Mass Communication

Social media has become a key forum for debate, organization, motivation, response and counter-response on human right issues. Social media tool such as blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and video sharing sites have played great part in political mobilization and generating public protest against suppression, exploitation and attempts of restricting freedom of expression and speech.
In last few years social media has played important role in the protection of democratic values and human rights. In recent years social media has become mainstream media of public communication and it has influenced and changed the patterns of communication, interaction and advocacy for human right issues. Organisations, activists, defenders, and citizen journalists through their increasing online presence expand their strength to reach global audience and raise the issues of human rights violation, which are often ignored by mainstream conventional mass media. In number of incidence social media campaigns have successfully created pressure on system to take the incidents of human rights violation seriously and provided alternative view for mainstream media to report the incident. As agenda setter social media has highlighted the issues by catching the eyeballs of the aware public and secured justice for marginalised and weaker sections of the society.
The present paper is an attempt to understand the patterns and adeptness of presence of organizations, human right activists, and civil society members on social media and effectiveness of such media for human rights advocacy, and conducting thematic campaigns and use of social media to mobilize common people and raise the voice of protest against the human rights violation.
Key Words- Human Rights, Social Media, Facebook

Digital democracy can be defined as the practice of democracy by using social media in online and off line political communications. Online and offline modes are important because both are extensively used for political mobilization, campaign and communication. Internet enabled platforms such as social networking sites and mobile communication have been emerged as one of the frequently used tools for political activities. Digital democracy has a great role in the improvement of political information retrieval, and exchange between government bodies and individuals, initiating public debate, community formation, motivating people for participation and political decision-making. Student unions are considered as the nursery of the politics. Same political and election methods are used for campaigning and elections of student bodies and to make voters aware of the issues, candidates, and their promises by exploring all means of communications. Since youth are equipped and frequent users of digital media so analyzing their exposure to social media, use of social media for informing and influencing voters can be very useful to understand the increasing importance of such media in democratic practices. Present paper is an attempt to explain the patterns of digital media uses in student politics and their role in influencing and mobilizing voters. With the help of interaction with student participants in Assam University Student's Council Election-2014 paper has tried to highlight the issues, efforts and effectiveness of digital media in student politics.

Today enterprises are growing in size supporting globally distributed and vigorous businesses involving huge number of events. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have a particular way of recording activities in the form of event logs. Business Intelligence aims to improve decision making processes and efficiency of the systems for that, organizations having ERP systems apply process mining techniques to extract information from event logs and analyze the actual business processes underlying the organizations. In this paper we have focused on one of the three features of process mining application i.e. discovery of process model with control flow perspective. Case study of a Pakistani Enterprise has been presented to analyze the results of three applied discovery algorithms Alpha Miner, Fuzzy Model and Heuristic Miner have determined the most frequent behaviors underlying its complaint monitoring process. To have so-called ideal process model discovery, preprocessing is the m...

The fundamental ideas about life of the people in Meghalaya are originated from the myth and the legend stories which are
considered to be the integral to the culture and tradition of its region. There are philosophies which describe about the social
construction of the society which is followed since the creation of the world and is reflected in the dance forms and festive
spirit of the indigenous people of the state. These dances, songs and the rituals have its own proposition which bind all into
one unity. Beside the political philosophies also rooted into the formation of democratic governance of the different clans
while upholding its matrilineal system. Most of the festivals are associated with the spirit of veneration, virtue, purity,
earnestness and holiness which in all respects upholds the honour of its divinity.

In media, the discrimination against woman has a different perception. Often, women are showcased in a
stereotyped image and there is absence of balanced portrayal of women’s contribution to the society. There
are very minimalist illustrations of women that could be found in the different columns of the newspapers.
The core purpose of the study is to find out how women related stories or news are represented in two
newspapers of Meghalaya and what is the significant of these news reports. The study also employs the
coverage of front page news and the editorials which portrayed the woman.

The proposed study is an attempt to examine the representation of women in realistic cinema. The study will focus on how women were presented and misrepresented in cinema. Based on feminist film theoretician, Claire Johnston, further analysis is developed on the idea of how feminist theories like counter cinema can be related to realistic films. This study will explore on how with changing times, women-centric movies started gaining popularity. Realistic films helped portray women to play strong and challenging roles and in addition to this, they have been able to make a mark in the mainstream cinema. This study will also briefly discuss how realistic cinema is different from popular cinema or popular cinema.

The advent of the Internet has challenged the traditional concept of ‘identity.’ The anonymity associated with the medium of Internet means that there is no reliable identification or recognition of people, or even corroboration of their claimed identities. With the rise of the ‘nonymous’ social networking sites like Facebook, the lines between real identity and virtual identity have become even more blurred and nebulous. Identities are parts of larger sense of self, and as such, they are internalized self-designations associated with positions that individuals occupy within various social contexts (Stryker). Underlying all social interaction, there seems to be a fundamental dialectic. When an individual plays a part, he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that ...

