Seeing Through The Media

An eye-opening look at the effect of the media on public perception of The Persian Gulf War

PN Balji is a veteran journalist with more than 40 years’ experience in Singapore journalism and has worked in five newspapers, three of them as Editor. His experience spans print, broadcast and digital journalism. He is one of Singapore’s most well-known media personalities and has provided communications advisory services to both public and private sector organisations in Singapore, including government ministries, statutory boards and tertiary institutions.

"This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how to bring the gospel message to bear on contemporary culture." --Catholic New Times>

Navigating Media’s Influence Through Childhood and Adolescence moves through research and questions that are relevant to practicing pediatricians and therapists in their everyday practice. As we navigate post-pandemic life where screen time was unrestricted in most homes, this book has never been more important. Written by a pediatrician and a professor of media effects, this book is a vital resource for practicing mental health clinicians, counselors, psychologists, physicians, and students studying in those areas. Grounded in developmental theory, mass communication theory, current research, and acumen gained from years of clinical and teaching experience, this book gives professionals what they need to understand the colossal effect media is having on their patients. An aid to practitioners, this book is organized by developmental stage and matches specific questions related to media’s effects with explicit research-based recommendations and explanations. It is intended to be a quick resource guide for the busy professional.

A nonfiction daily devotional with a twist. This is a story of a stay-at-home mother who was forgetting how to put God first in her day. This led to much struggle as God should be number one, but in going with the busy ways of the world, it's far too easy to forget how to see God in each new day. Lea Michelle's journey shows that walking with God is not something that is learned overnight. It takes great practice to learn how to be in the world but not of it! It takes a good solid year, 365 days, to build a lifelong routine of knowing how to make Christ a part of your day each and every day. It takes a year to discover how to never lose sight that the Holy Spirit gives us our daily bread and walks with us always. Lea Michelle's prayer is that you will pick up a pen and follow along with her journey. She has challenging questions at the end of each day for you to ponder. Challenge yourself and hold yourself accountable to walking with God each new day along with Lea Michelle. Share your heart for others to see on social media with the hashtag #A365DayJourney or share your discoveries in a private notebook. She prays that you too will open your eyes to a daily life, walking hand in hand, with our Savior Jesus Christ!

Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices.

This book is a result of the 2013 CLAVIER Conference held in Modena in November 2013, and includes a selection of the papers presented on that occasion. As the title suggests, this volume encourages cross-generic and cross-disciplinary investigations, in order to advocate integrated approaches to the study of media discourse regarding both theoretical background and practical applications. Bringing together a wide range of case studies, the book fosters debate on a variety of aspects related to the representation of specialised discourse in and through the media, including, for example, voice and point of view, argumentative practices, knowledge construction, multimodality, the re-contextualization and re-conceptualization of knowledge, opinion formation and peer-to-peer communication, and popularization in and through traditional, digital and social media. Taken together, the contributions to this volume provide extensive exemplification of the type of research currently being conducted on these issues. The variety of the questions posed and the wide array of methods used here therefore represent a substantial contribution to sharpening existing knowledge and furthering the ongoing debate among scholars in the field.