DECADES ago, the question for those studying international communication was how communications turns "others" into "ourselves" (propaganda). Now the question is who we are, ourselves, and where the "other" has gone. As a subject, international communication has moved from "low" to "high" policy; corporations and communities struggle to adapt to conditions created by a qualitatively new informa...

In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of " swing states " where the two candidates historically have roughly equal probabilities of winning. The effective value of a swing state in deciding the election is determined not on...

Formal work on the electoral model often suggests that parties or candidates should locate themselves at the electoral mean. Recent research has found no evidence of such convergence. In order to explain nonconvergence, the stochastic electoral model is extended by including estimates of electoral valence. We introduce the notion of a convergence coefficient, c. It has been shown that high valu...

Cyber Activism and SMS Propaganda: The potential and limitations in utilising Internet and cell phone technologies to strengthen human rights in China With this thesis, I have aimed to analyse the impact of Internet and cell phone technologies on the development of Chinese society, with emphasis on how it affects the promotion and respect for human rights and democracy in the country. The focus...

Web spamming, the practice of introducing artificial text and links into web pages to affect the results of searches, has been recognized as a major problem for search engines. It is also a serious problem for users because they are not aware of it and they tend to confuse trusting the search engine with trusting the results of a search [16]. The parallels between web spamming on the internet a...

The purpose of present study is to explore impact of marketing mix (price, firm image, distribution intensity, promotion and propaganda) on the brand equity of Asia Insurance Firm in view of its customers and prioritizing of these elements based on significance of their impacts. The statistical population includes customers of Asia Insurance Firm in Shiraz, IRAN. Data is collected using questio...

This paper analyzes the role of propaganda use in cyberterrorism. The main premise is that cyberterrorists display various semiotic gestures (e.g., the use of images and Internet videos) to communicate their intents to the public at large. In doing so, they communicate themes-these themes range from hate to anger. Cyberterrorism, then, is a form of theater or spectacle in which terrorists explo...

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and I put forward a "propaganda model" as a framework for analysing and understanding how the mainstream U.S. media work and why they perform as they do (Herman and Chomsky 1988). We had long been impressed with the regularity with which the media operate on the basis of a set of ideological premises, depend heavily...

In connection with the current national campaign against narcotics, there has been some propaganda to declare illegal the peyote used by many Indian tribes. We are professional anthropologists who have made extensive studies of Peyotism in various tribes. We have participated in the rites and partaken of the sacramental peyote. We therefore feel it our duty to protest against a campaign which o...