Search

Background: Through a close reading of the four issues of The Bowater Papers, this article aims to understand the rise of a paper modernity and to reinsert it--as material and infrastructure-- into media studies. Analysis: Producing wood paper is a strain on the landscape and the environment. The Bowater Papers showcases the histories and material possibilities of paper media products. A paper-dependent modernity can be understood as an infrastructural assemblage of harvesting, production, circulation, and consumption. Conclusion and implications: Paper calls for a natural history and geography of media. Thinking about the mediations from tree to paper through the encompassing notion of "xylomedia" is a way of articulating the intersection of the material, environmental, and infrastructural in media studies. Today is still a paper world, one that is also the age of lignin, package, and Amazon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Internet scholars are uncovering and connecting histories of early internets across the globe, but the Canadian context remains underexplored. Drawing on unpublished and declassified documents of the Canadian Armed Forces at Ottawa's Directorate of History and Heritage, this article investigates the history and significance of SAMSON (Strategic Automatic Message Switching Operational Network), an early Canadian internet that experienced a series of setbacks beginning almost immediately at its advent in 1965, until the project was completed in 1984. Analysis: Canada's internet infrastructural techno-politics are examined through Brian Larkin's framework of examining technical ways through which the political is constituted. Conclusions and implications: This paper shows how this early internet was a techno-political system that shaped and was shaped by Canada's pursuit of its national identity amid fears of U.S. influence and rising demands for self-determination within the Québécois and Indigenous nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1886 and 1895, the Sunday newspaper in U.S. cities became a cauldron for an emerging mass, popular culture-one with reach into Canada. The concurrent development of weekend newspapers in Toronto, Canada, distinguished local innovations against the unspecified, general influence of the "American Sunday paper." The Sunday World and the Saturday Globe followed and refuted, respectively, the ideal set by the American Sunday paper, but together defined Canadian weekend leisure reading. The reference in Canadian newspapers to an idealized American Sunday model offers an example of an emergent continental mass popular culture where cultural forms circulated, and were transformed, producing interesting local specificities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses papers published within the issue, including one on the facets of cybernetics that have been neglected, another on intellectual movements overshadowed by the visibility of cybernetics and lastly on the marginal nature of loans in agriculture.

The hero and phone-watch from Dick Tracy are evoked regularly in news and studies of cellphone use. This paper argues that the racial paradigm of White law enforcer and Dark law-breaker in the comic strip resonates in contemporary evocations and in discussions of cellphone use and crime. Representations of mobile communication and racialized criminality in Dick Tracy were inspired by the 1930s "war on crime" that intersected with wireless innovations and with lynching. This paper interprets that repeated evocation of the comic strip is a "perverse nostalgia" for an old-fashioned form of law and order premised on racialized violence and viewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the collaborations between Marshall McLuhan, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, and the modernist town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in the 1950s. Giedion's studies of everyday material culture and his concern with the human scale of cities became central to McLuhan's proposal for studying media. Through a historical analysis of Tyrwhitt's papers andcorrespondence, the paper documents her role in mediating a dialogue between McLuhan and Giedion and in co-founding, with McLuhan and others, the Explorations Group at the University of Toronto. Drawing upon Giedion's concern with the humanization of urban life, Tyrwhitt helped formulate a methodology that used the urban environment and architecture as the framework toanalyze the effects of media. The paper argues that Tyrwhitt's own contributions to the Explorations journal took up both Giedion and McLuhan's focus on media and material culture and their commitment to interdisciplinarity in examining the mediated experience of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines tobacco sponsorship advertising in 18 college and university newspapers in Canada from 2002 to 2004. It documents the financial value of tobacco advertising in the year before the federal ban on this form of advertising, which began in October 2003. Tobacco spending formed nearly half of these newspapers' national advertising revenues. The paper examines advertising revenue and publishing output in the year following the ad ban. While national ad revenue fell 28% in 2003-04, this did not adversely affect newspaper operations: the newspapers published 1.4% more pages-and more issues-in 2003-04 than in the previous year. In accounting for this anomalousfinding, the paper discusses