More objects and devices are connected to digital networks than ever before. Things - from your phone to your car, from the heating to the lights in your house - have gathered the ability to sense their environments and create information about what is happening. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information.

This has become known as 'the internet of things'. In this accessible introduction, Graham Meikle and Mercedes Bunz observe its promises of convenience and ...

The fifth edition of this approachable text draws on both academic and applied perspectives to offer a lively critique of contemporary advertising's effects on American character and culture. Berger explains how advertising works by employing a psycho-cultural approach, encouraging readers to think about advertisements and commercials in more analytical and profound ways. Among the topics he addresses are the role of brands, the problem of self-alienation, and how both relate to consumption.

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Presented in a unique and easy-to-use dictionary format, this practical guide will help students and practitioners understand and apply the principles of effective communication.

In recent years, global attention has focused on how women in communities of Muslims are revitalizing Islam by linking interpretation of religious ideas to the protection of rights and freedoms. Humanizing the Sacred demonstrates how Sunni women activists in Malaysia are fracturing institutionalized Islamic authority by generating new understandings of rights and redefining the moral obligations of their community. Based on ethnographic research of Sisters in Islam (SIS), a nongovernmental or...

In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to ...

In Plantation Life Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi examine the structure and governance of Indonesia's contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia, which supply 50 percent of the world's palm oil. They attend to the exploitative nature of plantation life, wherein villagers' well-being is sacrificed in the name of economic development. While plantations are often plagued by ruined ecologies, injury among workers, and a devastating loss of livelihoods for former landholders, small-scale inde...

Media and Public relations combines practical hands-on strategies with firm grounding in the theories of media relations. To successfully integrate theory and practice, the text uses case studies as the basis of theoretical argument. The text examines how communications practitioners deliver messages to the media, how the media receives the messages and how the media deals with the message prior to dissemination to the public.

It takes a comprehensive look at the different types of media in A...

A broad-ranging and pluralistic textbook which highlights the rich variety of approaches to studying politics. Written by an international team of experts, this fully revised fourth edition offers cutting-edge coverage from fundamental to contemporary issues. Integrating guides to further reading and clear examples of how research methods can be applied, it enables readers to feel confident about taking their study of politics forward.

An ideal foundation for study and research in political s...

Understanding Digital Societies provides a framework for understanding our changing, technologically shaped society and how sociology can help us make sense of it.

Known as the gold standard for research methods, Babbie's THE PRACTICE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH gives you a definitive guide to research as practiced by social scientists. Combining a straightforward approach with the author's renowned sense of humor, this student-friendly text equips you with the tools and knowledge to apply research concepts as both researcher and consumer. The author emphasizes the process by showing you how to design and construct projects, introducing today's various observati...