columbia News. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/06/02/ccnmtl.html
• New media in education progress report 2006. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/nme2006/panel_1_a_partnership_in_educational_innovation.html
• The panels at the third New Media in Education Conference: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3034

International iCS Conference on New Media in Higher Education and Learning with the Annenberg School for Communication & University of Teesside:

• http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~ics/HigherEd.html
  Includes resources such as the position papers and abstracts of the speakers and further information and related web sites

First Monday: Peer-reviewed journal on the internet

• Achleitner, H. K., Vowell, F., Wyatt, R. B. (1997). Global conversations: New horizons for information professionals and students., from http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/achleit/index.html
• DeLong, S. E. (1997). The shroud of lecturing., http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_5/delong/
• Noble, D.F. (1998). Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education., from http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/index.html
• Murphy, K. L. & Collins, M. P. (1997). Communication conventions in instructional electronic chats., from http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_11/murphy/index.html
  

UCLA:

• Kellner, D. New Media and New Literacies: Reconstructing Education for the New Millennium., from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/kellner/newmedia.html
  

Other Books & Journal Articles:

• Austria, J. L. (2007). Developing evaluation criteria for podcasts. Libri, 57(4), p. 179.
• Kollar, I. (2008). What has become of the new culture of learning? A view on instructional approaches with a potential for changing culturally divided teaching and learning scripts. Zeitschrift fur Padagogik, 54(1), p. 49.
• Livingstone, S. M. & Bovill, M. (2000). Young People, New Media. London.
  http://www.mediaculture-online.de/fileadmin/bibliothek/livingstone_young_people/livingstone_young_people.pdf
• Livingstone, S. M. & Bovill, M. (2001). Children and Their Changing Media Environment: A European Comparative Study. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=qykl-5RGimUC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&ots=BgVMdHobe7&sig=5mGnOpXC-NzV9oG7wT3c8GibUWk
  
  
  

Examples of New Media Education Systems

• Center for Media Literacy: http://www.medialit.org/about_cml.html
• New Media in Education Lab: http://www.newmine.org/
• The Ad Council & Kaiser Family Foundation: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia071907pkg.cfm
  
  

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• Electronic learning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-learning