the sui generis nature of campus newspapers, which embody elements of commercial and non-profit media, while remaining an under-researched and under-theorized area of communication studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1990s, the Government of Canada launched a string of initiatives to usher its citizens into the "information age." Recently, the federal government has announced "mission accomplished" in its pledge to become a "model user" of information technology, recognized around the world as the country most connected to its citizens. This paper interrogates the term "model user" as a marker of the changes occurring to techniques of government in our expanding information society. It proposes that the "model user" represents ways to negotiate the changing relationship between nation, state, and citizen associated with economic restructuring and signals a new civilizing discourse for citizen conduct amid the dynamic flows of information and ideas. Further, the "model user" suggests an emphasis on innovation that is implicated within larger discourses of economic globalization and the premium placed on adaptability and creativity. Finally, this paper makes vivid the connections between the "model user" and emerging discourses of Canada as a "model democracy" and Canadians as "model citizens" within the global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain how crime victims have become increasingly visible in the criminal justice system and in media portrayals of crime by looking to the U.S. victims' rights movement and its strategic mobilization of a particular construction of "crime victim" into the public sphere. Through analysis of the movement's documentation of its media strategies and new forms of victim-oriented journalistic practice, the paper demonstrates how the movement portrays crime through its construction of crime victims as a class of citizens without rights, through which the families of murder victims become proxy-victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how the National Post regularly excludes polling details that are essential to an accurate reading of the data. It then looks at how business and labour issues are covered in the paper and shows that opinion polls are manipulated to confer popular legitimacy upon the economic conservatism of the Post's editors. It concludes by arguing that while polls may be presented as a form of direct democracy, they are more aptly regarded as promoting a phony populism: the use of popular idioms to mask an elite project. Although opinion-poll results are presented as the unfiltered expressions of popular sentiment, they are in fact regularly manipulated by media outlets. I find that rather than giving voice to the general population, polls in the National Post are routinely used to "manufacture consent" for the viewpoints of the corporate and political elite, while misrepresenting popular opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto offers an opportunity to study the ways risk has come to form a rhetorical basis for public discussions of morality in contemporary Canadian society. This paper combines Ewald's precautionary description of risk functionality with Douglas' pollution theories to analyze quantitative and qualitative data taken from a print media content analysis. Precautionary conceptions are pre-eminent at the outset of the story, while pollution formulations become more important when the international community accuses Toronto of hosting a plague. This shift in emphasis between the two risk formulations is linked to a change in story frames from a public-health focus to an economic one. The paper concludes that risk is defined, redefined, and deployed as a moral tool and agent of social control by members of Canada's information elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 12, 1943, Harold Innis delivered a speech entitled "The Crisis in Public Opinion" at the annual luncheon of the Canadian National Newspapers and Periodicals Association, held in Toronto. The address has survived in transcript form in the Innis Papers collection at the University of Toronto Archives. Our paper can best be seen as a companion piece to the edited transcription of Innis' original speech, which follows in this issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication. Emphasizing the performative nature of the speech, we contextualize "The Crisis of Public Opinion" by examining the correspondence leading up to and following the speech. We argue that Innis' views on the "crisis of public opinion" in the print media indicate that he understood this particular issue as part of a broader public crisis related to the decline of political and juridical institutions and to shifts in power and influence. His commentary on media in Canada was bound up with his effort to promote collective engagement as a corrective to the biases in power that he had detected. The 1943 speech is thus significant not simply as a "missing link" between Innis' writings on Canada and his later work on communication theory; it is a clear and compelling distillation of the engagement, enactment, and performance that were the abiding features of his work as an intellectual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the corporate restructurings that took place in the Canadian news industry in 2000, using findings from website analyses in 2001 and 2003 that assessed the impact of the changes on the provision of online news. The paper