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🔗 Internet 🔗 Media 🔗 Cuba

El Paquete Semanal ("The Weekly Package") or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans, as Internet in Cuba has been suppressed for many years with only about a 38.8% Internet penetration rate as of 2018. El Paquete Semanal has its own page that is running in the United States, where one could view its contents and is consistently updated every week.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Politics 🔗 Media 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia

The firehose of falsehood, or firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. Since 2014, when it was successfully used by Russia during its annexation of Crimea, this model has been adopted by other governments and political movements around the world.

🔗 Film 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Film/Filmmaking 🔗 Media 🔗 Toys 🔗 Games

Toyetic is a term referring to the suitability of a media property, such as a cartoon or movie, for merchandising tie-in lines of licensed toys, games and novelties. The term is attributed to Bernard Loomis, a toy development executive for Kenner Toys, in discussing the opportunities for marketing the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, telling its producer Steven Spielberg that the movie wasn't "toyetic" enough, leading Loomis towards acquiring the lucrative license for the upcoming Star Wars properties.

🔗 Television 🔗 Media

TV-B-Gone is a universal remote control device for turning off a large majority—about 85%—of the available brands of television sets in 2015. It was created to allow people in a public place to turn off nearby television sets. Its inventor has referred to it as "an environmental management device". The device is part of a key-chain, and, like other remote devices, is battery-powered. Although it can require up to 72 seconds for the device to find the proper code for a particular television receiver, the most popular televisions turn off in the first few seconds.

🔗 Media 🔗 Journalism

State media are typically understood as media outlets that are owned, operated, or significantly influenced by the government. They are sometimes distinguished from public service media, which are designed to serve the public interest, operate independently of government control, and are financed through a combination of public funding, licensing fees, and sometimes advertising. The crucial difference lies in the level of independence from government influence and the commitment to building trust and serving a broad public interest rather than the interests of a specific political party or government agenda.

State media serve as tools for public diplomacy and narrative shaping. These media outlets can broadcast via television, radio, print, and increasingly on social media, to convey government viewpoints to domestic and international audiences. The approach to using state media can vary, focusing on positive narratives, adjusting narratives retroactively, or spreading misinformation through sophisticated social media campaigns.

Public or state media may be financed through different sources, such as direct government funding, a licence fee paid by television viewers, donations, and commercial advertising.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Media 🔗 Music theory

Napster was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

The P2P model employed by Napster involved a centralized database that indexed a complete list of all songs being shared from connected clients. While effective, the service could not function without the central database, which was hosted by Napster and eventually forced to shutdown. Following Napster's demise, alternative decentralized methods of P2P file-sharing emerged, including Gnutella, Freenet, FastTrack, and BitTorrent.

Napster's assets were eventually acquired by Roxio, and it re-emerged as an online music store commonly known as Napster 2.0. Best Buy later purchased the service and merged it with its Rhapsody streaming service on December 1, 2011. In 2016, the original branding was restored when Rhapsody was renamed Napster.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Politics 🔗 Media 🔗 Journalism

Atrocity propaganda is the spreading of information about the crimes committed by an enemy, which can be factual, but often includes or features deliberate fabrications or exaggerations. This can involve photographs, videos, illustrations, interviews, and other forms of information presentation or reporting.

The inherently violent nature of war means that exaggeration and invention of atrocities often becomes the main staple of propaganda. Patriotism is often not enough to make people hate the enemy, and propaganda is also necessary. "So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations", wrote Harold Lasswell, "that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about who the public is to hate." Human testimony may be unreliable even in ordinary circumstances, but in wartime, it can be further muddled by bias, sentiment, and misguided patriotism.

According to Paul Linebarger, atrocity propaganda leads to real atrocities, as it incites the enemy into committing more atrocities, and, by heating up passions, it increases the chances of one's own side committing atrocities, in revenge for the ones reported in propaganda. Atrocity propaganda might also lead the public to mistrust reports of actual atrocities. In January 1944, Arthur Koestler wrote of his frustration at trying to communicate what he had witnessed in Nazi-occupied Europe: the legacy of anti-German stories during World War I, many of which were debunked in the postwar years, meant that these reports were received with considerable amounts of skepticism.

Like propaganda, atrocity rumors detailing exaggerated or invented crimes perpetrated by enemies are also circulated to vilify the opposing side. The application of atrocity propaganda is not limited to times of conflict but can be implemented to sway public opinion and create a Casus belli to declare war.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Media

The spiral of silence theory is a political science and mass communication theory proposed by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. It states that an individual's perception of the distribution of public opinion influences that individual's willingness to express their own opinions, which in turn affects the perceptions and, ultimately, willingness of others to express their opinions. The main idea is that people influence each other's willingness to express opinions through social interaction. According to the spiral of silence theory, individuals will be more confident and outward with their opinion when they notice that their personal opinion is shared throughout a group. But if the individual notices that their opinion is unpopular with the group they will be more inclined to be reserved and remain silent. In other words, from the individual's perspective, "not isolating himself is more important than his own judgement", meaning his perception of how others in the group perceive him is more important to himself than the need for his opinion to be heard.

According to Glynn (1995), "the major components of the spiral of silence include (1) an issue of public interest; (2) divisiveness on the issue; (3) a quasi-statistical sense that helps an individual perceive the climate of opinion as well as estimate the majority and minority opinion; (4) 'fear of isolation' from social interaction "(though, whether this is a causal factor in the willingness to speak out is contested)"; (5) an individual's belief that a minority (or 'different') opinion isolates oneself from others; and (6) a 'hardcore' group of people whose opinions are unaffected by others' opinions."

🔗 United States 🔗 Media 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Georgia (U.S. state) 🔗 United States/United States Presidents 🔗 Animals in media

The Jimmy Carter rabbit incident, sensationalized as the "killer rabbit attack" by the press, involved a swamp rabbit (Sylvilagus aquaticus) that swam toward then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter's fishing boat on April 20, 1979. The incident caught the imagination of the media after Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, mentioned the event to a correspondent months later.

Political opponents argued that the incident was symbolic of Carter's purported weakness. According to Powell, anti-Carter political commentators went so far as to blame it for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Media

The Gen Z stare is a generally pejorative phrase coined by social media users to describe a "blank stare that members of younger generations give in situations where a verbal response would be more common" or appropriate. It most commonly occurs in customer service interactions in response to ostensibly simple questions about products, services, or signage in the establishment. Reflecting a generation gap, instead of responding to the customer, the generation Z cohort members have been described as "dumbfounded or disinterested" in these questions.

Kalhan Rosenblatt of NBC News says, "[w]hile there are several definitions for the stare, the most common meaning is a vacant expression a Gen Zer gives in response to a question. The stare occurs in classrooms, restaurants, at work and more settings." The term "Gen Z stare" garnered widespread coverage in the mainstream media in July 2025. The concept of the "Gen Z stare" was first explored in research conducted by Kaiden Jones, who proposed that while the stare shares some similarities with the nonverbal responses of both deadpan humor and stonewalling, it can signal social critique and a refusal to conform to social scripts.