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Social media networks make their services freely available to all users. Users pay for the service received with the time and attention taken by the advertisements. This chapter argues that social media platforms are a unique form of monopoly driven by “the more the merrier” effect (i.e., network effects) in users' consumption. These monopolies exercise market power, not by charging higher prices to users but by “tying” larger amounts of advertising to their content. Traditional antitrust instruments designed to address excessive pricing and reduced output by monopolies need to be reframed to tame the attention economy problems in the social media industry. This chapter discusses five antitrust instruments grouped in three categories: structural, behavioral, and market-based remedies. Market-based solutions are the least explored in the literature, despite being the most promising instruments to lower the attention costs imposed on users, while preserving the economies of scope in production and the network effects in consumption, and possibly maintaining free access to social media, as we know it today.

In Chapter 3, the author will problematise the youth smoking epidemic within SEA, in order to justify why the regional impacts of the tobacco trade on youths are worrisome. The author will present the major youth smoking trends in SEA, for the purpose of illustrating how the presence of tobacco products has adversely affected regional youths to a concerning degree. The author, next, will highlight the causes of the youth smoking epidemic, namely susceptibility and positive advertising. The author follows by emphasising the national and regional costs of youth smoking, by arguing how such a lifestyle results in negative consequences in relation to the delinquency itself. Lastly, the author will recommend policies for tobacco control that SEA governments should consider to contain the epidemic of youth smoking. It is noteworthy that all SEA governments have some degree of tobacco control policies in place. However, many lack the implementation of comprehensive national tobacco control strategic plans and tightened law enforcement endeavours to specifically target the problem of youth smoking. Therefore, the outputs of this chapter should contain scholarly values that are conducive to the betterment of policy-making.

This chapter examines representations of gender in online modafinil markets. While gender has often been absent from scholarship on online drug markets, our analysis demonstrates the ubiquity of gender in representations of modafinil users and sellers. The analysis draws on visual images, blogs, and marketing emails relating to three websites selling modafinil, discussed pseudonymously. We describe the range of ways that notions of gender are represented in advertising. Although women represent around 40% of that buying modafinil online, websites and communications tended not to feature women. Although sexist stereotypes of women were rarely present (in contrast to direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising), the ways that modafinil was imagined tended to focus narrowly on corporate spheres of work and productivity. We contrast this narrow imaginary with female journalists’ own accounts of using modafinil to manage illness and enhance creativity. Thus, we conclude that the ways that modafinil has been imagined reflects working assumptions as to who is considered the ‘normal’ participant in online modafinil markets.

This chapter presents theoretical and empirical studies that investigate the influence of digital culture on the educational process of university students where mobile devices and the internet have become increasingly present as resources in everyday school life. The researchers investigate how such devices and the internet interact with university environments in ways that change the more traditional academic practices, such as reading, writing, and studying. Moreover, in the context of what has been widely labeled as humanities studies, interest has grown in understanding how “culture” may be studied via varied strands of interpretative lines of inquiry, each configured by different methods and ways of reflection. At master education levels, digital technology becomes even more present as a means of academic activity and, as a result, amplifies the impacts of digital culture on contemporary university culture. The purpose of this work is to study the concept of culture, digital culture, and scholarly culture, and, on a second approach, to review aspects of the development of communication methods and their impacts on university educational environments. As a methodological theoretical procedure, this research builds on authors who have raised practical and scholarly cultural questions, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Pierre Levy, Raymond Williams, Roger Chartier, Anne Marie Chartier, and Bernard Lahire, among others. This study engages in empirical research with students in an Advertising and Marketing course in a private higher educational institution in the city of Araraquara, which is located in the “interior” of the state of São Paulo in Brazil.

In our studies of daily newspapers and news websites in small and medium-sized cities in Brazil, we view these enterprises as firms endowed with specific strengths and weaknesses reflecting the characteristics of the localities in which they operate. In addition, we use references from urban geography and the industrial economy to investigate their structure, conduct, and performance. This chapter presents our observations about the structure of these firms and the journalistic business in non-metropolitan cities of the State of Rio de Janeiro. The results point to greater consolidation of newspapers, despite their traditional way of operating; the low performance of news websites and their restricted source of revenue; and the existence of a potential regional market little explored by these media.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

A decade ago, the AIDS pandemic was driven by determinants such as poverty, deprivation, migrancy, patriarchy and gender-based violence. Today, however, the socio-economic and structural drivers of HIV infections have assumed or added other dimensions, including social and electronic media and reality television. These new dimensions saw further expression with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 onwards. To consign both HIV and the COVID-19 pandemics to history’s museum of pandemics, strategists must employ greater infiltration and mastery of social and electronic media and reality TV. In the case of HIV, these created social clouds or bubbles where unprotected sex, transactional sex and multiple concurrent sexual partnerships are manufactured and proliferated globally. The same was the case with the COVID-19 pandemic, in which case these social clouds or bubbles created an alternative narrative about the source of the pandemic, who and how people get infected, and both the requisite remedies and preventions in this regard. With reality television gaining popularity on low-cost paid channels and free-to-air television; with smartphone penetration widening and costs of access to data falling, a social cloud has been created, enabling the cultural majority (those who control the media and capital) to set trends for everyone, including those with less means. These trends in turn become a standard many aspire to live by. The ontological density of the poor and lower middle-class women is lost through the universalisation of social and cultural trends set by middle elites who control the production and reproduction of knowledge and shape international and national imagination. It is these discourses, and their shaping of imagination as a consequence, that this chapter deals with. It looks at both the implications and consequences which, in the case of pandemics such as these, can be dire.

Exposing the hidden lives of female public relations (PR) practitioners requires deep connection with those lives. Stories need to be uncovered, interrogated, and ultimately told, to shine a light on the lived experiences of those working in PR. The methods used to collect these stories require deep immersion in the field and the ethnographic method is ideal for this. Ethnographic research methods have long been utilised to gain insights into the lived experiences of individuals and communities. This chapter provides an understanding of the strengths and limitations of ethnographic research methods in capturing the nuances of women's experiences of working in PR.

Organisational ethnography is an established field in business studies and has been used to investigate disciplines cognate to PR, including advertising and media, but, to date, has failed to be fully explored in PR research. This chapter examines the potential for ethnography to open new areas of PR theory and considers its potential as a means of bridging the gap between PR theory and practice.

Ethnography is not without its limitations; key concerns surround objectivity, the role of the researcher, and that of the participant, and ethics. Nonetheless, this method would appear to offer huge potential for the study of PR practices; the diverse nature of the sector makes it a rich area to study.

This chapter explores the potential of this method to offer an opportunity to investigate areas such as working practices, ethics in practice, power, gender, diversity, and culture.