shows that despite their stated commitment to convergence, the restructured companies only selectively exploited the interactive potential of the Web, and that they tended to operate under traditional news and revenue strategies. It also documents a continued shift in Canadian regulatory policies toward neo-liberal conceptions of news and the public good framed in terms of private ownership, free markets, and consumer choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between cultural participation, community wellbeing and global sustainability. By reframing notions of cultural participation within a perspective that stresses interconnection and deep reflection as key to wellbeing, the author questions the core values that guide, govern and fund cultural organizations, policies and practices. The paper presents ten quasi-fictive scenarios that explore the dynamics of meaningful participation. They creatively illustrate the importance of an ecomuseological perspective in which culture is understood as the foundation for increased human consciousness and responsible action to share limited planetary resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores privacy issues in relation to the growing prominence of marketing research and data mining in websites for children. Whereas increasing protection is given to individuals' personal information, little attention is paid to information that is aggregated, electronically scanned, and sorted --despite the fact that aggregate information is often highly valued by the marketing industry. The authors review current trends in Internet market research, data mining techniques, policy initiatives, and the contents of some of the most highly frequented children's game sites. The paper demonstrates how common data mining practices constitute a threat to children's emerging rights online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper retraces the genesis and evolution of Canada's French public broadcaster's foray into online news (OLN). It examines how Radio-Canada's online news service has been integrated with radio and television newsrooms, how it contributes to expanding the public sphere, and the manner in which it differentiates itself from the competition. The paper concludes by reviewing the challenges facing the public broadcaster in an era where pressures for civic-minded journalism are engendering a set of participatory practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the production of local subjects through radio production, challenging the common assumption of a straightforward conceptual link between de-traditionalization and media globalization. It examines the directions several urban Aboriginal cultural producers in Canada are pursuing to confer meaning on their futures, questioning whether Native modernities are necessarily replacing traditions. Focusing on several First Nations radio shows issuing from university radio station facilities in London and Toronto, Ontario, the paper offers insights into the ways Native radio producers are culturally mediating neo-traditional (new-old) versions of Aboriginality over the airwaves. The article highlights the interdependence of Aboriginal public spheres, radio mediation, and popular sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an account of the life and work of Mary Quayle Innis (1899-1972), the wife of Harold Innis, and a figure largely unknown in the Innis scholarship. Using material taken from her writing, archival sources, and interviews with two of the Innises' children, this paper provides background on her contributions to Canadian culture as a writer and editor. The paper also speculates on her possible influence upon Innis' political economy and media research, and suggests that in understanding Mary Quayle Innis better, puzzling features of Harold Innis' own work are illuminated. A full bibliography of works by and about Mary Innis is attached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication studies as an academic field had a relatively late start in Canada. The first college-level communication studies department was only established in 1965. Since then, the number of departments has grown rapidly across Canada as the field has become wildly popular among Canadian students. This article presents information related to a conference, which was held in April 2003, to bring together communication scholars within Ontario and nationwide to present and discuss their research. The call-for-papers for the conference, titled "Revisioning Boundaries," attracted many submissions from scholars. This issue includes several contributions from the conference, including an expanded version of professor John Durham Peters' keynote address. The papers invite one to re-examine old ideas as well as to explore extensions to communications research. John Durham Peters' paper is at once a paean to the Canadian tradition of communication studies and an extension of it. He begins with reflections on the experience of time and space in the history of civilization.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the guest editor discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on the Yi Jing as a philosophical examination of the interological origin and inclination of the Chinese way of thinking, one on the use of interology in exploring the affinities and resonances between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the Zen sensibility and another on the constitutive effect of jazz.

