Making Sense of Violence: Perceived Meaningfulness as a Predictor of Audience Interest in Violent Media Content

Research on audience interest in violent media content is extended to include individuals' appreciation of certain types of violent portrayals as a meaningful and valuable reflection of reality. A sample of 482 German and U.S. adults aged 18–82 watched movie trailers that varied in pretest ratings of gore and meaningfulness, but were equivalent in suspense. As hypothesized, perceived levels of gore and meaningfulness interacted to predict individuals' reported likelihood of watching the full movie, such that a negative influence of gore on viewing likelihood was compensated at high levels of meaningfulness. These findings suggest that, in addition to other motivations such as suspense, some types of violent and even gory content might be sought as an opportunity for meaning‐making.     

A New Look at Agenda‐Setting Effects—Comparing the Predictive Power of Overall Political News Consumption and Specific News Media Consumption Across Different Media Channels and Media Types

The purpose of this study was to compare the predictive power of overall political news consumption and media‐specific news consumption, on perceived issue salience across different media channels and media types in the context of the 2006 Swedish parliamentary election. Findings suggest that overall consumption of political news is significantly more important than consumption of specific media outlets in predicting changes in issue salience. Although the study demonstrates that the Swedish news media collectively can exert considerable agenda‐setting influence over their audiences, it could, however, not find any consistent evidence of differences related to media channels or media types. The reasons for and implications of the results are discussed.     

影视剧显示的大数据技术

大数据无疑是2013年IT业内最热的词.厂商热推,媒体热炒,仿佛不谈大数据,不推大数据,不用大数据,就没有了未来.当IT业界正在爆炒大数据的时候,影视圈的导演和主角们自然也不甘寂寞,他们雄赳赳、气昂昂地投身到这场轰轰烈烈的造星运动之中.本文对英剧《黑镜》、电影《点球成金》和美剧《疑犯追踪》中的大数据元素进行了分析,体现了大数据的无穷魅力,展望了大数据广泛的应用前景.     

基于匹配滤波的有意义图像水印算法

图像隐形水印是解决数字媒体版权保护的有效手段.目前的大多数水印算法采用伪随机序列构成水印,因而只能给出"Yes"(有水印)或"No"(无水印)的回答.嵌入有意义的水印在一些应用场合更加重要,但同时也带来了更多的困难.嵌入有意义的水印必须解决二个问题:(1)嵌入的水印具有一定的数据量;(2)从有失真的水印图像中正确地提取嵌入的水印.本文应用数字通信的理论和方法,提出了一个嵌入有意义字符串的DCT域隐形水印算法.该算法采用BCH编码和匹配滤波来降低误码率.应用所提出的算法,把一个32个字符组成的水印嵌入到256×256的图像中并达到了较好的稳健性.在水印图像信噪比受Gaussian加性噪声干扰下降到26dB时,仍实现了对嵌入水印零错误概率的检测.     

A Clearer Picture: The Contribution of Visuals and Text to Framing Effects

Visuals in news media help define, or frame issues, but less is known about how they influence opinions and behavior. The authors use an experiment to present image and text exemplars of frames from war and conflict news in isolation and in image–text congruent and incongruent pairs. Results show that, when presented alone, images generate stronger framing effects on opinions and behavioral intentions than text. When images and text are presented together, as in a typical news report, the frame carried by the text influences opinions regardless of the accompanying image, whereas the frame carried by the image drives behavioral intentions irrespective of the linked text. These effects are explained by the salience enhancing and emotional consequences of visuals.     

Learning landmark salience models from users’ route instructions

Route instructions for pedestrians are usually better understood if they include references to landmarks, and moreover, these landmarks should be as salient as possible. In this paper, we present an approach for automatically deriving a mathematical model of salience directly from route instructions given by humans. Each possible landmark that a person can refer to in a given situation is modelled as a feature vector, and the salience associated with each landmark can be computed as a weighted sum of these features. We use a ranking SVM method to derive the weights from route instructions given by humans as they are walking the route. The weight vector, representing the person’s personal salience model, determines which landmark(s) are most appropriate to refer to in new situations.     

Explicating Media Salience: A Factor Analysis of New York Times Issue Coverage During the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Media salience—the key independent variable in agenda-setting research—has traditionally been explicated as a singular construct. Nevertheless, scholars have defined and measured it using a number of different conceptualizations and empirical indicators. To address this limitation in research, this study introduced a conceptual model of media salience, suggesting it is a multidimensional construct consisting of 3 core elements: attention, prominence, and valence. Furthermore, the model was tested through an exploratory factor analysis of The New York Times news coverage of 8 major political issues during the 2000 presidential election as a case study. The data revealed that 2 dimensions of media salience emerge: visibility and valence. Based on the factor analysis, 2 indices are created to measure the construct, which are intended for use in future investigations.     

