Download or read book Digital Humour in the Covid 19 Pandemic written by Shepherd Mpofu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital humour in the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from the Global South offers a groundbreaking intervention on how digital media were used from below by ordinary citizens to negotiate the global pandemic humorously. This book considers the role played by digital media during the pandemic, and indeed in the socio-political life of the Global South, as indispensable and revolutionary to human communication. In many societies, humour not only signifies laughter and frivolity, but acts as an important echo that accompanies, critiques, questions, disrupts, agitates and comments on societal affairs and the human condition. This book analyses citizens’ use of social media and humour to mediate the pandemic in a diverse range of countries, including Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The book will appeal to academics and students of media and communication studies, political studies, rhetoric, and to policy makers.

Download or read book Communicating COVID 19 written by Christian Fuchs and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communicating COVID-19 analyses the changes of everyday communication in the COVID-19 crisis. Exploring how misinformation has spread online throughout the pandemic, the impact of changes on society and the way we communicate, and the effect this has had on the spread of misinformation.

Download or read book Exploring the Sociopragmatics of Online Humor written by Villy Tsakona and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph explores the diverse sociopragmatic functions and meanings of humorous discourse in various online contexts affecting its use. To this end, an analytical model is proposed which takes into consideration the aspects of context which are relevant to the production and reception of humor, and hence to its sociopragmatic analysis. The model is employed for addressing research questions such as the following: Why may an utterance/text be intended and perceived as humorous by some speakers and fail for others? How and why may speakers attempt to regulate language use through humor? Why and how may the same humorous utterance/text engender diverse and contradictory interpretations? How do speakers create social groups and project social identities through humor? How could the sociopragmatic analysis of humor form the basis for teaching about humor within a critical literacy framework?

Download or read book A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar written by Caty Borum Chattoo and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combining communication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedy examples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.

Download or read book Chasing My Cure written by David Fajgenbaum and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LOS ANGELES TIMES AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER • The powerful memoir of a young doctor and former college athlete diagnosed with a rare disease who spearheaded the search for a cure—and became a champion for a new approach to medical research. “A wonderful and moving chronicle of a doctor’s relentless pursuit, this book serves both patients and physicians in demystifying the science that lies behind medicine.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene David Fajgenbaum, a former Georgetown quarterback, was nicknamed the Beast in medical school, where he was also known for his unmatched mental stamina. But things changed dramatically when he began suffering from inexplicable fatigue. In a matter of weeks, his organs were failing and he was read his last rites. Doctors were baffled by his condition, which they had yet to even diagnose. Floating in and out of consciousness, Fajgenbaum prayed for a second chance, the equivalent of a dramatic play to second the game into overtime. Miraculously, Fajgenbaum survived—only to endure repeated near-death relapses from what would eventually be identified as a form of Castleman disease, an extremely deadly and rare condition that acts like a cross between cancer and an autoimmune disorder. When he relapsed while on the only drug in development and realized that the medical community was unlikely to make progress in time to save his life, Fajgenbaum turned his desperate hope for a cure into concrete action: Between hospitalizations he studied his own charts and tested his own blood samples, looking for clues that could unlock a new treatment. With the help of family, friends, and mentors, he also reached out to other Castleman disease patients and physicians, and eventually came up with an ambitious plan to crowdsource the most promising research questions and recruit world-class researchers to tackle them. Instead of waiting for the scientific stars to align, he would attempt to align them himself. More than five years later and now married to his college sweetheart, Fajgenbaum has seen his hard work pay off: A treatment he identified has induced a tentative remission and his novel approach to collaborative scientific inquiry has become a blueprint for advancing rare disease research. His incredible story demonstrates the potency of hope, and what can happen when the forces of determination, love, family, faith, and serendipity collide. Praise for Chasing My Cure “A page-turning chronicle of living, nearly dying, and discovering what it really means to be invincible in hope.”—Angela Duckworth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grit “[A] remarkable memoir . . . Fajgenbaum writes lucidly and movingly . . . Fajgenbaum’s stirring account of his illness will inspire readers.”—Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Communicating COVID 19 written by Monique Lewis and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores communication during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Featuring the work of leading communication scholars from around the world, it offers insights and analyses into how individuals, organisations, communities, and nations have grappled with understanding and responding to the pandemic that has rocked the world. The book examines the role of journalists and news media in constructing meanings about the pandemic, with chapters focusing on public interest journalism, health workers and imagined audiences in COVID-19 news. It considers public health responses in different countries, with chapters examining community-driven approaches, communication strategies of governments and political leaders, public health advocacy, and pandemic inequalities. The role of digital media and technology is also unravelled, including social media sharing of misinformation and memetic humour, crowdsourcing initiatives, the use of data in modelling, tracking and tracing, and strategies for managing uncertainties created in a pandemic.