In this article, I explore how Montréal-area community newspaper The Suburban represented the 2012 Printemps érable and, more specifically, the educational issues at the core of this uprising, which was sparked by a historic student strike. A qualitative framing analysis was conducted on the visual and textual content of the newspaper's front pages from February 13 to August 1, 2012. Results suggest that the paper framed the Printemps érable as an illegitimate series of individual protest actions worthy of derision. Students were represented as lazy, self-centred, directionless consumers, and authoritarian government action as desirable in forcing them to submit to the realities of a neoliberal economy and corresponding education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early efforts of CBC Radio to promote Canadian literature through programs such as Canadian Short Stories and its successor, Anthology, gave rise to various issues related to media integrity, including the selection of content, the use of language, and the format of presentation. Even before Robert Weaver retired in 1985, the approach he developed in the 1950s gave way to a different philosophy of literary arts programming, one focusing less on the needs of CanLit and more on the contingencies of radio. As in other cases of textual migration across media, the ontological requirements of the destination medium eventually took precedence. The process by which this shift occurred is examined using the relatively unexplored papers of Weaver and Howard Engel and other documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Canadian reporting on suicide and the ways it changed over 150 years. Archival research on the reporting practices of two long-standing newspapers presented here shows that suicide was not always taboo in the media. In fact, the silencing and tip-toeing around reporting on suicide only began in the mid-twentieth century. Early newspaper accounts frequently included reports on suicides, both local and far removed, including details on the exact manner of death. As public perceptions of suicide, and the laws surrounding it, gradually shifted from considering the act a crime to an aspect of psychiatric malady, reporting on suicide changed. Once suicide became an untouchable subject in newsrooms the stigma became entrenched, making it hard to address in any meaningful way for decades [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade, urban planners and city councilors across the country have taken the "cultural turn." In Montréal, this has led authorities to focus on citywide culture as a tool for enhancing creativity and for developing the economy of their municipality through the concept of "cultural poles." But in the past few years, the attention of authorities has shifted from "poles" to "cultural quarters" (or "neighborhoods"), particularly through a new proposed action plan for cultural quarters. Basing itself on municipal documents, comments in the media, papers and reports, this article retraces the transformation from one concept to another as well as the interpretations and decisions that resulted from it. Echoing a larger process of municipalization of culture, the growing interest of Montréal's authorities in policies that use quarters as an explicit object demonstrates a renewed and changing spatialization of cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2012, the Canadian Heritage Minister announced that the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the country's largest and most popular museum, would be renamed the Canadian Museum of History. In addition to the new name, three strategies—a strategy of engagement, a strategy of authority, and a strategy of expansion—were elaborated by museum and government officials as part of the transformation. We examine these three strategies as an example of the Harper government's attempt to "brand" Canadian identity and history in its own image, arguing that the strategies were designed expressly to paper over near-unilateral changes in the museum's mandate and transformation. Ultimately, these changes have problematic implications for the democratic management of cultural production in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the media construction of a certain form of Islamic public visibility by analyzing the French regional and national press coverage of the "Burqa affair" (2009-2010) . By means of a semiotic approach, and with reference to the notions of "visibility-invisibility," "face," and "iconocrisis," the paper seeks to demonstrate how the Burqa affair raises questions about contemporary regimes of visibility and publicity (making public). Considering the media staging of Islam as a site of deployment of strategies of visibility, the article demonstrate show the niqab is (re) presented as both an ostentatious and an opaque sign, and as such, as the antithesis of a French Republican conception of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history and current state of ownership concentration in New Brunswick's print media industry. At the time of writing, Brunswick News Inc. owns every English language daily, the majority of weeklies, and almost all French-language newspapers in the province. Moreover, the family-owned Irving group that owns Brunswick News Inc. also owns hundreds of other businesses operating in dozens of different sectors in the province, a fact that has raised concerns regarding media ownership concentration. Drawing on the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, this article quantitatively evaluates the claim that there is excessive concentration in the province's print media industry. This analysis is supplemented by recent allegations of anti-competitive behaviour and editorial influence exerted by the Brunswick News papers, most notably that of the flagship Telegraph-Journal. The article concludes that the evidence broadly supports these allegations, and that there is therefore an increasingly strong case for Canada's Competition Bureau to take action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aesthetics manifest a rationally ambiguous category of meaning that encompasses both relational and representational dimensions of communication. In this paper, I argue that (1) truth-claims have ontological consequences bound in the