Dr. Verma has joined the University College of Bahrain as Vice President for Academic Affairs. The university is a non-profit, English-language institution in the Kingdom of Bahrain, modeled after U.S. and Canadian higher education in the liberal arts tradition. The university's leading programs are in business administration, information technology, and communications and multimedia.
An accomplished scholar himself in mass communication, Dr. Verma has been a friend and stellar colleague of mine for many years. His enthusiasm and determination to collaborate across borders is almost singularly responsible for sparking my enduring interest in communication law and policy on the Indian subcontinent and in the Middle East. I've been privileged firsthand to witness Manish's intense devotion to his students, and they respond with adoration in kind. I expect that that teacher's spirit will animate his service in administration, where such spirit is so often sorely needed.
Closer to home, for me, attorney Kristine Goodwin has been named Vice President of Student Affairs at Western New England University. Located in Springfield, Massachusetts, Western New England is a vital provider of access to higher education in its region. In addition to the WNE School of Law, led by the talented Dean Sudha N. Setty, the university boasts colleges in arts and sciences, business, engineering, and pharmacy and health sciences.
Attorney Goodwin has more than three decades' experience in higher education. That career was already well underway when she went to law school, so I cannot quite claim that my Torts I and II classes made all the difference. It was rather my privilege to have around her magna cum laude appetite for learning. She was a university administrator in my home state of Rhode Island while she went to law school. She generously provided me with guidance and resources when I served on a university committee formulating personnel policy.
I hope leaders at University College of Bahrain and Western New England University, and students in Bahrain and Massachusetts, know how lucky they are.
Citizen and participatory journalism through digital Media
Digital media economy
Digital media and political communication
Future of journalism in the digital age
Social media as source of news
Digital media laws and censorship
Digital media literacy
Journalistic ethics in digital media
Data journalism
Mobile and multimedia journalism
Artificial intelligence in journalism
Author guidelines and the official CFP are at the journal website. Manuscripts, preferred length of 3,000 to 5,000 words, are sought no later than April 30, 2021, and will be peer reviewed.
The information flow in digital societies has been discussed and analysed for more than a decade with close watch on social media networks. The shift from traditional forms of communication to social media enables users to gratify their daily needs of information digitally. The current paper builds on narrative analysis of selected social media active users and their digital social engagement to understand how a user and a network of users engage with information. To understand the role of social media literacy, the current paper interviews the users and correlates the findings with contemporary literature on social media. The results show that social media literacy becomes a pillar of information system, but it works in micro-level of societies at crossroads of online and offline spaces.
The authors survey digital media users to analyze the efficacy of efforts by social media platforms to enhance digital literacy to combat misinformation. The paper concludes that the efforts are less than efficacious because they derive from a holistic vision of society and politics rather than an understanding of the literacy deficiencies of individual users.
They gave me the latitude to talk about my nascent theoretical framework for analyzing legal responses to the problem of media misinformation / disinformation —colloquially if ambiguously termed "fake news," or unambiguously, as I prefer, in Spanish, desinformaciĆ³n. My rubric ranges from non-responses, what I call "the Wild West" approach, to authoritarian responses.
The best of the conference of course came from what I was able to learn from my colleagues of such far-ranging experiences, backgrounds, and focuses of study. I'll comment on some photographic highlights here, though this testimony will not express how deeply this program enriched my experience in comparativism.
Top paper honors went to Abdulla Saad of Amity Dubai. I was fortunate to serve as a judge on his panel, and his presentation was a favorite of mine. A mass communication scholar and proclaimed leading world expert on karak chai, Abdulla is researching online humor in the face of the gravest of circumstances, such as oppression and war.
Interdisciplinary presenters brought perspective to problems in mass communication. Social media researchers Fathima Linsha Basheer and Sudha Bhattia are considering the implications of this factoid: ten minutes' tweeting yields 13% oxytocin increase in brain. Oxytocin is also known as "the love hormone."
"Dr. G.," Dr. Geentanjali Chandra, is the head of the law school at Amity Dubai. Amity Dubai is the only school outside of India accredited to allow its graduates to sit for the bar in India.
Dr. G. kindly invited me to talk to a law class. Students studying at Amity Dubai are surprisingly diverse. The UAE creates a curious dynamic: Indian migrants--already an intrinsically diverse population--make up some quarter of the population of the Emirates and have established multi-generational households. Yet they remain Indian citizens. As a result, the young generation has a unique global identity.
Amity Dubai studded the scholarly program with creative contributions from the range of student talents fostered at the university, including fashion, dance, and film. Film students spent just one week creating a short-film horror project titled, "Out of Order." I'm getting in the ground floor as a fan of up-and-coming director Ruslan Baiazov.
The right to information (RTI) has come to recognition as a human right in international law. Conventionally, RTI is a means for a person to demand information from a public body. RTI has proven especially potent in the hands of journalists, who seek information on behalf of the electorate to hold public institutions accountable. But in the recent decades in which RTI has attained human rights stature, power in society has shifted in substantial measure from public to private sector. Journalistic inquiry is frustrated by the inapplicability of access laws to private bodies. In India, direct access to the private sector through RTI law was considered and rejected in the 1990s; however, the 2005 RTI Act allows a generous measure of access to non-governmental actors with public ties. A legal movement has been gaining steam in Africa to push past the public-private divide and recognise the importance of RTI to protect human rights regardless of the public or private character of the respondent. Different approaches are emerging with respect to journalist access in the African model. Amid trending privatisation and burgeoning private power, the time might be coming for India to reconsider the road not taken.
The Research Journal Social Sciences is a peer-reviewed publication of Panjab University in union-administered Chandigarh, India. Panjab is a public university on 550 acres, enrolling 17,000 students in 78 departments and 15 centers for teaching and research, including a law school. More than 250,000 more students are enrolled in 198 constituent and affiliated colleges and centers throughout the region. Founded in 1882, Panjab was split in the 1947 partition of India from the University of Punjab, now in Pakistan.
Dr. Verma
This issue of the journal is dedicated to development and mass communication. I was fortunate to be invited to contribute by the special editor of the issue, Dr. Manish Verma (LinkedIn), who serves as director of international affairs and director of the School of Media at Amity University Jaipur in Rajasthan. Dr. Verma is a Ph.D. graduate of Panjab University and an alumnus of the Executive Program in Management and Leadership in Education at Harvard University. He's also a top-shelf colleague.
