"In their article on 'Building the Sacred Community Online', Oren Golan and Nurit Stadler zoom in on the latest attempts of Chabad, the extrovert Jewish Hasidic group, to harness the newest digital technologies to propagate and popularize its staunchly traditionalist reading of Jewish heritage. Also ... known as 'Lubavitch', Chabad is the Hebrew acronym of 'Wisdom, Intellect, Knowledge', three of the more elevated kabalistic spheres (cf. Proverbs 3, 19-20). To many, Chabad's embrace of communication technologies looks like an example of enlisting the devil to do God's work, though it does not look like that to them. This paradox, and Golan and Stadler's account of its newest coming, touches on some of the most fundamental issues of Jewish communications, as well as the much broader problem of religion and communications. The general religion and communication nexus may be divided into two major themes. One is the issue of religious communications, or media theology - namely, the problem of interaction of God and humans. But it also consists of the issue of communicating religion, namely, the handling and disseminating of what the religious believe to be a divine message in this world. As we shall see, both these issues are particularly relevant to Chabad. But the more immediate context for understanding Chabad and its use of media is the universe of Jewish communications. Here too there is a duality: 'Jewish' connotes both Jews and Judaism - a social entity and a religion - and here too, both aspects are relevant to understanding Chabad's media practices today. In order to link Stadler and Golan's study to these broader themes, we will work diachronically. We survey the beginnings and historical development of Chabad communications and beyond them the beginnings of Hasidic communications." (Abstract) more

"A compilation of the papers of Symposium VII of the 9th World Congress of Sociology whose central theme asks whether the mass media should be agents of change or agents of the status quo. Central to the articles are discussions from varying viewpoints as to the nature of news and the factors that s ... hape it. Among the contributors are Peter Golding, Gaye Tuchman, Paul Hirsch, Elihu Katz, Tamás Szecskö and Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. A list of reference follows each article." (Eleanor Blum, Frances G. Wilhoit: Mass media bibliography. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990 Nr. 227) more

"The emphasis of our study is on process, on the dynamics of accommodating the phenomenon of broadcasting and its institutional forms to the surroundings of a developing country for which it was not in the first instance designed," say the authors. They are also interested in side effects, some of w ... hich were not anticipated. Basing their work on an extensive review of statistical and documentary data concerning broadcasting in 91 developing countries and on case studies of 11 of these, they assess the status quo in terms of structure, control, and social and cultural patterns. The 11 countries include Algeria, Brazil, Cyprus, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, Singapore, Tanzania, and Thailand. Contains a number of tables of data throughout and an appendix of supplementary tables. Two other appendixes give methodology and levels of development of the 91 selectcd countries. There are numerous footnotes and an index. Winner of the 1977 National Association of Education Broadcasters Award." (Eleanor Blum, Frances G. Wilhoit: Mass media bibliography. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990 Nr. 672) more