The commercial public service broadcasters (PSBs) in the United Kingdom (UK) make a significant contribution to the country’s public service television system, alongside the BBC. Operating under the UK communications regulator Ofcom, the commercial PSB channels ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 are required to broadcast varying levels of public service content. This places these channels in a different category to all other market broadcasters in the UK. By taking a critical political economy of communication approach, this article examines how the regulatory system functions to secure public service provision in television. A particular focus is placed on the first-run originations quotas, which govern the levels of programming that are originally produced or commissioned by a commercial PSB, and broadcast for the first time in the UK. It is argued that while fulfilling the public service remit, the commercial PSBs gain significant benefits that contribute to the underpinning of their business models.
In this conversation, community media activist jesikah maria ross and filmmaker Vicky Funari talk about the work they have done together in alternative media since the 1990s. Their shared projects include skin•es•the•si•a (1994), an experimental video exploring the cultural codification of the female body; Paulina (1998), a feature-length documentary about a resilient Mexican woman whose parents traded her for land when she was a child; and Maquilápolis [City of Factories] (2006), a participatory documentary that tells the stories of women workers in Tijuana’s multinational factories, and explores through their eyes the transformation of a city and its people by the forces of globalization. Set just after their last collaborative project, Troubled Waters (2014), their conversation addresses the issues of media pedagogy and aesthetics, technological affordances and limits, and the changing state of participatory media production in the United States.
Japanese and other Asian TV producers have been deploying multi-colored, and highly visible, intra-lingual captions on TV programs to enhance their appeal and to influence their viewers’ interpretations. The practice of adding these captions is far from innocent and is prone to abuse and overuse due to the lack of official guidelines and an evidence base. We conducted a multimodal analysis within the framework of relevance theory to provide an empirically supported insight into the way in which these captions, known as "telop" in Japan, form part of a production’s deliberate and careful media design. Our findings suggest that telop are deployed in conjunction with other communicative resources that are deliberately used to influence viewers’ interpretations, to enhance and make affective values in TV programs more explicit. The increasing use of diegetically integrated captions elsewhere further justifies the need for critical TV and new media research on telop.
This special issue takes up new media in situ, addressing how new media technologies have the potential to re-orient us and, by extension, radically intervene in our understandings of place—specifically the public spaces of the city—and our place in it. We not only explore the specificities of these new media technologies and the cultural practices they afford but also highlight the intimate relationships they instantiate with their surroundings. The specific case studies highlighted in the contributors’ essays discuss gaming in Canada (Engel) and Japan (Hjorth), the traces of racism in South Carolina (Cooley), the topographical footprint of settler colonialism (Zwicker et al), Hong Kong pace (Wilmott), and artistic experiments that use the city as a laboratory (Verhoeff). What holds all of these contributions together is their indebtedness to creative cartography. This special issue on Urban Cartographies explores the paradoxes of presence, co-presence and absence as represented on and generated by our living, mediating screens.
This article explores the unofficial role of camera phone practices in visualizing everyday forms of play as part of emergent urban cartographies. I argue that camera phone practices—especially in an age of timestamping—are creating their own cartographies of place that overlay the visual with the ambient, social with the geographic, emotional with the electronic, in new ways. By focusing upon the playful qualities of camera phone practices, we can begin to understand places as sites for ambient meandering and co-presence. Having outlined the notion of performative cartography as part of what has been defined as "critical cartography," I consider how camera phone practices can be understood through ambient, co-present play. I turn to a site-specific mobile game, keitai mizu (mobile water), made for a post-Tokyo tsunami and Fukushima disaster context (known as 3/11), to explore the ways in which cartography can be performed.
This project on economic topographies is one of eight thematic ways in which the research group Edmonton Pipelines is remapping the neighborhood of Rossdale. The essay brings together poetry, data visualization, and technologies of mapping to analyze how the twin vectors of capitalism and colonialism have created Western Canadian cityspace. Rather than taking for granted the ups and downs of the built environment, the article muses on the possibilities of using haunting as an urban interface. Working through this metaphorical possibility concretely, this essay traces the contours of haunting in the case of Rossdale, a Canadian neighborhood that has undergone an emblematic form of gentrification. We develop literal topographical maps as a way of conceptualizing metaphorical hurdles to belonging to settler colonial cities. These socioeconomic topographical maps serve as a new form of urban cartography.
This article addresses issues of user precarity and vulnerability in online social networks. As social media criticism by Jose van Dijck, Felix Stalder, and Geert Lovink describes, the social web is a predatory system that exploits users’ desires for connection. Although accurate, this critical description casts the social web as a zone where users are always already disempowered, so fails to imagine possibilities for users beyond this paradigm. This article examines Natalie Bookchin’s composite video series, Testament, as it mobilizes an alt-(ernative) social network of vernacular video on YouTube. In the first place, the alt-social network works as an iteration of "tactical media" to critically reimagine empowered user-to-user interactions on the social web. In the second place, it obfuscates YouTube’s data-mining functionality, so allows users to socialize online in a way that evades their direct translation into data and the exploitation of their social labor.
