丁韪良与近代中西文化交流

美国传教士丁韪良在中国活动了６０余年,客观上推动了中国近代教育的改革和发展,促进了中西文化的交流和传播。     

The Heritage of 30 Years of Mobile Communications in the UK

The first mobile phone networks were launched in the UK in 1985. In the 30 years that have elapsed since then, the mobile phone has evolved from an expensive device owned by the few to a mass-market smartphone that is now regarded as an essential part of modern-day life. Behind the scenes, the mobile networks have undergone four major technology evolutions that have transformed their functionality from providing a basic telephone service to offering very high-speed connectivity for data applications. Yet, much of the heritage of this relatively young but transformational mobile technology is poorly documented and in great danger of being completely lost. Each new generation of mobile network replaces and ultimately erases the evidence of its predecessor. Equally, manufacturers are so focused on the release of their next handset that this leaves little scope or motivation for preserving and recording older models. The perception remains that the mobile phone is a new and young technology which is still considered by many to be a recent phenomenon. This results in a very casual attitude to the preservation of cellular mobile communications heritage, hence raising the significant risk that no suitable historical records will be available for future generations. This paper therefore begins to address this deficit by examining, through a UK perspective, two key but highly visible parts of the mobile phone story, namely, the cellular radio site installations that adorn roadsides, rooftops and hillsides and the mobile phones themselves as important historical artefacts.     

Media literacy: the UK’s undead cultural policy

This article examines media literacy in the UK: a policy that emerged within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the late 1990s, was adopted by the New Labour administration, and enshrined in the Communications Act 2003. That legislation gave the new media regulator, Ofcom, a duty to ‘promote’ media literacy, although it left the term undefined. The article describes how Ofcom managed this regulatory duty. It argues that over time, media literacy was progressively reduced in scope, focusing on two policy priorities related to the growth of the internet. In the process, media literacy’s broader educative purpose, so clearly articulated in much of the early policy rhetoric, was effectively marginalized. From the Coalition government onwards, the promotion of media literacy was reduced further to a matter of market research. Today, if not altogether dead, the policy is governed by entirely different priorities to those imagined at its birth.     

李流芳生平交游考略

李流芳为明未著名的文人画家,他不仅在绘画上取得了很大的成就,且诗文、书法、印章均擅,是一位具有多方面才能的艺术家。李流芳早年热心干科举,曾六次进京会试,但均铩羽而归。他晚年醉心于山水,和一些志同道合的友人浪迹江湖,创作了不少山水画佳作。由于李本人无画学专著,且诗文书画又散佚较多,故本文试图通过著录文献及其诗友的文集大致梳理出其生平及交游的情况。     

Australian foreign policy and news media: national identity and the sale of uranium to India and China

This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as ‘rising’ superpowers whose prominence offered opportunities for economic prosperity even as it undermined settled regional power balances. This article finds that, rather than a matter of rational strategy, the decision was made in a context of considerable anxiety about the ‘Asian century’ as the Australian public, politicians and policymakers struggled to comprehend geopolitical change. It further argues that the constructivist project in international relations can benefit from engaging with insights from media and communications methodologies and by taking a less hierarchical approach to ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ discursive agency.     

American graffiti: deconstructing gendered communication patterns in bathroom stalls

Bathroom graffiti, in both its text and pictorial form, represent viable means for strangers to communicate with each other. The text or drawings in the bathroom stalls, while written or drawn in a private space and presumably during a very private moment, are meant to be public, as they transmit ideas, images, and even responses. Using data collected in 10 bathroom stalls at a university (five men's bathrooms and five women's bathrooms), this study examines differences in communication patterns in women's and men's bathroom stalls through an analysis of graffiti content and style. Findings reveal that while communication patterns tend to be supportive and relationship-focused in women's bathrooms, the graffiti in men's bathroom walls are replete with sexual content and insults, in the course of the construction of hegemonic masculinity. In addition, an analysis of the response-and-reply chains suggests that, in the bathroom stalls, hierarchies of power are established and reinforced even in anonymous, unmoderated spaces, and even when no humans are physically present.     

Stumbling towards Empire: The Shanghai Local Post Office,the Transnational British Community and Informal Empire in China, 1863–97

In the second half of nineteenth century, a small transnational British and foreign community grew up in the treaty ports scattered along China’s coast, a community literally caught between the great inner Asian empire of the Manchu Qing and British-dominated informal empire in Asia. Although scholars often contend that few major developments occurred in the foreign sector of the treaty port world until the very end of the nineteenth century, this article joins recent revisionist scholarship seeking to better understand the growth of this transnational treaty port community through a study of the Shanghai Municipal Council’s local post office in the context of informal empire prior to the rise of muscular Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century.

As an institutional history of the virtually unknown local post office, this article is a study of the decades-long process by which the foreign settler community of Shanghai slowly built up the administrative capacity, trading networks and communications infrastructure of informal empire and semi-colonial order in the nineteenth-century treaty ports. The history of the local post office is largely unknown not because of its insignificance, but because we have not paid enough attention to the institutions that facilitated the emergence of transnational expatriate and settler communities throughout the world of British informal empire and the global and local influences that shaped them.     

Charles Eliot Norton,E.L. Godkin,and the Liberal Republicans of 1872

The Liberal Republican Party of 1872 combined ‘genteel’ intellectuals such as Charles Eliot Norton and E.L. Godkin with hardened politicos like Horace Greeley. It serves therefore as a window on the political thought of Norton and Godkin at a moment when their ideas were tested by exposure to the real world of practical politics. The two men's revulsion at the nomination of Greeley and the debasing of the reform cause exposed their underlying conservatism during this time.     

Broadcasting and market-driven politics in the UK and Germany: the Peacock Committee in comparative perspective

When, from the 1980s onwards, market-driven politics won widespread recognition in liberal capitalist Western democracies, processes of broadcasting marketization in the UK and Germany were decisively determined by two inquiries: the Committee on the Financing of the BBC, chaired by Alan Peacock, and the Commission for the Development of the Technical Communications System (KtK), chaired by Eberhard Witte. This article compares how both inquiries, driven by their chairmen, affected domestic communications policy-making. The research is situated within a critical political economy framework and it is argued that critiques from scholars within cultural policy depicting Alan Peacock and the inquiry he chaired as driven by a narrowly economistic understanding of broadcasting are partly unjustified. As the comparison with the radical restructuring pursued by Eberhard Witte brings to the fore, Peacock, in fact followed a moderate reform agenda of gradual change, aiming to preserve some core cultural elements within public service broadcasting.