This Special Issue presents work-in-progress from a substantial cross-national project investigating the diffusion and significance of media and information technologies among young people aged 6-17 years old living in twelve European countries Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. As described i...

News coverage of Islamic extremism is reigniting debates about the media's role in promoting prejudice toward Muslims. Psychological theories of media-induced prejudice date to the 1950's, and find support from controlled experiments. However, national-scale studies of media effects on Muslim prejudice are lacking. Orthogonal research investigating media-induced prejudice toward immigrants has ...

In this survey, 187 samples collected from 9 different sources of water in Tehran such as: water cool‌ers, neonates incubators, water bathes (37° C), little pools in parks or squares, cooling towers, hot or cold water taps, were examined for Legionnaires' disease agents. Inoculating water samples on selec‌tive and nonselective media resulted in isolation of several strains of gram negative bact...

Suicide is not only an individual phenomenon, but it is also influenced by social and environmental factors. With the high suicide rate and the abundance of social media data in South Korea, we have studied the potential of this new medium for predicting completed suicide at the population level. We tested two social media variables (suicide-related and dysphoria-related weblog entries) along w...

BACKGROUND Doctors are uncertain of their ethical and legal obligations when communicating with patients online. Professional guidelines for patient-doctor interaction online have been written with limited quantitative data about doctors' current usage and attitudes toward the medium. Further research into these trends will help to inform more focused policy and guidelines for doctors communica...

Funding bodies and policy imperatives increasingly favour comparative research. Stimulated also by the phenomena of globalisation and the concomitant rise of globalisation theory, researchers in media, communication and cultural studies increasingly find themselves initiating or invited to collaborate in multinational comparative projects. Given the growing prominence of comparative media and c...

Today's world has been the world of media. Today can hardly find a place that people are far and separated from the media and media effects. Practices, knowledge, tastes, and many teachings of daily life of every human, somehow directly or indirectly will be affected by what the media has covered. This article attempts to focus on national media audience on one hand and satellite television net...

Social media may liberate citizens in societies with stringent media controls and accelerate political democratization. Yet, little is known about the relation between social media use and perceived constraints in a semi-authoritarian system. This study draws on Media System Dependency theory to examine this relation in the context of the 2011 Singapore General Election. Our findings, based on ...

This article explores the intricate interrelationships between discourses on identity and themultiple processes associated with increasing globalization in the modern age. Globalization is notonly often exclusively associated with worldwide economic integration and the emergence of aborderless global market but also involves sweeping changes on the social, cultural and politicaldomains. Further...