Current accounts of the development of the Chinese Internet have provided important analyses of the political economy of telecommunications and the Internet. This study builds on these research to examine how vernacular online practices played a role in enabling political economic dimensions of the Chinese Internet to act as significant shaping forces. With this objective in mind, this article considers vernacular online practices that preceded the rise of commercial online video portals. My specific examples are ‘video spoofing’ and ‘fansubbing’, practices popular in the early to mid-2000s. Led by amateur enthusiasts, these practices were intimately associated with the legacy of cultural piracy in China in the pre-Internet era. My primary concern here is with identifiying and explicating the social energies that encouraged the formation of these online practices, their development trajectory, and finally, how these practices eventually became assimilated within a nascent video industry. In that respect, my argument is that the vernacular cultural forms and practices associated with these phenomena were central, and indeed essential, to the formation of an online video industry in China.
This article argues the possibility of building not just a queer gaming experience but rather a queer game mechanic—that is, a game whose very structure of play can be theorized as queer. It presents the prototype game Go Queer, a locative media history app, as a theoretical experiment in what it might mean to play queer. Queer theorists and historiographers have demonstrated the intimate relation between queer subjects and the city; the game literalizes this dynamic, requiring players to travel the physical spaces of the city in the hopes that they will encounter queer history—now disappeared, redeveloped, forgotten. It proposes that a productive and underrepresented setting for queer play is the space of the city itself and that the hybrid reality of locative media provides particular affordances to enable particularly queer navigations, occupations, and constructions of queer urban space.
Launched in 2013, Amazon Studios’s Pilot Season reportedly offers an alternative to the conventional Hollywood development cycle by soliciting viewer feedback through short surveys and star reviews to determine which projects are developed into original series. However, while Amazon Studios publicly assures us that viewers "Call the Shots," the company has swiftly navigated away from such participatory discourse. Through a discursive analysis of promotional materials, executive and talent interviews, and responses from trade presses and critics, this article unpacks how Amazon Studios diminished the import of viewer feedback at the first sign of significant attention from the critical community and subsequently shifted to promotional discourses centered on markers of "Quality TV." This case ultimately demonstrates that, as discursive strategies, participatory culture and Quality TV serve distinctive functions for the industry, with the former often relegated to attention-seeking gimmick and the latter functioning as a powerful tool of legitimation.
This article analyzes the way media technologies provide interfaces for the complexity of cities as historically layered, continuously changing, and intricately connected spaces. Following Branden Hookway and Alexander Galloway, I understand media interfaces as processes rather than objects. An interface is not something; it does something. I propose to focus on the way in which often temporary, mobile, and connected interfaces produce urban cartographies in the very act and process of navigation. This navigation constitutes a performative cartography of ambulant presence, fluid connectivity, and an inherent multiplicity of connections between locations and other subjects. In what follows, I examine a small collection of urban art projects that speak to this description and suggest that the interface’s pursuits of connectivity, and the stakes and claims inseparable from these pursuits, produce and structure urban cartographies. The article then questions in what ways interfaces can create, not a threshold between two dimensions, but spatial transformations of a third kind.
This article analyzes the Belfast-set BBC series The Fall (2013–) as an illustrative example of television noir. It aims to use noir scholarship to investigate The Fall’s complex gender politics and genre position, and, more significantly, to use The Fall to illuminate the complex ways in which noir currently operates across Anglo-American television and culture. The Fall is self-conscious, if not self-reflexive, in its mobilization of noir to aspire to the cinematic. This article argues that the series, and others like it, use noir as a legitimation strategy, often to excuse prurient stories of sexualized violence. The act of labeling something noir, particularly a visual fiction, is a way of insisting on its status as art. I conclude that the system of noir (and its associations with art and authenticity) is unable to contain the excesses of the serial killer mythology and Gothic inflection of its postfeminist investigator.
Brazil is both a leading television producer in the Global South and home to TV Globo, one of the largest and most commercially successful networks in the world. Indeed, for nearly fifty years of its sixty-five year history, TV Globo and its standardized production of extremely popular telenovelas have largely come to characterize Brazilian television fiction as a whole. In this article, I situate the meteoric rise of the independent production company and YouTube sensation, Porta dos Fundos, within the broader context of TV Globo’s declining audience share and the wide-ranging effects of the Pay Television Law (2011). In doing so, I argue that Porta dos Fundos’s audiovisual production for the Internet and prime-time television serves as an illustrative case for understanding the interrelated ways in which recent policy, new distribution platforms, emerging independent production companies, and an influx of locally produced content are helping to shape the changing landscape of Brazilian television fiction as it transitions out of a six-decade-long network era.
This article reflects on the growing urge among researchers to visualize large-scale digital data. It argues that the desire to visualize unfolds in the context of a complex entanglement of (1) the pragmatics of data visualization, (2) the problematic ideological work that visualizations do, (3) the politics of data power and neoliberalism, and (4) visualization pleasures. The article begins by outlining the considerations that constitute data visualization design, highlighting the complexity of the process. It then provides an overview of critical debates about the way that visualizations work, which are relevant to reflective visualization practice. Then, it turns to the context (of datafication and the neoliberalization of the university) in which academic researchers contemplate visualization futures and which simultaneously constrains the realization of these futures. Finally, the article acknowledges the cracks in these structures, the pleasure of visualizing data, for example, in using visualization for advocacy and social justice.