This ancient language, considered to be the mother language of a majority of Indian languages, today appears to be fighting a losing battle with only about 14,000 people in India claiming Sanskrit as their mother tongue in a country of over 1.2 billion people, as the 2011 census data reveal. In an era increasingly engulfed by the forces of globalization amidst the debates surrounding linguistic homogenization and cultural neo-imperialism, mass media as well as various digital media platforms, including social media can contribute towards restoring the rich literary tradition of the Sanskrit language that defines the very essence of what we understand as ‘Indian culture.’ This paper argues that state-run public service broadcasters like Doordarshan and All India Radio, are obligated to create and transmit content that generate awareness about Sanskrit and its significance to modern Indian knowledge like Ayurveda, yoga, music, grammar, philosophy, Vedic mathematics etc. Yet, this pape...

The northeastern state of Assam in India has witnessed long years of armed conflict waged by the ULFA and other militant outfits against the Indian state, and intermittent identity struggles by different ethnic groups and communities demanding greater autonomy and constitutionally guaranteed privileges. The 2000s political landscape of Assam saw several spectacular incidents of violence, of a scale and magnitude that attracted not only national, but also global media attention. This study examines the press coverage of three such spectacular conflictinduced violent events by four frontline English dailies, in order to draw definitive inferences about how the national and the regional press interpreted, constructed and presented these violent incidents in the country's periphery, to their readers. The findings clearly establish the ways in which the press constructs issues from the nation's margins in the way they define events, actors, causes and effects of violent political conflicts.

From Decentralisation of Planning to Peoples Planning - Experiences of the Indian States of Kerala and West Bengal by Charvak, 2000: The Discussion Paper attempts a comparison of the process of decentralisation of planning in the two States that have made significant progress in this area. The study shows that social mobilisation, process of democratisation, mass conscientisation, demand from below, and collective action have been responsible for their success. It also makes a critical review of the evolution of local bodies in these States followed by an analysis of the process, and the new innovative experiments of decentralisation. A detailed account of the Kalliasseri experiment (from Resource Mapping to Peoples Plan Campaign) as well as the KSSP experiment (from Science Popularisation to Local Level Planning) is also given. The study concludes with the observation that instrumentalities such as the total literacy campaign, peoples mobilisation, popular science movements, and mass conscientisation are the necessary conditions for replicating of the Kerala and the West Bengal experience in other States. (http://www.krpcds.org/fellowsh.htm)(http://www.krpcds.org/charvak.pdf. Other related works of Charvak: Background Paper to UNDP, India, 1998, Country Strategy Paper for IDF-1998 and to the UN award winning HDR-2004 of West Bengal).

The geographical, demographic and historical isolation of the region have exercised considerable influence on the growth of print media in North East.History of Print Media for the North East however remained less documented and read till today. Scholars of mainland India have less interest of conducting research on this area, while scholars of North East lack in terms of resources and scope. In this context, this paper seeks to offer a fundamental reading of the history of print media in the seven states of North East India. It is however by no means, a complete compendium of the history of press in North East India. It does offer only a rudimentary level of historical documentation and attempts to reflect the specificities of advent of print media in the seven sisters of North East India. It is a documentation of the summary of the advent of Print Media in North East both from primary and secondary data.

Surely it was a call for justice – academic as well as applied – a call for greater social justice, for which the theme 'Media and the North East' was chosen for the current issue of the Global Media Journal, Indian Edition. The choice was indeed a significant and strategic one and it is expected that an analytical understanding on North East India would hopefully emerge from this exercise and the dynamics of the region would be understood through a prism of media studies. For a couple of unavoidable reasons, we were rendered late in bringing out the issue, for which the Guest Editor takes the full responsibility. We have tried to accommodate representative papers from across the region and also across the spread of the theme that would explain the often-overlapping complexities of the region, its politics, economy and its media. The multi-layered problems of understanding media and its role in addressing social situations were key objectives that this issue has tried to unfold. Many tribal societies of North East still have their traditional communication intact by and large despite the boom of commercial media. Our first article of Dr.Raghavendra Mishra & K. Newme of Assam University showcaseone such sample – Zeme Naga Traditional Folk Media and social communication. The second article-'Print Comes to North East India', written by this guest editor, tried to situate the advent of print media in North East – a portion of the print media history of our country which has fallen out of our traditional media history books of India. The placing in of the textual history continues with the third article by Dr.C. Lalmuansangkimi, from IIMC, Aizwal, which is a reflection on the emergence of Print and Electronic Media in Mizoram-one of the important and distinguishable states of North East.