Research
Impact of Social Media Visuals on People’s Visual Communication during Social Movements in Bangladesh
The past decade has seen an armorial growth of the influence of social media on many aspects of people’s lives. Social networking sites, especially Facebook, play a substantial role in framing popular view through its contents. This article explores the impact of visuals, especially photos and videos, published in social media during social movements. Importantly that some visuals received attention in social media during agitations which later got featured or become news in print, electronic and online news portal media as well. Some of the visuals later proved to be edited or fabricated contents which created confusion among participants in this research and beyond. The confusion has contributed to the acceleration or shrinkage of the movement in question in many cases. The center of this article is to examine how social media visuals influence people’s visual communication during social movements. Additionally, it digs out the user’s activity on social media during movements.
The Commodification of Domesticity and Scopophiliac Consumerism through YouTube Vlogs
The world is now experiencing a boom time of global capitalism that entirely is rooted in large-scale investments worldwide. The word, capital, however, is no more confined to the material or monetary category; instead, it has started analyzing cultural as well as social realities to find out new forms of profit-making investment sources. Interestingly, capitalism is nowadays devoted to dig out human interests and to present commodities according to those desires. To understand this matter more clearly, here few contents from YouTube are going to be analyzed to show how social scopophilia (a pleasure principle) has been targeted as a space for investment. These contents are uploads of some women who share their daily life with the world around on which this study has launched a thorough qualitative analysis. In order to find an answer to the question why the selected YouTubers have made their everyday life public and, on the other hand, why viewers get interested in others’ life, this study has mainly focused on commodity culture of contemporary world that, resultantly, has brought into view how everything irrespective of their materiality and immateriality gets commodified. To conclude, the most determining factor behind the commodification of everyday domestic life has been a sort of scopophiliac consumerism that this particular study has earnestly attempted to establish.
Corporate Culture in Journalism: Bangladesh Perspective
Thanks to globalization, mass media, especially news media is controlled by the largest multinational companies of the world. The multinational form of the media has started influencing every sector of life of the people in the world because the media as a social institution is working as an intermediary in the practices of socio-economic and politico-cultural norms; it is building both the individual and universal identity; and is designing the road map for our daily life. However, like other corporate organization, the media is also running behind the profits. News like other profitable goods is becoming the way to profits of the multinational companies. Though the newspaper is considered the 'mirror of the society', 'fourth pillar of the country', 'the consciousness of the nation', etc., it is criticized by the scholars. The multinational companies have been using media as a way to profit instead of the way for social change. In this study the evolution and nature of the media under the corporate organization in Bangladesh has been discussed and analyzed critically. The objective of the research is to investigate how the capitalism known as the basic structure of the media (media economy) is influencing the superstructure of the media (contents: news and advertisement). Through content analysis of four national dailies and in-depth interview of media experts, the article illustrates how the corporate organization is influencing the news. The present study also depicts investigates the corporate news organization and the ownership of the media in Bangladesh with mentioning the history of the corporate media organization in the Western countries. In this perspective, the contemporary practices of the journalism and its nature in Bangladesh are also elaborated here.