Located at the heart of the University of South Carolina campus is the historic Horseshoe—originally the South Carolina College campus (est. 1801)—a site whose construction during the antebellum years relied on enslaved labor. Ghosts of the Horseshoe is a cross-College, collaborative "critical interactive" for iPad that features the Horseshoe campus and endeavors to make visible this unacknowledged history. The application uses as its dedicated navigational interface a historic 1884 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of the site; participants can also activate a Google Map overlay of the site and determine its degree of opacity with respect to the archival map image. Importantly, however, the two maps do not actually "map" onto each other. This serves as a first mis-mapping of several mis-mappings. This article considers how such mis-mappings, involving geo-locative contingencies, representational disjunctions, and potential dis-locations, mediate site-specific explorations and, as such, make possible alternative historiographic understandings of place.
This article moves beyond the textuality of the map to focus on the way in which mobile mapping is constructed discursively, semiotically, and experientially. It centers on the autoethnographic and reflective experience of the researcher analyzing video and Global Positioning System (GPS) recordings of walking interviews, during which the interviewees conversed about, and engaged in, mobile mapping practices. This reductive process can be considered in light of its re-presentation to the researcher for analytical purposes—a ghostly abstraction of a past spatial experience. The article considers the manifold hauntings stirred in the process of abstraction and the creation of multiple layers of experience: that of the firsthand experience of the walking interview and that of the secondhand analysis of the video and geocoded data. The discrepancy between firsthand movement and secondhand analysis underscores questions about the relationship between mobile maps, representation, and movement and about those epistemologies and ontologies that haunt the interstices between individual records.
Launched in 1970, American Broadcasting Company’s (ABC) Monday Night Football made live prime time sports television viable when most sports broadcasts were relegated to weekends. It did so in part by packaging games for a crossover viewership. To this end, it suppressed racial divisiveness that might splinter the mainstream audience it sought. ABC parlayed Monday Night Football’s widespread popularity into prime time TV events beyond sports broadcasts that grew out of the programming flows it established and reflected its racial politics, including the made-for-TV melodrama Brian’s Song (1971) and the miniseries Roots (1977). Like Monday Night Football, these marquee TV events courted a crossover audience in part by downplaying racial discord. Although overlooked in scholarship that historicizes and critiques network television’s racial politics, Monday Night Football established intersecting representational conventions and programming norms that informed the mediation of race on some of U.S. television’s most visible, celebrated, and influential TV events.
This article interrogates the cultural work of "old" media texts that take social media use as a narrative focus. Using the MTV reality show Catfish: The TV Show as a case study, I argue that, in this program, the specific conventions of reality television—authenticity, confession, and self-realization—work to produce and circulate normative scripts of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" ways to articulate the self on social media, which align with reality TV’s established investment in the concept of the "authentic" self. Furthermore, I argue that the show’s representations of social media use valorize the primacy of connecting with and accepting one’s "real" self, making legible a subject position that speaks particularly to young people—the program’s target demographic—in the contemporary juncture of 2010s "crisis" neoliberalism, by transposing political questions into personal crises.
This article explores push–pull dynamics in television drama production and reception. Push–pull dynamics are understood as complicated power relations in the transactions between television industries and audiences. The research is underpinned by qualitative data, drawing on more than 170 participants in interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, with producers and audiences from Northern Europe and North and South America. A case study of The Bridge (FX, 2013–2014) crime drama and its adaptations is used to think through the idea of push–pull dynamics. A key question concerns how power is performed in television itself, referring to work in cultural studies and Williams’s notion of the television experience. The Bridge crime drama and its adaptations underscore the particularities of power for television industries and audiences: this is not a tale of surrender to global industrial forces; rather, this is a story of the reality of power and the struggle over how producers and audiences make sense of global television.
This article uses the emergence of smartwatch models from 2012 to 2015—including the Pebble Watch, Android Wear, and Apple Watch—to explore the relationship between "instants" and "information." Through a focus on the ways in which smartwatches notify, buzz, and otherwise touch the skin, this article develops the idea of the "haptic instant" as a key feature of this technology. The haptic instant, in calling attention to the delivery of news alerts, e-mails, personal communication, and other notifications to the wearer’s wrist, is part of the larger formation of bodies capable of living in a culture increasingly reliant on computer information systems for the management of daily life.
Trump is more than a symptom of manipulative infotainment and cultural decline: His political ascendency speaks to reality TV’s long-established role in governing practices.
Seen through the lens of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s reality TV program ‘The Apprentice,’ his promise to American voters that they’ll tire of "winning" under his regime takes on a darker meaning. This article identifies ‘the loser’ as a potent new political symbol emblematic of ‘contestants’ who in the face of mathematical loss become ‘bigger’ losers if they fail to assert their right to a non-meritorious victory. The fact of one’s loss is not as important as one’s reaction to it. To lose is possible, but to be a ‘loser’ is the ultimate humiliation that justifies taking extreme, even immoral measures. Contestants who are willing to ‘do anything’ to win are rewarded more generously often than those who, in reality, are the rightful winners. Such a perspective rationalizes a politics of exaggerations, lies and defamation. Extending Couldry and Littler’s discourse of passion, we identify the mechanism that enables and compels some voters to embrace Trump’s divisive politics of ‘otherism’ as astute ‘game playing.’ In Trump’s world, to win means many more must lose. Just as in the reality TV world, however, Trump alone holds the power to annoint winners and exile losers, meaning there is no guarantee of success for anyone but him.
