Member News & Updates
Edited by Hana S. Noor Al-Deen and John Allen Hendricks
Published by Palgrave Macmillan (June 2013)
Social Media and Strategic Communications provides comprehensive and original scholarly research that exhibits the strategic implementation of social media in both advertising and public relations. Policies, codes of ethics, and recommendations set by business organizations for best practices are also examined. Various research methodologies are employed to analyze the communication strategies applied by advertisers and public relations practitioners who have embraced social media as an integral part of their operations in order to develop and maintain strong and lasting relationships with customers and the public.
Hana S. Noor Al-Deen and John Allen Hendricks were also the editors of the book “Social Media: Usage and Impact” published by Lexington Books (November 2011, and reprinted November 2012).
A Tour of Media and Mediation in West End London
Led by Joel McKim and Scott Rodgers
This tour uses West End London as a lens into ‘the mediated city’. It explores how the city not only hosts, but is in many ways constituted through, media. City living compels us to use, need and even desire media content and devices in quite particular ways. Meanwhile, media forms, technologies and industries exist in and are even ‘built-into’ urban spaces: for example the street, the tube, the suburb, the bar, the public square. The aim of this tour is twofold: first, to highlight how the city provides a unique lens to critically study, understand and define media; and second, to use media and mediation as a lens to understand the city. Though a range of buildings and neighbourhoods associated with major media industries will be visited, the tour also focuses on observing some more unconventional forms of urban media and communication.
Date, place and registration:
Wednesday 19 June 2013, 12:30-3:00pm
Numbers are limited, so booking is essential – visit http://ica2013mediatour.eventbrite.co.uk.
Attendees will meet at the southwest corner of Fitzroy Square at 12.30pm (directions at Eventbrite link). The tour lasts 3 hours, ending at Leicester Square.
For further information:
Contact Joel McKim (j.mckim@bbk.ac.uk) or Scott Rodgers (s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk)
Key Research to be presented at the 63rd Annual International Communication Association Conference
Scholars in the Department of Communication at the U of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have founded the Media Neuroscience Lab, one of a small but growing number of research groups attempting to understand the use and influence of media technologies by utilizing innovative techniques from cognitive neuroscience. In light of President Obama's recently-announced BRAIN Initiative, these researchers hope to highlight the important contributions to the social sciences which can be made through studying the brain.
The Media Neuroscience Lab (http://medianeuroscience.org), led by René Weber, Ph.D., M.D., Chair of the Mass Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA), studies a range of media-related topics from an interdisciplinary perspective. Current lines of study include the impact of media violence on society, understanding the neuroscience of persuasion in order to craft more effective public service announcements, examining the cognitive and behavioral effects of video games and other interactive computer-mediated environments, and observing the ways that mass-media narratives are designed to appeal to fundamental moral intuitions.
This type of research is increasingly influential in social science generally and the field of communication in particular. Communication researchers will meet this summer to exchange their findings at the first-ever Preconference on Evolution, Biology, and Brains, which will precede the 2013 Conference of the International Communication Association in June. Presenters are scheduled to include members of the Media Neuroscience Lab, the University of Michigan's Communication Neuroscience Lab, and dozens of other scholars from five different nations.
In addition to faculty members from UCSB’s Department of Communication, the Media Neuroscience Lab also includes affiliated researchers from the UCSB Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, as well as other universities around the world.
For more information about the Media Neuroscience Lab, contact René Weber [renew@comm.ucsb.edu; phone +1-805-893-2156] or visit the lab website at http://medianeuroscience.org