This thesis basically proffers a critical reexamination of the debate on the New International Information Order. It mainly accosts two problematic issues viz; the faulty conceptual framework adopted by a majority of the Third World member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement Under the auspicies of UNESCO to address the problems of international communication, and secondly, the inability of researchers - as a result of the limitations imposed by the North vs South polarization of the debate and the Third World leader's pedestrian conceptualization of the problems at hand - to focus on the operations of the Third World media in order to arrive at much more comprehensive generalizations. The starting point of this thesis is that it is not enough to concentrate on only one side of the coin. To fully understand the interconnections of neocolonialism and its symptomatic manifestations in the field of information and communication, we have to go beyond the polemical stance the debate and current research assumed. That is, it is not enough to accuse or heap all the blames on imperialism and neocolonialism. It is obvious most of the accusations levelled against the media of the advanced capitalist countries in their portrayal of the Third World countries are valid. But, to get to the roots of the problems i.e., the underlying causes of these problems at large, there is also a fundamental need to put the Third World media themselves under the same analytical microscope. It is with this in mind that we set out to analyse how the African media cover and project African affairs, taking Libya as a case study. The rational behind this endeavour is that since the African states have been accusing the media of the capitalist countries of ill treatment by negatively portraying them, the African media would somewhat cover and portray other African states in a more positive manner, particularly in the period of the debate and in its aftermath. Our results suggests the opposite. That is, there is no fundamental difference in how Libya was covered and projected to the outside world by both the African media in our sample (The Nigerian Daily Times, The Tanzanian Daily News and The Nairobi Standard) and The Times of London in the period 1970-1986. This we believe suggests that both the Third World media and the media of the advanced capitalist nations share some characteristics that makes them to operate along similar lines. They are to a certain extent, two sides of the same coin, which might suggest that, what we are confronted with in the field of international communication is a paradox of "a one world with a one voice" when it comes to the coverage of some contentious issues that threaten what is normally projected as the norm in society. Although these findings are tentative, we hope they will open avenues for further research in our efforts to fully understand the complexities not only of the information sector, but the whole institutional structures that underlie and give bearing to international relations, politics and economics.

The aim of this research is to propose a relationship between church and culture based on the Trinitarian concept of perichoresis, particularly as found in the theology of Colin Gunton. Chapter 1 offers a survey of the historical understandings of perichoresis, from its initial use in Christology, to Trinitarian ontology to the renewed interest in the doctrine of the Trinity (and perichoresis) in the twentieth century, which, in some cases, includes applying the concept to issues of human relating. From this survey, five characteristics of the concept of perichoresis are identified: mutual constitution, particularity, coinherence, dynamism, and perfection. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the relationship between church and culture, giving consideration to various definitions of culture. It makes a clear distinction between the concepts of creation, culture, and world, and goes on to consider some historical relationships between church and culture. Chapter 3 looks at three historical methods of ecclesiological enquiry: the marks of the church, being one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, found in the early creeds; models of the church, which offer a means of categorising the church; and practices, a method that has arisen as a reaction against models-based ecclesiologies. Chapter 4 takes the characteristics of perichoresis, established at the beginning of the thesis, and considers them in terms of the way in which these might apply to the relationship between church and culture, before proposing four features of a church in perichoretic relationship with culture, suggesting that church and culture engage in mutual communication, that the church relinquishes its desire for central power and instead seeks an interpenetrative relationship between the centre and periphery, that the church is constituted by the other, and, finally, that the church is the community for creation.

published_or_final_version / Political Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This paper discusses the development of a new information representation system embodied in ontology and the Semantic Web. The new system differs from other representation systems in that it is based on a more sophisticated semantic representation of information, aims to go well beyond the document level, and designed to be understood and processed by machine. A common theme underlying these three features, i.e., turning documents into meaningful interchangeable data, reflects a rising use expectation nurtured by modern technology and, at the same time, presents a unique challenge for its enabling technologies.

Discusses persistent links or PURLs as a tool for linking.

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