This brief editorial links Trump’s popularity to reality television’s messages of promotionalism and the spread of overt forms of self-branding and reputation-seeking across the population at large thanks to social media. Against the backdrop of growing economic insecurity, most people must now assiduously self-promote and hustle in order to find or protect their jobs. Trump supporters are not ‘dupes’ buying the hype then; they recognize that Trump’s brand is his skill set, admire it, and see it as all the qualification he needs to become president. While Trump’s ‘brand’ is figured as the result of his own personal style and power, it is actually the product of the underpaid, highly exploited labour of thousands of workers. Trump the Brand and reality television’s gauzy promise of mini-celebrity are symptoms of, and alibis for a flawed and failing political economic system. It will take the concerted, collective power of people in the streets, demanding something better, to stop him.
Focusing on the United Kingdom, this article addresses key issues facing the international distribution industry arising from over-the-top (OTT) digital distribution and the fragmentation of audiences and revenues. Building on the identification of these issues, it investigates the extent to which U.K. distribution has altered over a ten-year period, pinpointing continuities in the destination and type of sales alongside changes in the role and structure of the industry as U.K.-based distributors adapt to a changing U.K. broadcasting landscape and global production environment. At one level, increasing U.S. ownership of U.K.-based distributors and the arrival of OTT players such as Netflix highlight the tensions between the national orientations of U.K. broadcasters and the global aspirations of independent producers and distributors. At another level, video-on-demand (VOD) has boosted international sales of U.K. drama. Although the full impact of subscription VOD (SVOD) on content and rights has yet to materialize, significant changes in the industry predate the arrival of SVOD.
This article analyzes producer–consumer relations in social media marketing in the Swedish dairy industry. The article discusses how ideas of interspecies intimacy are publicly performed in an interactive process between the dairy industry producers and social media users. Two examples from the Swedish dairy industry were chosen for analysis: one Instagram account and one Facebook account. The analysis shows how the pages are premised on spectacularly visualizing the emotional labor and performances of cows for capital accumulation. The dairy industry’s social media presence encourages the media users to engage in building the perception that Swedish dairy farms represent an idyll where the cows are willing producers of the milk that is taken from them, and the dairy industry is loving, caring, and compassionate. Thus, the social media marketing represents a co-opting not only of the ideals of participation that social media holds but also of the ideals of ethical consumptions.
This article examines the impact of mobile smartphone culture on TV narrative through an examination of the network series The Good Wife (TGW; CBS, 2009–2016). Ubiquitous smartphone use proffers a managerial relationship between subject and device, such that smartphone culture becomes necessary for navigating between different spheres of life. Furthermore, as smartphones occupy a greater role in public life, they have also begun to shape the creation of story in media narratives. I argue that smartphones have become a tool of narrative management for network drama not unlike the ways in which they govern everyday life. TGW’s narrative form and genre—a unique negotiation between episodic procedural and serial melodrama—successfully mirror the management of routine informational and emotional flows, structuring narrative and spectatorial habits while also accommodating for technology’s glitches.
Popular and journalistic discussions of television often present a rhetoric, which suggests that television has become ubiquitous, any content being able to be watched anytime, anywhere. This article argues that this represents a myth of televisual ubiquity, which neglects the role still played by national borders and which makes assumptions about the types of television of interest to people. By accepting the myth of televisual ubiquity, we are making assertions about the television experience of some viewers over others, as well as creating a distinction of which television can be seen to have lasting importance. The article analyzes the components of the myth of televisual ubiquity and draws them together to consider a case study, video on demand in New Zealand.
Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.
In this article, I explore The Good Wife’s particular uses of costuming and wardrobe and the consequent linkages to politics, feminism, and the discourse of "quality" television the show mediates. I argue that CBS borrows language from feminism to rehabilitate network broadcasting’s reputation as a dying medium in the wake of premium cable, time shifting, and cord-cutting. In the service of this strategy, I investigate how CBS dusts off an old tactic from The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, using fashion to target a "quality" professional female audience and self-referentiality to resignify broadcast television as an activity for progressive, educated, and diverse women. Ultimately, I argue that The Good Wife uses costuming with female characters to self-legitimate and brand itself as "quality" television.
The spectacle of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign calls for a reconsideration of some of the key arguments we made in our 2009 book, Demystifying Business Celebrity. In that book we downplayed the significance of individual celebrity personalities in order to highlight the importance of the industrialized process of celebrification. But Trump’s very singular personality clearly exerts its own form of agency—somehow appealing to his supporters, and increasingly alarming to many others. In tandem with a set of cultural anxieties, gendered and racialized phobias, economic disparities, and new social media avenues for the expression of populist violence and rage, the industrialized process of celebrification we described in our book has functioned to elevate, and not to diminish, the significance of the particular set of reactionary and narcissistic pathologies Trump embodies. Whether he succeeds in his campaign or not, we should all be worried.
