The widespread adoption of social media, mobile phones, and online dating apps has drawn more attention toward the importance of media technologies in romantic relationships. However, most observed relational functions and effects of digital media are not novel. Rather, they have been documented previously with traditional media such as books, letters, radio, newspapers, recorded music, television, and the telephone. Romantic relational phenomena manifest across both traditional and digital media due to similar affordances. This chapter provides an overview of research on traditional media across relational processes (mate seeking, relationship initiation, relationship escalation, relationship maintenance, relationship disruption, and relationship dissolution), identifying key social affordances, and introducing relevant theories. We discuss how people use media in relationships, how media consumption affects our relationships, and how people foster relationships with media characters (i.e., parasocial relationships).

Histories of urban sound have often fixated on the regulation of soundscapes and sensitivities to noise – frequently on the part of a perpetually rising bourgeoisie. Using the case study of the ’news-horn’, a tubular instrument used by newspaper vendors, this chapter offers an alternative way of understanding the changing soundscapes of towns and cities: rhythm. Developing from the post-horn which had been used in England since the sixteenth century, the news-horn became a common sound on the streets of 1770s London. However, with the growth of newspaper print and news from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the intensity and frequency of the news-horns’ blasts increased. This produced an arrythmia in London’s soundscape that clashed with other street sounds, sabbath-day silence, and the busy hum of London’s commercial centres. During the 1820s this resulted in the disappearance of the news-horn from London’s streets. Looking back from the mid-nineteenth century, many writers did not celebrate the news-horn’s removal. Instead, they remembered its sound with a fond nostalgia. The news-horn was one among many casualties in the emergence of a new London soundscape that replaced a pointillist pattern of auditory information with a roaring blanket of urban noise.

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three “Chicago Schools”: in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the “color line” and the public sphere on Chicago’s South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding “Chicago Schools” are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan “form follows function”; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three “Chicagos” and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.

All news is fake news, because all reports are to some extent ‘made up’ by the time they are received by a mediated consumer distanced from the original source. ‘Fake’, from the Latin facere (to make, to do), is a member of the family of making words that includes fact, factory, fashion, artificial, and face. It is ironic that the standard test for whether news is ‘fake’ is to subject it to ‘fact-checking’. Facts themselves are things – artefacts – that we make through artificial processes of Creation and Production. Any ‘fact’ deserving of the name is something established by some process involving human skill and judgment. What matters is not whether news or facts are made up – they always are – but how they are made up and what relation there is between the thing at source and the thing as made up for public reception. Public reception also plays its part in the broadcast of fake news. We therefore need to think in terms of ‘receiver responsibility’, from the case of the journalist who receives the factual grain of a promising story to the editor who publishes journalists’ copy to the online user who re-tweets a tweet.

Chapter 1 treats the War of the Morea as a major media event that sheds new light on the relationship between communication and power in seventeenth-century Venice. Challenging the exceptionalist assumption that secrecy was the guiding principle of official policy, wartime culture reveals an active willingness to deploy publicity to boost government reputation and bolster the Republic’s declining ruling class. In considering different information modalities – oral, manuscript, print, ritual – the chapter approaches news as a form of discourse that integrates facts, emotions, and interpretations. As Walter Benjamin noted, news reporting always comes with explanation, a ‘psychological connection’ that is ‘forced on the reader’. Rather than limit the scope of analysis to the mechanics of communication, the chapter critically examines how war news integrated fact and value to justify military action abroad and encourage popular engagement with empire at home.

This chapter explores the trial of the St Osyth witches and the witches from surrounding communities, and follows them to their judgement and - in some cases - their deaths. It examines the creation of the news pamphlet that recounted the story of the witch trial, and suggests an author for that famous account, showing how it shaped the story of the St Osyth witches that has been handed down to modern readers.

Does the First Amendment forbid reforms to save and improve newsgathering, production, and distribution? All features of the news ecosystem are currently under threat, but some interpretations suggest that the First Amendment either forbids relevant government action or has no relevance. Debates about potential reforms of the businesses and structures wreaking havoc on news and information in the United States often hit a roadblock: the assumption that the First Amendment bars government from playing a role in media systems and news industries.1 Victor Pickard calls this “First Amendment fundamentalism.”2 We can understand why internet tech platforms invoke the First Amendment against any regulation and measures requiring them to pay for news posted on their sites but gathered by others. Avoiding regulation makes their work easier and their bottom line richer. But the First Amendment is not such a bar.

