The well-established concept of expressive voting concludes that the public policy preferences people express are likely to differ from their instrumental preferences, but the literature on expressive voting has not developed clear conclusions about how people form their expressive preferences. An extensive literature on preference formation helps to answer this question. Because there are no instrumental consequences from the political preferences citizens hold, the utility they get from those preferences comes solely from their having and expressing them. People have a status quo bias, and are prone to value the preferences they have because of the endowment effect. People adopt preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance, and often yield to peer pressure when choosing the public policy preferences they express. There is a bandwagon effect, and people’s policy preferences are affected by the mass media. This chapter goes beyond just saying that expressive preferences differ from instrumental preferences by explaining why they differ.

This chapter considers the myth of the perfect body image and the critical role played by the mass media in influencing people's self-image and informing ideals of what is considered beautiful or attractive. The way in which body image is affected by psychosocial factors is analyzed. Many theories and much scientific research about this topic are introduced, followed by an overview of body dysmorphic disorder, and a broad summary of vigorexia (bigorexia), a new and increasingly common disorder, along with several theories and scientific research. Finally, the way in which these two diseases correlate with the myth of the perfect body image is analyzed.

Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.

In this Introduction, we meet two fixer–reporter teams who cover the same event – a terrorism attack in Istanbul – in very different ways. Fixers are news contributors who assist foreign reporters by arranging, translating, and otherwise mediating between them and local news sources. Depending on a fixer’s background, aspirations, and relationship with their client reporter, they can shape the news in significant ways. To understand how and why fixers shape the news, attention to political, historical, and biographical contexts of newsmaking is essential. The Introduction goes on to explain that the fixer and reporter characters who appear in this book are composite characters created from data collected through ethnographic research.

All of the historicising of literary modernism in recent decades has brought scholars of literature to a point where the application of a simple test is warranted. We should ask, that is, whether the historical phenomena that made literary modernism what it was also extensively shaped the majority of literary practice delivered in a realist mode. The ‘modernismists’ amongst us must face an uncomfortable possibility: if modernism’s major causes can be found shaping the rest of the literary production of the period which we associate with modernism – that is, those works not commonly deemed modernist – then any intrinsic justification for categorising certain works as ‘modernist’ has disappeared. This chapter looks in detail at the impact of one of the established causes of literary modernism – the shift from individualism to collectivism in European politics during the late nineteenth century – on realist writing, to test the easy assumption that literary modernism was unique in being influenced by collectivist politics. It shows that the distinctiveness, self-consciousness, and sensitivity to the surrounding world that is conventionally ascribed to modernism is, at least, overstated.

In the years 1900–20, polar exploration and high-altitude mountaineering became entrenched as features of British newspapers and the pictorial press. Meeting and propagating the appetites of an emerging audience of ‘armchair’ explorers, such publications exploited the opportunities afforded by new printing technologies to offer eye-catching typography and photographic images that conveyed the scale of Alpine adventure, and put the wastes of polar snows into the hands of the reader. Meanwhile, reporting on labour disputes connected to the British mining industry offered the yin to exploration’s icy yang: the chance to convey the greys and blacks of mines and miners through the liberal application of ink. This relationship between the black/white of the mines/snows and the black/white of the page can be seen triangulated by a further force: literary modernism’s development of a kind of spatialised moral economy. This chapter considers the tensions between a press in transition, an armchair audience in the waning days of exploration, and a body of literary work that made the most of the greyscale and the vertical axis in offering to the reader a moral and emotional landscape.

Over the course of his career, Mailer demonstrated a deep concern regarding the problem of totalitarianism, particularly its manifestation in American society. It was his belief that totalitarianism was not only a political and social threat enacted against the freedom of the individual, but that it had also made inroads into every aspect of society, from architecture to technology. This chapter provides an overview of Mailer’s definitions of totalitarianism in society, as well as his views of its consequences – which he believed manifested not just socially and politically, but also psychologically and physically.

The local information environment reflects a community’s experience with a war’s local casualties. As this experience varies across communities, so too does the information environment. The intensity of the experience is also reflected in the information environment. When a community has suffered more wartime losses, those deaths receive more coverage, even when we control for community-specific factors and size. While national media are more likely to report on international stories in general, specific local media give more attention to an international story if it includes local casualties. These local news stories include powerful elements, most notably military funerals and flag-draped coffins that make the stories vivid and highly influential. These scripted events represent standard, well-known symbols of loss that clearly and powerfully convey the cost of combat, directly affect ETC, and therefore significantly dampen public support for fighting a war. Social networks also contribute to individuals having varied levels of information about a war’s costs that in turn influence their variation in predictions of a war’s ETC and powerfully alters their views.

This chapter discusses a number of broad and influential perspectives to studying audiences, explains differences and similarities in background as well as explores their main possibilities in understanding the flow of management ideas. In particular, we consider: (1) research in the field of conversation analysis which is concerned with understanding the way lectures and speeches may influence and transform audiences and in turn, how audience responses may affect speakers’ oratorical performances; (2) the ‘uses and gratification’ approach to studying media audiences which focuses primarily on the reasons and motivations for selecting specific media options and the way various audience activities relate to the nature of audience orientations; (3) more critical traditions of media research focusing on how audience members’ interpretations of media messages relate to their social backgrounds and (4) literature on fans and fandom which provides an important lens to advance understanding of how and to what extent audience members take the ideas beyond a mass communication setting and may even become producers themselves.

Illustrated magazines provided some of the main vehicles for expressing ideas of modernity and modernism in the Brazilian context. The chapter focuses on three pioneering art nouveau magazines of the early 1900s (Atheneida, Kósmos, Renascença) and their mass-circulation successors (O Malho, Fon-Fon!, Careta, Para Todos) over the 1910s. The experimental work produced in the arena of design and photography by artists K. Lixto and J. Carlos, among others, is proof that an alternative version of modernism was already in place in Rio de Janeiro long before the modernist movement of 1922, focused not on fine art but mainly on graphic art and photography. By examining the complex linkages between the magazines and their personnel, the chapter demonstrates that this alternate modernism was a self-conscious and deliberate movement. The writings of leading art critic Gonzaga Duque provide the theoretical underpinnings that tie together the efforts of a broad group of practitioners. Interestingly, their vision of modern art weds the symbolist decadentism of Rubén Darío’s modernismo with a political outlook that ranges from anarchism to socialism and communism.

Between December 2009 and March 2010, members of xenophobic groups attacked Kyoto Korean Daiichi Elementary School, organizing a series of three discriminatory rallies. When the school and the parents sought to fight back in the criminal and civil courts, they were met with obstacles: the undefined nature of hate speech, the legal system’s incapacity to deal with hate crime, and the Japanese majority’s lack of understanding of ethnic education, rooted in Zainichi Korean resistance against colonialism and assimilation. Charged under existing laws, four attackers were convicted in criminal court. The school’s persistence also paid off in victory in the civil courts. Inevitably, discussion of anti-discrimination legislation ensued, resulting in the Hate Speech Elimination Act of 2016 (the first anti-racism Act in Japan) and Kawasaki City’s anti-hate speech ordinance of 2019 (the first to stipulate criminal penalties). Nevertheless, many issues remain. This chapter reports the pain suffered by those subjected to the discriminatory attacks. It also discusses what it means for minorities to fight a legal fight and what issues persist even after victory.