This article juxtaposes The Good Wife’s (TGW) representation of Alicia Florrick’s experience as a professional woman and a mother, against interview accounts of middle-class women who left successful careers after having children. I show that TGW furnishes a compelling fantasy based on (1) the valorization of combining motherhood with competitive, long-hours high-powered waged work as the basis for a woman’s value and liberation, and (2) an emphasis on women’s professional performance and satisfaction as depending largely on their individual self-confidence and ability to "lean in," while marginalizing the impact of structural issues on women’s success and workplace equality. This fantasy fails to correspond to women’s lived experience, but shapes their sense of self in painful ways. The TGW fantasy thus involves a relation of "cruel optimism": it attracts women to desire it while impeding them from tackling the structural issues that are obstructing realization of their desire.
Observing that contemporary marriages now represent transactional efforts that benefit wives as much as their spouses, this article considers The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick alongside a list of real-life women, most notably Hillary Clinton, whose examples have helped to trouble and complicate the image of the betrayed wife. While marriage continues to register as a necessary complement to any political run, this fact is increasingly regarded with skepticism and a self-conscious admission that the performance of a happy union is often merely a tactical move, a reality that is well-evidenced in The Good Wife and the ABC drama Scandal. A meditation on Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, a real-life political couple who seem to be baldly borrowing from (or perhaps inspiring) these televised marriages, closes the piece and is used to suggest that political marriages may serve as professional boons.
Based on interviews with three dozen working writers in American television, this paper argues that TV writers assert their status as labor to guarantee their shared craft identity with novelists, dramatists, and authors of other conventional literary material. The tension between writers’ desire for literary prestige on one hand, and their recognition that they create at the behest of company executives, on the other, emerges, alternately, in the imagined difference between writers and producers and, most basically, between autonomous creators and corporate hacks. Our novel observation is that writers’ identification with labor, including their commitment to their union, the Writers Guild of America, plays a central role in resolving these tensions. Union membership solves a problem at the heart of contemporary TV writing insofar as it transforms a necessity into a virtue; opposing management as labor, the writer registers her opposition to creative input that might otherwise compromise her sense of artistic integrity. That opposition allows writers to imagine themselves at odds with the studios and networks that employ them, and at the same time to commit to artistic over and against corporate values.
Since 2010, concerned citizens in India argued that cell antenna signals had heating effects on bodies, and media campaigns compared the experience of living in cities with cell towers as being inside the oven. I argue that mediation of cell towers in newspapers and lifestyle shows as potentially emitting cancer-causing radiation was key to shaping public perceptions about them. Through their disruptive nature, cell towers call into action a technoscience public consisting of a variety of stakeholders, including radio-frequency scientists, cellular operators, journalists, tower builders, activists, municipal corporations, and building owners. Technoscience publics and media publics intersect and shape each other, and this article presents "mediated technoscience public" as a theoretical framework for an ethnographic intervention in media studies. This framework involves the tracking and comparison of media coverage about technological infrastructure as well as the ways humans emotionally perceive and interact with those infrastructures.
Donald Trump, known as a mogul and reality TV celebrity, is presented as horrific in the press now that he wants to be President of the United States, a position requiring controlled and civil behavior, which he cannot master. Comparisons between his candidacy for president and a reality TV show abound, forcing us to contend with the conventions, privileged behaviors and ethics of the current culture of surveillance (which includes reality TV), arising in contexts of surveillance but now exceeding these. The crossover from reality TV celebrity to presidential candidate is troubled, highlighting the uncomfortable intersection of Trump’s whiteness and wealth with his crass behavior. The reality TV genre is seen as trashy, featuring people without class in behavior and often in social and financial status. The presidency, however, is for the elite white upper-middle or upper-class (usually male)—Obama negotiates the politics of respectability to fit this ideal. Popular articulations of Trump demonstrate the uneasy alignment of elite whiteness with white behavior marked as working class or poor, displaying panic about a president unable to exhibit appropriately classed behavior. This dangerously elides the larger machinery that is the government and big business, belying our cultural preoccupation with individualism and obfuscating the systemic. Taking Trump for the system negates how the current machinery has in fact produced a string of Trumps (Palin, Bachmann, Cruz), leaving us longing for the more civil days when white elite men knew how to speak their hatred in a civil manner.
Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene as the realization of the obscene figure of enjoyment that Slavoj Zizek associates with the decline of "symbolic efficiency." The symptoms of this decline include the debunking of representation associated with a fragmented and conspiracy-theory-ridden public sphere coupled with attempts to resuscitate direct access to the "real." Reality TV is one cultural manifestation of this combination and Trump has become its political avatar. The demagoguery and resurgent forms of political violence associated with Trump’s campaign demonstrate the authoritarian tendencies of this combination.
This study explored preschool children’s television-related fears through a general study of children’s television-viewing habits. Based on semi-structured interviews with eighteen Estonian preschoolers, the results showed that young children’s fears were represented not only in adult programs but also in seemingly child-friendly cartoons through which children tended to see the fictional story as real. However, children were not passive victims: they took an active role in diminishing their television-related fears by using various coping strategies, including peer mediation. These results support the notion that children are second-level mediators who share with their peers both their own experiences and what their parents have taught them about television.