Does Media Violence Predict Societal Violence? It Depends on What You Look at and When

This article presents 2 studies of the association of media violence rates with societal violence rates. In the first study, movie violence and homicide rates are examined across the 20th century and into the 21st (1920–2005). Throughout the mid‐20th century small‐to‐moderate correlational relationships can be observed between movie violence and homicide rates in the United States. This trend reversed in the early and latter 20th century, with movie violence rates inversely related to homicide rates. In the second study, videogame violence consumption is examined against youth violence rates in the previous 2 decades. Videogame consumption is associated with a decline in youth violence rates. Results suggest that societal consumption of media violence is not predictive of increased societal violence rates.     

Does Movie or Video Game Violence Predict Societal Violence? It Depends on What You Look at and When

This article presents 2 studies of the association of media violence rates with societal violence rates. In the first study, movie violence and homicide rates are examined across the 20th century and into the 21st (1920–2005). Throughout the mid‐20th century small‐to‐moderate correlational relationships can be observed between movie violence and homicide rates in the United States. This trend reversed in the early and latter 20th century, with movie violence rates inversely related to homicide rates. In the second study, videogame violence consumption is examined against youth violence rates in the previous 2 decades. Videogame consumption is associated with a decline in youth violence rates. Results suggest that societal consumption of media violence is not predictive of increased societal violence rates.     

The Effectiveness of Brand Placements in the Movies: Levels of Placements, Explicit and Implicit Memory, and Brand-Choice Behavior

Product placements within a movie are often treated as a binary variable: either they are present or absent. However, placements can occur at many different levels ranging from a simple background prop to the product being an instrumental part of the story. The influence of 3 different levels of brand placements on explicit and implicit memory for the brand, implicit choice behavior, and attitudes toward the brand were examined. The results confirmed that levels of brand placements influence recognition of the target brand and attitudes toward the brand. On the other hand, simple placement of the brand within the movie influenced implicit memory and the implicit choice task. The implications of the current study's findings were discussed.     

When attention-grabbing tactics backfire during media multitasking: The detrimental effect of atypical advertising slogans on brand attitude

Emerging technologies have transformed traditional single-screen viewing into a new form of audience behavior called media multitasking (e.g. surfing the internet while watching TV). This shared attention in media-multitasking situations poses a challenge to media planers when attracting the audience’s attention. However, attention-grabbing tactics might backfire on companies as they make manipulative intent salient and, therefore, decrease levels of brand attitude. This study advances the extant research by challenging the suitability of silence as an attention-grabbing practice in advertising during media multitasking. More specifically, we test if atypical (i.e. silent) slogans in TV commercials impact on consumers’ evaluation of brand-related information when media multitasking. Utilizing a one-factor (two-level) between-subject laboratory experiment (N = 66), this study examined participants’ feelings of manipulation and brand attitude when exposed to typical versus atypical TV advertising slogans in a media-multitasking situation. The results demonstrate that a typical TV advertising slogan (i.e. audio in addition to vision) during media multitasking results in lower salience of manipulative intent compared to an atypical slogan (i.e. silent) and positively impacts on brand attitude.     

Development of a security training system based on interactive multimedia

This paper presents the development of the main modules of a highly interactive system for security training, The system allows the security professionals to feel as if they were in a real danger situation, very close to the one they may find in their work activities. Such situations create conditions for a better training and skills achievement. In order to produce the interactivity, the system exhibits a 2D movie, in real size (1:1), showing scenes and scenarios close to the reality of the professional under training. During the movie an unexpected situation of danger emerges and the user has to make quick decisions to circumvent the problem. Depending on the reactions of the user, the automated system chooses the best sequence for the movie. Afterwards, the reactions and decision taken by the users will be evaluated by computer software to determine his/her performance.     

More Than Stories With Buttons: Narrative,Mechanics, and Context as Determinants of Player Experience in Digital Games

Recent research has attempted to describe meaningful experiences with entertainment media that go beyond hedonic enjoyment. Most of this research focuses on noninteractive media, such as film and television. When applied to digital games, however, such research needs to account for not only the content of the medium, but also the unique dimensions of digital games that distinguish them from noninteractive media. Experiences with digital games are shaped by the game mechanics that define the users' interaction with game content, as well as by the opportunities for social interaction that many games offer. We argue that the complex interplay of these dimensions (narrative, mechanics, and context) facilitates or inhibits meaningful user experiences in ways that are unique to digital games.     