Download or read book Alone Together written by Garth Stein and published by Central Avenue Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Could there be a timelier gift to quarantined readers...? I doubt it."—The Washington Post "A heartening gathering of writers joining forces for community support."—Kirkus Reviews "Connects writers, readers, and booksellers in a wonderfully imaginative way. It's a really good book for a really good cause"—Bestselling author James Patterson ALONE TOGETHER: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 is a collection of essays, poems, and interviews to serve as a lifeline for negotiating how to connect and thrive during this stressful time of isolation as well as a historical perspective that will remain relevant for years to come. All contributing authors and business partners are donating their share to The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), a nonprofit organization that coordinates charitable programs to strengthen the bookselling community. The roster of diverse voices includes Faith Adiele, Kwame Alexander, Jenna Blum, Andre Dubus III, Jamie Ford, Nikki Giovanni, Pam Houston, Jean Kwok, Major Jackson, Devi S. Laskar, Caroline Leavitt, Ada Limón, Dani Shapiro, David Sheff, Garth Stein, Luis Alberto Urrea, Steve Yarbrough, and Lidia Yuknavitch. The overarching theme is how this age of isolation and uncertainty is changing us as individuals and a society. "Alone Together showcases the human desire to grieve, explore, comfort, connect, and simply sit with the world as it weathers the pandemic. Jennifer Haupt's timely and moving anthology also benefits the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, making it a project that is noble in both word and deed."—Ann Patchett, Bestselling author, bookseller, and Co-Ambassador for The Book Industry Charitable Foundation

Download or read book Digital Humour in the Covid 19 Pandemic written by Shepherd Mpofu and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital humour in the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from the Global South offers a groundbreaking intervention on how digital media were used from below by ordinary citizens to negotiate the global pandemic humorously. This book considers the role played by digital media during the pandemic, and indeed in the socio-political life of the Global South, as indispensable and revolutionary to human communication. In many societies, humour not only signifies laughter and frivolity, but acts as an important echo that accompanies, critiques, questions, disrupts, agitates and comments on societal affairs and the human condition. This book analyses citizens' use of social media and humour to mediate the pandemic in a diverse range of countries, including Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The book will appeal to academics and students of media and communication studies, political studies, rhetoric, and to policy makers. Shepherd Mpofu is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the University of Limpopo, South Africa. He is an African Humanities Programme Fellow. He is co-editor of Mediating Xenophobia in Africa (Palgrave, 2020). He regularly publishes in academic journals on themes such as media and identity, media and protests, gender and race. .

Download or read book Memes in Digital Culture written by Limor Shifman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking “Gangnam Style” seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture. In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

Download or read book Pandemic written by Slavoj Žižek and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-05-20 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an unprecedented global pandemic sweeps the planet, who better than the supercharged Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to uncover its deeper meanings, marvel at its mind-boggling paradoxes and speculate on the profundity of its consequences? We live in a moment when the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection. When governments renowned for ruthless cuts in public spending can suddenly conjure up trillions. When toilet paper becomes a commodity as precious as diamonds. And when, according to Žižek, a new form of communism – the outlines of which can already be seen in the very heartlands of neoliberalism – may be the only way of averting a descent into global barbarism. Written with his customary brio and love of analogies in popular culture (Quentin Tarantino and H. G. Wells sit next to Hegel and Marx), Žižek provides a concise and provocative snapshot of the crisis as it widens, engulfing us all.