Since the time it was first broadcast in 2013 and despite its unquestionable commercial success, Netflix prison comedy-drama Orange Is the New Black has garnered equal shares of praise and blame. Countless articles have appeared in the popular press discussing the show’s treatment of race, sexuality, and class, as well as its depiction of the American prison system, while academics have also begun to comment on the series. This special issue aims to continue the work initiated on this important television series, while adding to a growing body of scholarship on popular representations of punishment in the age of US mass incarceration.
The article argues for creating a mutually beneficial connection between postcolonial and television studies in order to understand how imperial legacies have shaped contemporary television regions. What it contributes to this work, more specifically, is the beginnings of a postcolonial account of intra-European broadcast regions. As both the original center of colonialism and the site of recent global economic, social and cultural crises, Europe is a major reference point in such attempts to re-historicize "empire" in order to understand industrial and ideological configurations within present-day media regions. I zoom in on three examples to highlight the imperial layers that have informed television in Europe: industrial collaborations between East and West, the imperial vestiges of 1960s to 1970s historical adventure series, and the imperial connections that tie together forms of TV comedy across Europe. The three examples demonstrate an opportunity to bypass the obligatory nation-state framework and begin to write the region’s history of television in a postcolonial, regional, and European perspective, outlining the imperial legacies of aesthetic, infrastructural and economic factors that underscore all cultural industries in the region.
This essay examines the depiction of labor in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, paying specific attention to gender and race. It argues that the program’s interest in the historical link between coerced prison labor and enslavement in the United States, as well as the more recent implication of prison privatization in the neoliberal assault on labor rights, is undermined by its privileging of affective and interpersonal dynamics over political solidarity.
This article argues that Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) uses postfeminist strategies to covertly promote prison reform and exercise a subtle critique of (female) mass incarceration while remaining constrained by the limitations of a postfeminist sensibility. Despite its contradictory and uneven agenda, OITNB should be seen as an important ally in the process of raising awareness about media (mis)representations of female prisoners, not least because of the program’s own self-reflexive commentary on tropes of the women in prison genre. The article calls for a tactical alliance between academic examinations of female imprisonment and critical sensibilities in popular culture to further more fundamental critiques of women’s incarceration, and its concomitant cost to individuals, families, and society.
This article interrogates Netflix’s use of unconventional marketing strategies for season 2 of Orange Is the New Black (OITNB), and argues that the company takes a mixed approach to cast a wider net for potential subscribers. One campaign emphasizes stereotypes that the program itself problematizes, and another humanizes the images of real-life incarcerated women. Using feminist textual analysis, we explore these campaigns in relation to intersectionality and analyze the construction of intersectional identities within Netflix’s two promotional campaigns: The New York Times’ paid promotional content "Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work" and the "Crazy Pyes" food truck campaign. Applying theoretical work from scholars such as Lotz and Gray, we discuss the ideological messaging of the campaigns, and examine how Netflix commodifies images of OITNB’s incarcerated, female characters, and also images of actual incarcerated women—and how these images function in exchange for viewership for Netflix and OITNB.
This article argues that Orange Is the New Black’s multiculturalist approach to diversity on television is indicative of the show’s inability and unwillingness to critique neoliberalism, and thus to effectively critique the prison industrial complex in the United States. It claims that because the women in prison genre demands a diverse set of characters, the show uses intraracial, class-based conflict to participate in a culture of "color blindness" on screen.
Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) offers Netflix viewers the chance to go behind bars and see the Prison Industrial Complex from the inside. Described by creator Jenji Kohan as "my activism," OITNB showcases the reprehensible treatment of elderly female prisoners, while simultaneously adhering to age-old tropes of femininity as manipulative. Using Goffman’s work on stigma as a framework, we examine representations of elderly women on OITNB, while also considering "binge-watching" (the process of consuming mass amounts of television) as a method of analysis. Binge-watching, or "marathon viewing," a temporal phenomenon laden with feelings of guilt and shame, works to highlight the stigma of temporality aging women on OITNB face. Thus, we offer "marathon viewing" as an alternative, stigma-free method of critical feminist media analysis. This article suggests marathon viewing is a product of media convergence, reliant on today’s streaming services and a highly productive method of media critique.
Drawing on the work of Lois McNay as a feminist extender of Foucault’s ideas about power and the possibility of resistance, this article offers a discussion of her theories of female agency as transferred onto Jenji Kohan’s TV adaptation of Piper Kerman’s prison autobiographical narrative Orange Is the New Black (2010). Situated within feminist epistemology, our approach is interdisciplinary, and we argue that the series is an instance of McNay’s neo-Foucauldian framework in practice, with her three dimensions of agency integrated in a critical discourse about life in women’s prisons. We contend that Kohan presents the protagonists as active subjects with potential for transformation. In our view, her narratives of resistance against the disciplinary practices of the institution can be read as political statements that promote consciousness-raising among viewers.