Critiques of NATO’s involvement in the Libyan crisis have argued that a sober understanding of the intervention in Libya will only come to light through future studies on those that manipulated information about the conflict. However, no empirical evidence exists on the actual textual structures and strategies brought to bear by journalists in the discursive reproduction of the framework that allegedly guided the involvement of Western powers in the uprising in Libya that eventually led to a civil war in 2011. This chapter examines textual structures and discourse strategies used by CNN between February 14, 2011 and October 31, 2011 – the period General Muammar Gadhafi was killed. The authors propose new questions that may inspire arguments on whether semantic, narrative, and pragmatic acts had impacted on attitudes that validated and inspired the war in Libya.

This chapter examines the relation between language and conflict resolution, by focusing on the beginning of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process in 1993 as it was represented by the New York Times. It analyzes the front-page articles dedicated to this dialogue and discusses the results in the context of the diplomatic negotiations and the political and social discourses of peace available at the time. The chapter also shows how the diplomatic discourse concealed opposite views of the peace process, and it maps the transfer of dominant discourses of peace from the political and social levels to the media and diplomatic ones. Finally, it discusses the implications of such dynamics for peace achievement.

Chapter 3 concentrates on plays published by Nathaniel Butter during the early Jacobean period, and the conceptual overlap between ‘news’ and ‘history’ that was crucial for Butter and other early modern readers. Because Butter was so invested in ideas of ‘history’, it is possible to use his output to develop a clear profile of an early reader – one whose selection of texts with Protestant and union interests offers a distinctive perspective on history plays and introduces a slight tension with James I’s own political and religious policies. Alongside Butter’s non-dramatic output, this chapter focuses on Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me, Heywood’s 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, and Shakespeare’s King Lear to offer a fresh perspective on early Jacobean historical drama. It reveals that the genre did not decline at this time; and it considers the important but neglected parallels between plays that dramatize recent history and the legendary British past. Finally, the chapter argues that Butter’s investments were shaped by the geography of the book trade and his location, next to Matthew Law’s, at St Austin’s Gate in Paul’s Churchyard.

This chapter discusses how news contributes to informed citizenship by reviewing the different approaches adopted in the literature to understanding how individuals learn from the news. After reviewing the main theoretical and empirical perspectives on how news contributes to citizens’ ‘knowledge’, we advance the hypothesis that adopting a self-regulated learning perspective might provide a more comprehensive theoretical framework for this type of research. We therefore propose a GAMES approach (Goal-Oriented, Active, Motivated, Emotion-Laden, Situated), derived from a synthesis of the literature on self-regulated learning in the field of educational psychology.

Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.

In 53.19, Dio discusses the impact that the transition of Rome’s system of government from a Republic to a monarchy under Augustus had for the flow of accurate political news and information. This programmatic section of the Roman History has often been discussed for the insight it provides into Dio’s historical methodology. This chapter takes a complementary perspective on 53.19, examining Dio’s view that the new monarchical government led to the rise of rumour, and the way that this theme plays out in the Roman History at large. It shows that the presence of rumour in Dio’s narrative increases the closer one comes to Octavian assuming sole power, especially during the triumviral period, which is marked by attempts to control channels of news. Dio’s emphasis on rumour in the imperial books, it is argued, reflects the uncertainty engendered by the concentration of political power in the hands of one man, whose real thoughts and intentions always remained inscrutable.

This chapter’s ethnography of the “quality of life” West Bank development/settlement of Alfei Menashe describes the structural realities and security schematic narrative lens through which this Jewish Israeli audience filtered “the conflict” and understood the series. They are viewed from outside by stateless-nation Palestinians as living behind the “Wall Enclave” and by state-minority Arab/Palestinian Israelis as a “settlement” (most Jewish Israelis regard it as a “consensus settlement”). Alfei provides its children the greatest opportunity for contact with Palestinians, which the separation barrier has all but eliminated for Israelis. Neither interpersonal contact with Palestinian day laborers who build and clean their homes and playgrounds, nor imagined contact influenced their readings of the text. From secondary conversations, news media portrayals, and artifacts like the barrier constructed to maintain the secured existence of Israel, they learn Palestinians are those who commit terror. Via a binary logic, anyone allowed into Israel (or Sesame Street) is not Palestinian. Fearing harm, a majority erased Palestinian characters. These processes, not Sesame Street, were overwhelmingly socializing them, leading them to oppose the series’ attempt to communicate peace. They normalized and reproduced “the conflict,” assuming defensive play patterns; for them, the resolution is “evicting, killing or imprisoning” Palestinians.