social commitments and obligations generated through expressive choices and interpellated audiences; (2) ontological implications entangle discourses of "truth" in the constitution of knowledge in ways that extend beyond rational argumentation into aesthetic experience; and (3) a reinterpretation of Kantian aesthetics offers a framework for understanding how aesthetic experiences influence the organization of relations of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction between corporeality and information in the context of the digital interface is, as Anna Munster (2006) notes, characterized by the distinctly spatio-temporal processes of both "multiplication (doubling) and division (splitting)." In this experience, the body's "image, sensation, and action" mutate to align with the speeds of the informational universe, translating physical action into digital results and dividing attention between multiple spatio-temporalities. This paper considers such conjunctions and disjunctions within and through the applied media theory project Division Pixel Suppliers created at the University of Waterloo Critical Media Lab, focusing specifically on how embodied action in the digital interface of the arcade-cabinet installation is characterized by a fracturing of space and time that places interactants into a particular relationship with their technical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile phones are becoming increasingly location-aware: they use and share positioning data through networks, across space, and between friends. This paper introduces the term "comobility" to describe an emerging feature of mobile and located communication, and asks how increasingly popular locative applications are changing social and mobile experiences of place and proximity. This new sense of comobility, of being mobile with others at a distance, was produced and made visible in the collaborative creation-research of the author, in which art practice and social research co-exist in a mobile research methodology. Workshops and a performative walk are analyzed in relation to theories of proximate interaction, to reveal how aspects of face-to-face communication are extended through locative technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On October 17, 2009, seventy-six Tamil refugees arrived off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia. This study examines how the Canadian newsprint media portrayed this event and in which policy context this coverage occurred. We analyze articles published between October 2009 and January 2010 from the Vancouver Sun, the Toronto Star, and the National Post. A discourse analysis addresses issues offraming, representation, and identity to understand how the Tarnil refugee migration was represented in media debate. Our results show that there was an overall negative representation of the Tamil refugees as the press emphasized issues of criminality and terrorism, and constructed the refugees as risk. The discussion established security—rather than human rights—as a focal point and portrayed the immigration system as both "failing" and "abused" by "bogus claimants." This security-oriented framework provided a discursive background for the refugee reform Bill C-n to be ushered through Parliament later that summer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In large cross-sector research networks, good communication is critical to the effective management of research partnerships. In this paper we report on a communication audit conducted to identify the communication pathways and flow of information within the Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) Network, a Canadian Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE). The results indicate a range of communication challenges that can be related to an inherent problem in network management-that of orchestrating some kind of "harmony" among the different and sometimes competing voices of the multiple sectors involved. Our findings confirm the need to design and implement formal organizational communication structures to facilitate the process of creating a shared language and unified goals for the different sectors entering into partnerships in large, collaborative network organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges assertions made by business magazine editors that the business press plays no role beyond reporting on women's executive advancement—or lack thereof. The study begins with the latest reported statistics on women's leadership roles in corporate Canada and a summary of the most common explanations for these numbers. The second half of the paper goes on to examine the Canadian print media coverage of Annette Verschuren, a woman who defied the executive odds. It argues that although Verschuren is prominently featured in the business press, gendered stereotyping, which has been identified as a major obstacle to women's promotion, is reinforced in that coverage by both the framing of her story and the language and imagery used to describe her and her accomplishments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the 2006 season of the reality television show Canadian Idol and the manufacturing of Canadian identity. Our analysis looks specifically at the way Canadian identity was articulated in the production of the show, the comments of the judges to contestants, the comments in news releases, and the viewers' discussions on the message board accompanying the show. We argue that the show produces a version of Canadian identity that sustains a logic of regional difference, with a key point of distinction between urban and nonurban Canadians. However, we also indicate that this representation is ruptured by the viewers' debates on their feelings of Canadian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Holmes on Homes is a Canadian home improvement television program and the centrepiece of HGTV (Home and Garden Television), featuring Mike Holmes as the series' star contractor and host. This paper argues that by looking back at earlier incarnations of film and television melodrama, we can determine the way in which Holmes on Homes reinvents the home improvement subgenre. By playing out reality TV's central tension between fiction and non-fiction, Holmes on Homes reveals its larger themes of justice and redemption, which