In 2002, during Silicon Valley’s recovery after the dot-com crash and the recent push for sexual equality in the United States and across the globe, various media began pondering the question of what to do if TiVo "thinks you are gay." Here, I analyze a King of Queens (1998–2007) episode and a The Mind of the Married Man (2001–2012) episode that center on this question and how they illustrate a sudden breakdown in sexual norms and identities even as they served to make TiVo’s personal video recorders (PVRs) and recommendation systems more attractive to the urban, liberal, and largely heterosexual viewer that TiVo desired. These narratives became deeply connected to TiVo’s identity in ways that made the PVR appear simultaneously transgressive and conventional—the birth of a new algorithmic culture and the furtherance of the television industry as status quo.
Although abstinence-only programs in the United States have historically failed to provide medically accurate information on sexual health, young people in the twenty-first century have turned to YouTube to answer their sex questions. The accessible and engaging format of the YouTube video has helped some sex educators achieve Internet fame among a mass audience of users devoted to watching their web series and interacting with them on social media. Using two sex education channels (Laci Green’s Sex Plus and Lindsey Doe’s Sexplanations) as case studies, this article investigates the ways in which YouTube stardom shapes the production of and engagement with online sex education videos. In doing so, the article uncovers how Internet fame helps to create a brand of sex education salient to audiences across media platforms that rely on the illusion of face-to-face interaction, the development of an authoritative yet approachable identity, and the cultivation of a virtual community.
Recent years have seen changes to the video game industry and the image of video game players. There are more games on the market and a larger variety of ways to play those games. Yet, despite market shifts, authors such as Shaw demonstrate that there are still tensions surrounding gamer identification. Even as next-generation systems (such as the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, and the Wii U) and casual gaming take hold of the market, tension remains between the perceptions of who is playing versus the reality of actual players. In our study, we perform a content analysis of video game commercials in 2013 to explore questions of diversity—particularly in terms of portrayals of the player’s sex and ethnicity—to consider how the gamer is represented in terms of physical and behavioral attributes.
Windowing—the process of managing the release sequence for content so as to maximize the returns from intellectual property rights (IPRs)—is changing because of transformations in the way that television is distributed and consumed. Drawing on original research into the experience of leading international television producers and distributors, this article breaks new ground by examining how rights owners are adjusting strategies for exploitation of the economic value in their content. Findings show how the rise of digital platforms and outlets whose footprints are diffuse and boundaries are porous is disrupting traditional windowing models. This has necessitated new thinking about how best to organize the sequential roll out of content so as to build audience demand, avoid overlaps, and maximize returns. This article argues that changes in the dynamics of television distribution have altered not just processes for exploiting the value in IPRs but also content and content production, with implications for audiences as well as industry.
This article analyzes how producers of advertising construct children as an advertising audience. Previous research has argued that marketers are bound to present children as competent and savvy to legitimize their own practices. Drawing on interviews with Swedish producers of child-directed online advertising, this study shows that marketers are not destined to portray children as competent as the idea of the vulnerable and incompetent child was an important construction among the Swedish producers. The Swedish producers constructed a multifaceted and ambivalent image of children, mixing the idea of the vulnerable and dependent child with the idea of the competent child. This study contributes to the wider understanding of media producers’ constructed audiences, particularly regarding how culture and media regulation shape the notion of the child audience among producers.
This article examines media participation through affective political economy, using as a case study the documentary Knuckle, a profile of Irish Traveller fighting. The film incorporates videos recorded by fighters and their families. Boasts and threats from one clan to another expand in circulation and become increasingly monetized as they are repackaged. Combing media political economy with Sarah Ahmed’s concept of affective economies, this article explores how, through such circulation, the videos help accomplish the affective work of world building, not only within Traveller society but also beyond it in realms such as mixed martial arts (MMA).
Since its release in August 2013, the critically acclaimed exploration game Gone Home has been mired in controversy, with politicized debates centering on its status as a game as well as on the much-lauded coming out narrative at its center. This article uses the varied response to Gone Home’s narrative and mechanical structures as an opportunity to reframe the discussion around the game in terms of how it invites players to engage with the objects and temporalities that compose its environment or, more specifically, its archive. Drawing from queer theory, historiography, and game studies, I argue that although Gone Home gestures toward the radical potential of archives, it ultimately undermines this potential by adhering to design conventions grounded in normative and normalizing logics. Through this analysis, I also suggest ways in which digital games can help us think through the politics of archives and of queerness as a historiographical method.
This article analyzes the male-only spaces present in four television series, FX’s The Shield, Nip/Tuck , Rescue Me, and ABC’s Boston Legal, which each include a gendered territory as a recurring feature. I argue that these homosocially segregated environments enforce boundaries against women and shelter intense bromance relationships that foreclose romantic relationships of any kind, acting as physical incarnations of troubling retrograde sexual politics and ideologies. I also assert that the "boys’ clubs" in which these narratives take place, enabled and empowered by the aesthetic dimensions of architecture and design, help establish workplace patriarchy as commonplace, reasonable, and benign. This article reveals that in these television boys’ clubs, problematic gender ideologies are protected and celebrated, misogyny is naturalized, and patriarchal beliefs and behaviors legitimized.