The Genesis of Civic Awareness: Agenda Setting in Political Socialization

Agenda-setting theory, a conceptual framework used to trace how issue salience is established among policy makers, media, and the public, has yet to be applied to political socialization. This study extends agenda-setting theory by conceptualizing it as a process of political development. In an analysis of adolescent involvement during the 2002 U.S. elections, data are reported from a quasi-experimental field study of the effects of the Kids Voting USA campaign intervention on students in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. A model of agenda setting among adolescents is built by investigating the influence of school intervention exposure, news attention, discussion, and information integration on salience, opinion strength, and finally strengthened political predispositions (partisanship and ideology). Findings suggest that agenda setting provides a valuable perspective for understanding how adolescents come to decide what issues are important to them.     

Dominant sets based movie scene detection

Multimedia indexing and retrieval has become a challenging topic in organizing huge amount of multimedia data. This problem is not a trivial task for large visual databases; hence, segmentation into low- and high-level temporal video segments might improve the realization of this task. In this paper, we introduce a weighted undirected graph-based movie scene detection approach to detect semantically meaningful temporal video segments. The method is based on the idea of finding the dominant scene of the video according to the selected low-level feature. The proposed method starts from obtaining the most reliable solution first and exploit each solution in the subsequent steps recursively. The dominant movie scene boundary, which can be the highest probability to be the correct one, is determined and this scene boundary information is also exploited in the subsequent steps. We handle two partitioning strategies to determine the boundaries of the remaining scenes. One is a tree-based strategy and the other is an order-based strategy. The proposed dominant sets based movie scene detection method is compared with the graph-based video scene detection methods presented in literature.     

Scalable On-Demand Streaming of Nonlinear Media

A conventional video file contains a single temporally-ordered sequence of video frames. Clients requesting on-demand streaming of such a file receive (all or intervals of) the same content. For popular files that receive many requests during a file playback time, scalable streaming protocols based on multicast or broadcast have been devised. Such protocols require server and network bandwidth that grow much slower than linearly with the file request rate. This paper considers ldquononlinearrdquo video content in which there are parallel sequences of frames. Clients dynamically select which branch of the video they wish to follow, sufficiently ahead of each branch point so as to allow the video to be delivered without jitter. An example might be ldquochoose-your-own-endingrdquo movies. With traditional scalable delivery architectures such as movie theaters or TV broadcasting, such personalization of the delivered video content is very difficult or impossible. It becomes feasible, in principle at least, when the video is streamed to individual clients over a network. For on-demand streaming of nonlinear media, this paper analyzes the minimal server bandwidth requirements, and proposes and evaluates practical scalable delivery protocols.     

基于现代信息技术的我国电影音乐研究

现代信息技术的发展与进步催促着各行业向信息化与自动化转型,电影作为一种重要的传播媒介,它是西方现代科学技术发明的产物,电影音乐作为电影的重要组成部分,在现代电影发展将其音乐制作融入更多的信息技术因素,是我国电影产业发展的重要趋势。因此,本文通过对传统技术条件下的我国电影音乐制作及其局限性的分析,提出我国电影音乐未来发展的数字化趋势。     

The largest players rule the media playground

The top media companies increasingly do a lot more than create content. The 12 companies outlined in this article deliver content via cable systems and the Internet. They also have investments in makers of personal video recorders (PVRs) and set-top boxes and suppliers of video on demand. Consider the former Moxi Digital, builder of a personal entertainment hub that can play DVDs and CDs and can function as a PVR and a set-top box. Moxi's investors, before Vulcan purchased it, included AOL Time Warner, Vulcan, and Scientific-Atlanta. Vulcan also owns Digeo, another hub maker, with which Moxi was merged. Eight of the companies listed-AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, GE, Liberty Media, Sony, Viacom, and Vulcan-were investors in ReplayTV before it was bought by SonicBlue. TiVo, an up-and-coming PVR maker, has attracted hefty investments from almost all major media companies. The most-connected company is AOL Time Warner. Under its umbrella one of its several movie or TV studios can create a film that gets shown on its HBO channel via the Time Warner cable system. Only US business interests are shown here. Many have overseas media holdings, notably France's Vivendi Universal, Japan's Sony, and News Corp. in Australia     

French Abstract

To what extent do frame‐building and frame‐setting processes manifest themselves in the interplay between online public discourse and traditional (offline) media discourse? Employing a content analysis of 206 online posts and 114 news reports regarding a sociopolitical incident in China, we test the associations and causal relationships between the salience of opinion frames and media frames. Online public opinion plays an important role in transforming the original local event into a nationally prominent issue. It also exerts a significant frame‐building impact on subsequent media reports but only in the early stage of coverage. However, the media are not passive in this two‐way process and adapt online frames as necessary. Although media coverage is the primary source of information for netizens, it does not set frames for online discourse. Noticeably, significant associations between concurrent opinion frames and media frames lend strong support to frame‐interacting effects. Discussion focuses on governmental influences in the frame‐building process and the potential of netizen autonomy to attenuate frame‐setting effects.