نشریه رسانه و فرهنگ
سال سوم شماره 2 (پیاپی 6، پاییر و زمستان 1392)

With the development of media, the world entered a new phase in which media not only continued its increasing growth in terms of both technology and variety, but as a whole it turned into one of the central components of human societies. Over the past two decades, many thinkers in the field of communication have focused on media literacy as a key element whose public promotion can prevent many negative effects of media, increase the range of audience access to media, and turn the audience themselves into producers of communicative messages. Defined as a science whose aim is to regulate the relationship between the audience and media based on internalized norms, media literacy is a crucial factor to be considered when formulating a country’s media policy. Several models have been proposed for formulating media policies, among which the model developed by the European Commission is among the most comprehensive ones. The model is comprised of four components of media literacy, including access, use, critical understanding and communicative production. The present study employed the EC model in a documentary and analytical research methodology to examine components of media literacy in three important cultural and educational organizations in Iran: the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Ministry of Education, and the Artistic-Cultural Organization of Tehran Municipality. Results from the analysis of documents from the Ministry of Education revealed that the main focus was on use and on critical understanding, and that no policy was formulated for promoting communicative production. In the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, policy documents only addressed digital media and there were no policies developed for other type of media, including print and electronic media.

Honor killing is a social reality which has existed since ancient times. Such murders are committed by a person who believes that the victim has brought shame to the family by actions which bear social stigma, including improper love affairs, betraying one’s spouse, adultery, running away from home, losing virginity, and so forth. Many factors are involved in occurrence of honor killings, including customs, patriarchal cultures, the society’s penal and other laws, and mass media. With their widespread availability, attraction and variety, mass media have many positive and negative impacts on occurrence of honor killings. The many aspects of this impact need to be taken into account in establishing a sound, consistent and well-thought criminal policy which will prevent occurrence of honor killings by all means. Public media can encourage honor killings by making programs which approve and preserve certain customs. In fact, the role of media in promoting culture of honor killing is so central that if any action is to be taken to prevent such murders it, in the same manner, needs to be supported by media.

Societies consist of three sub-systems: political, cultural and economic. If the society was a human being, politics would be the human free will, culture his power of thought, and economy his body and organs. This analogy can be explained as follows: The human will pursues its intentions through thinking, and thinking employs material means to put its initiatives in action. Thinking therefore plays the important role of acting as a medium between the will and the action. Culture plays a similar role in the society: Politics operates through culture, and culture uses material and economic means to operate. In other words, culture operates as a medium operating between social will and social action. In today’s world, two major cultural systems confront each other: the religious and the secular cultural systems. Exploring the dimensions of this confrontation would involve a study of the concept of culture in general and a comparative study of the Islamic and the secular cultures. Acquiring an understanding of the concept of culture and its nature is an essential step before any thinking, judgment and planning can be done. This paper first studies culture in general and its nature and then adopts a comparative approach to studying areas of rivalry between the two cultural systems. To this end, the study employs new epistemological and ontological approaches and suggests a model based on teachings of the Qur’an which state that humans have three means for understanding: the sense, the thought and the heart, and that in order for anything belonging to the reality to be understood all the three means need to get involved. On this basis, the paper suggests that culture, as a fact belonging to the reality, is consisted of three layers, or aspects: sense, thought (or reason), and heart. Accordingly, a three dimensional matrix (consisting of a political, a cultural and an economic cultural dimension) was designed in order for the authors to determine the factors shaping culture. We then searched for instances of each of the 36 cells in both the Islamic and the secular cultural systems. Findings of the study can be a used by scholars in the field as a basis for cultural planning.

Human social relationship requires adhering to principles of ethics, and the wider the range of communication would be the stronger the need for adhering to virtuous ethics becomes. A number of thinkers in the field of ethics hold that variety and diversity of cultures in today’s world have made it impossible for us to determine any shared ethical principles for humans. However, the author of the present paper believes that there are five fundamental ethical principles, all stemming from the common nature of humans, which can be suggested as the common fundamental ethical principles in global media. These principles, which are not at all at odds with varieties and diversities in ethical cultures of different communities, include: human glory, freedom of speech, equality and non-discrimination, social consensus, and social welfare.

This paper studies and compares elements of social networks, including structure, interaction, user anonymity and self-representation, in the following social networks: a) Yahoo chat rooms, b) Yahoo Groups, c) OkCupid (online dating network), and (d) Facebook. The paper addresses the question as to the relationship between structural elements and user actions in the four networks. It proposes a model build on Thomas theory and on Lindlof and Taylor’s qualitative approach to communication in order to provide a better understanding into user actions in the virtual world. The paper also redefines notions of voluntary groups, circles and aggregates, and dyads. Results suggest that user self-representation is influenced by structural elements of the network, anonymity and norms of the virtual world.

Postmodernism is a result of the convergence between the philosophical turn in approaches to the nature of aesthetics and the increasing flow of media in today’s world. It can be suggested that media is both a cause and an effect of postmodernism. On the other hand, media depict, both directly and indirectly, association and transformation of phenomena. As such, media is a powerful critical tool which can scrutiny everything (even itself) with critical eyes. Media is able to create surreal and imaginary visual settings, an ability which enables it to fulfil aesthetic needs of the postmodern philosophy for creating illusions of reality and producing meta-realities. The present paper aimed to study how cinema, as a visual medium, is used to depict failures of postmodernism in the area of urbanism. Several two-dimensional matrixes were therefore designed, whose dimensions included critical formal aspects of the postmodern city and formal elements of cinema. The final matrix presents a visual conception of postmodern urban themes and systematically illustrates different critical aspects of the postmodern city as depicted in cinema. The paper also suggests that imagination and business, as two aspects of postmodern urbanism, have been depicted more than other aspects and that function, similarity and repetition, and difference and variation were used more than other formal elements.