Download or read book Pandemic Inc written by J. David McSwane and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This startling, vital book deserves our attention.” —San Francisco Chronicle For fans of War Dogs and Bad Blood, an explosive look inside the rush to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic, from the award-winning ProPublica reporter who saw it firsthand. The United States federal government spent over $10 billion on medical protective wear and emergency supplies, yet as COVID-19 swept the nation, life-saving equipment such as masks, gloves, and ventilators was nearly impossible to find. In this brilliant nonfiction thriller, called “revelatory” by The Washington Post, award-winning investigative reporter J. David McSwane takes us behind the scenes to reveal how traders, contractors, and healthcare companies used one of the darkest moments in American history to fill their pockets. Determined to uncover how this was possible, he spent over a year on private jets and in secret warehouses, traveling from California to Chicago to Washington, DC, to interview both the most treacherous of profiteers and the victims of their crimes. Pandemic, Inc. is the story of the fraudster who signed a multi-million-dollar contract with the government to provide lifesaving PPE, and yet never came up with a single mask. The Navy admiral at the helm of the national hunt for additional medical resources. The Department of Health whistleblower who championed masks early on and was silenced by the government and conservative media. And the politician who callously slashed federal emergency funding and gutted the federal PPE stockpile. Winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, McSwane connects the dots between backdoor deals and the spoils systems to provide the definitive account of how this pandemic was so catastrophically mishandled. Shocking and monumental, Pandemic, Inc. exposes a system that is both deeply rigged, and singularly American.

Download or read book Pandemic Play written by Carolyn Ownbey and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Pragmatics of Internet Humour written by Francisco Yus and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-07 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a first thorough analysis of internet humour from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, covering a wide range of discourses that are pervasive online and focusing especially on messaging interactions, social networking sites and memes. Its chapters describe the inferential strategies implemented to turn online coded discourses into meaningful interpretations, which in turn can be devised and manipulated for the sake of humour. Furthermore, and apart from the typical object of pragmatic research (humorous discourses), the book emphasises the importance of the interfaces’ design and of the qualities of the users engaged in humorous interactions (called contextual constraints), additionally highlighting the parallel significance of the various effects, shaped as feelings and emotions, that stem from humorous communication on the internet. In sum, the book delivers a rich and detailed account of humorous internet discourses through dissecting their affordances as a medium, tracking the users’ intentions, and predicting the audiences’ interpretive strategies, with the goal of helping the reader obtain a better understanding of internet humour and its role in today’s online interactions.

Download or read book The Cage of Days written by Michael G. Flaherty and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time. Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate’s time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime.

Download or read book Viral Discourse written by Rodney H. Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element consists of ten short pieces written by prominent discourse analysts in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each piece focuses on a different aspect of the pandemic, from the debate over wearing face masks to the metaphors used by politicians and journalists in different countries to talk about the virus. Each of the pieces also makes use of a different approach to analysing discourse (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Genre Analysis, Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis) and demonstrates how that approach can be applied to a small set of data. The aim of the Element is to show how the range of tools available to discourse analysts can be brought to bear on a pressing, 'real-world' problem, and how discourse analysis can contribute to formulating 'real-world' solutions to the problem.

Download or read book How to Prevent the Next Pandemic written by Bill Gates and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments, businesses, and individuals around the world are thinking about what happens after the COVID-19 pandemic. Can we hope to not only ward off another COVID-like disaster but also eliminate all respiratory diseases, including the flu? Bill Gates, one of our greatest and most effective thinkers and activists, believes the answer is yes. The author of the #1 New York Times best seller How to Avoid a Climate Disaster lays out clearly and convincingly what the world should have learned from COVID-19 and what all of us can do to ward off another catastrophe like it. Relying on the shared knowledge of the world’s foremost experts and on his own experience of combating fatal diseases through the Gates Foundation, Gates first helps us understand the science of infectious diseases. Then he shows us how the nations of the world, working in conjunction with one another and with the private sector, how we can prevent a new pandemic from killing millions of people and devastating the global economy. Here is a clarion call—strong, comprehensive, and of the gravest importance.

Download or read book Media Social Movements and Protest Cultures in Africa written by Lungile Tshuma and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-08-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Lungile Tshuma, Trust Matsilele, Shepherd Mpofu and Mbongeni Msimanga, Media, Social Movements, and Protest Cultures in Africa: Hashtags, Humor, and Slogans provides a rich array of protest cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, delving into the motivations for protests, how protests are carried out and how those targeted by protests try to undermine the protesting movements. Organized into three parts, this book examines social media and social movements, online protest strategies, and media texts used in various protest movements within Sub-Saharan Africa. The contributors shed light on the brutality of various post-colonial regimes in Africa while also giving the reader hope for the current movements that seek to wrestle their societies from the jaws of autocratic leaders. This book offers a theoretically rich and methodologically diverse engagement of protest cultures in countries like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The wide tapestry of how these protests are formulated and executed speaks to Africa's diversity and dynamism. This book makes an important intellectual contribution on social and political movements and is relevant to policy makers and researchers in the social sciences and digital humanities.