befit its unique position between the documentary and the classic melodrama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses narrative development and audience interactivity in reality television, with a particular focus on the "format franchising processes" involving Canadian Idol. The staging of media events, recruitment of semi-professional performers, and immersive online environments emphasize the complexities of reality format adaptation, which involves the localization of global media texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Canadian government shifted to a neo-liberal policy regime, social service delivery was "contracted out" to community organizations such as the Riverview Centre. The outsourcing objectives were to keep delivery costs low and to build in efficiencies by relying on new technological systems. This paper shows the problems arising from the Riverview Centre's inadequate technology system when interfacing with advanced government networks to report on employment services provided to clients. These advanced networks centralized control of social-service labour through digital Taylorization practices. Electronic reporting tasks have been standardized and routinized such that labour processes are shaped by the digital technology systems. The delivery of employment services conceals the dual aspect of the commodification of the social workers' labour through contract employment and technological means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of a pilot project that examines the perceptions of English-language TV news among two racialized groups: self-identified Iranian-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians. This research indicates that, according to participants, mainstream Canadian English-language TV news does not necessarily offer racialized immigrant audiences a space through which to see themselves reflected accurately as part of Canada's rich social life beyond the celebration of ethnic events and festivals. Participants explained that they appreciated Canadian English-language television news, with important caveats. They would like to see the Canadian English-language television news media create spaces in which they could see their own ethnic, racial, cultural, and immigrant identities reflected within the backdrop of the Canadian multicultural state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores three Canadian wireless network projects that demonstrate that Wi-Fi technologies, like landline telephones, radio, and hydro, can be used to bring services to local communities. It is our position that despite the strengths and weaknesses of Fredericton's eZone, Montréal's Île Sans Fil, and the Lac Seul network in Northern Ontario, these three highlighted Wi-Fi networks demonstrate that a public information utilities model is still a useful lens through which to understand the development and implementation of telecommunications in Canada. Through our case studies, we have observed that in order for municipally based and community Wi-Fi networks to successfully take root in a community, it is advantageous to build on existing technological infrastructure. Moreover, municipal and community needs must be considered in the project. Finally, a cohort of interested advocates from the region is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the current debate on Internet neutrality is examined in terms of four frames: legislative reform, network economics, Internet practices and culture, and broadband policy. The paper is critical of the broadband carriers' (telephone and cable companies) attempt to institute a "new Internet" based on discriminatory service tiers. It is vital for the Internet community to oppose the introduction of service tiers, but public debate on the future of the Internet should not be limited to the problem of service tiers. A more enlightened framework, consistent with over two decades of network policy, would re-frame the debate at the more fundamental level of infrastructure development. Policy recommendations are made to ensure adequate financing for the development of local broadband networks in the public interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the change in Conservative Party behaviour during the 18 months between the 2004 and 2006 Canadian federal elections. It asks: How did the Conservative Party strategy influence the shift in voter preference during the 2006 Canadian federal election? The approach taken to address this question is rooted in the emerging field of Political Marketing. Using the Lees-Marshment taxonomy of party behaviour as a framework for analyzing the election outcome, this paper demonstrates how market intelligence was incorporated into the Conservative Party's strategy to influence voter perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With considerable attention now being paid within scholarly communications to publication models that increase access to research, the launch of the open access journal Open Medicine demonstrates the contribution that open access, in all of its various economic models, can make to scholarly traditions of editorial independence, intellectual integrity, and academic freedom. This paper details the history of Open Medicine, which was born of an editorial-interference incident in the field of medical publishing, and offers a case study of the current political economy of academic publishing. This new journal demonstrates how open access, in combination with open source publishing and management software, enables new journals to more readily protect the academic freedom of researchers and scholars. As we argue, this method of publishing provides a venue for the emergence of new approaches, ideas, and independence from sources of competing interests in scholarly publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three major paradigms--mass communications, political economy, and poststructuralism--to demonstrate how the process of knowledge production erases their connection with their postcolonial subjects and locations. This mapping indicates that what one perceives to be at the margins actually subtends or holds together the theoretical centre. As such, I explore and explain how a canonic economy of value operates within the field of communication and cultural studies. This discussion is followed by a brief reflection on the institutional, and potentially imperial, effects of this canonic economy on university programs and curricula and on the distinction between what is required and what is optional or elective in a course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the days that followed the Montréal Massacre at the École Polytechnique, December 6, 1989, the Canadian mass media became a discursive battleground regarding violence against women. In response to this phenomenon, I released a half-hour documentary in 1995 entitled Reframing the Montreal Massacre: A Media Interrogation. Designed as a feminist tool for media literacy, the tape deconstructs six key moments in the media coverage of the Massacre. This paper serves as an extended artist's statement to accompany the project's re-release on the Internet, while simultaneously exploring aesthetic and representational strategies that shape the documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While current mainstream media stories oscillate between Canadian troops in Afghanistan attempting to restore safety and democracy and the imminent threat of a war on terror on domestic soil, a sorely neglected story concerns the continued war on women in Canada. In this paper, we look at one site of this war--the case of missing and murdered women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Employing a frame analysis, we analyze 128 articles from The Vancouver Sun published between 2001 and 2006. We argue that prevailing and historically entrenched stereotypes about women, Aboriginality, and sex-trade work continue to demarcate the boundaries of 'respectability' and degeneracy, interlocking in ways that situate these women's lives, even after death, in the margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving interpersonal communication skills has become an increasingly important aspect of HIV prevention strategies, based on the notion that this will contribute to more consistent condom use. The emergence of "barebacking" (intentionally unprotected casual sex among gay men) has foregrounded the limitations of such strategies. Efforts to encourage talk run counter to the ways in which silence is valued within bareback sex culture and serves to construct specifically masculine forms of pleasure and desire. This paper draws on gender analysis and phenomenology to consider how prevention organizations can come to grips with this dilemma by re-examining their own ways of interacting with the communities they serve. Using a range of examples, it explores ways organizations can work around barriers to interpersonal communication by enhancing their own ability to converse with community members on issues such as bareback sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through in-depth interviews with Taiwanese newspaper workers, this paper illustrates the "de-skilling" effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on journalists. In recent years, Taiwanese reporters have experienced an increase in workload and an intensification of managerial control due to the introduction of new technologies in the newsroom. Using ICTs in the workplace consequently has harmed journalists' working conditions and autonomy. Moreover, ICTs have led to a trivialization of reporting tasks and devaluation of reporters' experience and knowledge. The degradation of reporting work resulting from the use of ICTs has enabled managers at Taiwanese newspapers to hire young employees to fill the jobs of experienced reporters and to reduce salary costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the notion—proposed by liberal-democratic theories of the “knowledge worker” and industry accounts of “friction-free” capitalism—that labour conflict is no longer relevant within digital capitalism via an in-depth examination of a case of collective organizing by temporary workers at Microsoft. The paper suggests the formation and activities of their union, WashTech, prefigures 21st century collective organizing. Two concepts are proposed as guides to these struggles. “Immaterial labour” refers to a set of increasingly important forms of labour within post-Fordism, ranging from callcentre work to software development. “Precarity” denotes the material and existential insecurity suffered by workers as a result of flexible employment arrangements. These concepts are examined by drawing on archival material and interviews with WashTech members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The blog postings of "EA Spouse," partner of an exhausted video game programmer, have catalyzed discussion of epidemic overwork in the digital play industry. This paper analyzes the crisis of labour in this glamorous new medium. After a brief overview of the industry and its production process, we discuss its labour conditions under four headings. "Enjoyment" examines the real pleasures game workers find at their jobs. "Exclusion" discusses the gendering of game work. "Exploitation" investigates the corporate processes that drive toward a work culture of extreme hours and the consequences game workers suffer. "Exodus" looks at current attempts by workers to escape this predicament - attempts including legal action, educational efforts, entrepreneurial flight, and union organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the key legitimating role of communication and the media, and the role of taming-labour, in constructing the Ontario neo-liberal hegemonic project in 1995. Media-content analysis and examination of the communication strategies of the Ontario government in the 1996 public-service strike show that the government relied on constructing the perception of a hegemonic crisis and framing labour as oppositional to the public interest of resolving the crisis. The government's general strategy of quick-attack communications offensives curtailed media and opposition scrutiny, increasing the likelihood of policy success and media dependence on its framing of issues. A strong challenge to the government led by labour and social justice groups failed in the face of state public relations, media silence, and internal dissension. Examination of a second strike in 2002 suggests that even without a crisis, the government continued its attack on labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]