This article explores how two recent television drama miniseries, Top of the Lake and Les Revenants produce moments of the uncanny. I argue that both series produce the uncanny in formal ways made possible by conditions of a televisuality characterized by narrative complexity and a pronounced aesthetic. Both series draw on recognizable conventions of the police procedural genre, but each develops a dialectical narrative structure that rotates between a rational procedural plotline and an irrational, less linear narrative of a secretive community. In my exploration, I conceive of the televisual moment as a form of rupture and draw on Freud’s original sense of "the uncanny" as making strange what was fundamentally familiar. I argue that ultimately each series mobilizes "the uncanny" in distinctive ways, resulting in two endings with very different implications.
From U.S. Marine Corps helicopters rescuing "stranded" participants on The Biggest Loser to having individuals temporarily enlist in the Army on Extreme Weight Loss, these examples of military imagery work toward legitimizing the disciplinary logics put forth on reality weight-loss programs. Yet the military is simultaneously relying more on weight-loss and training practices originating in the commercial sector, including those found on TV, due to perceived "softness" and "fatness" within its ranks. This article thus examines the military-inspired disciplinary logics both reinforced and inadvertently challenged across weight-loss reality TV programs, the "fattening" and commercialization of the military, and the way each ultimately challenge the authority and expertise of the other, revealing numerous instances of disciplinary discrepancy.
This essay comments on the limits of new and social media to change the contemporary landscape of mediated sport in meaningful ways. The first part of the essay speaks to the "limits of the new." Here, the forces of "monetization" and the transition of new media into mainstream are considered. Arguments are presented that the "game" of new and social media will likely draft of media logics of legacy media rather than structurally change them. The second part of the essay speaks to the "lasting power of the mediasport interpellation." Here, theoretical strains from the work of Althusser concerning ideological state apparatuses and the nature of "hailing" are melded, on one hand, with the work of Bauman on "consumer sociality," and on the other, with that of Wenner on the communicative powers of sports dirt in a commodified environment. Consideration is given to the constancy of sport-anchored mediated hailing to establish (1) gender identities, (2) fan identities, and (3) consumer identities in ways that anchor subject position. It is argued that, given the cultural hold and embrace of these identities, new and social media will be more likely to engage them rather than mount structural resistance in ways that will facilitate meaningful changes in "lived experience" relations with contemporary sport.
TV Globo is the leading television channel in Brazil and is among the biggest television networks in the world. Globo is internationally renowned for its soap operas, but football has also been an important part of its popularity. Domestically, Globo is also known for its ambiguous relationships with the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s, a context highlighted by the controversial telecast of the 1970 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. More than four decades later, Brazilians have not forgotten this context, or the controversies raised by the relationship between Globo and the government. This article aims to discuss this subject, trying to better understand the relations between football, television, and political systems.
The surge of U.S. reality television shows focused on "making over" contestants has paralleled the decline of the welfare state, the eradication of Affirmative Action, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. This article examines MTV’s From G’s to Gents to consider questions of neoliberal governmentality and race. By analyzing the show's relationship to the prison system, enterprise culture, and heteronormativity, I argue that the show functions as a technology that governs black freedom under neoliberalism.
This article examines the position of the "runner" as an entry-level route into film and television production. Through the analysis of publicly available industry guidance materials, desirable characteristics and dispositions associated with working as a runner are identified. A recurring understanding emerges in these materials that the "rite of passage" of working as a runner is a necessary step for those seeking to break into film and TV production. In turn, tensions are revealed with perspectives from higher education students who question the value of mundane entry-level work and stress their degree experiences as a means to negotiate and challenge seemingly established career pathways.
For transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming people, emergent media technologies offer new outlets for self-representation, outlets that often last for only a brief moment. This article examines trans culture on the website Tumblr during the period from March 2011, when the authors began researching the platform, to May 2013, when Yahoo! paid creator David Karp over a billion dollars for the site. Through auto-ethnographic dialogue about the loose social networks within Tumblr to which the authors contributed during this phase, the article explores ephemeral aspects of self-representation at the intersection of postmodern art practice, sexual politics, and queer subjectivities. From at least 2011 to 2013, people collectively oriented in opposition to dominant discourses of gender and sexuality used Tumblr to refashion straight cisgender norms and to create everyday art in a hybrid media space.
Media scholars have begun to examine how masculinities function in the media through exploration of a variety of texts and personas; however, most have sought to do so by using textual analysis. We argue that this emphasis on textual analysis has overshadowed scholarship on media audiences, limiting opportunities to understand how audiences’ gender identities are affected by mediated masculinities. Through interviews with viewers of HBO’s Entourage, we examine how viewers apply their attitudes and beliefs about masculinity to Entourage’s characters and use Entourage’s portrayal of masculinities to think through their own gender identities. We found that participants were drawn to a fantasy version of a powerful, dominant masculinity and felt less favorably about characters who exhibited forms of masculinity that incorporated attitudes and behaviors deemed feminine. Our findings suggest that scholarship on the crisis in masculinity, and theorization of hegemonic masculinity generally, would be strengthened with critical qualitative audience studies.
One of the fundamental issues in the relation between television and sports has been the transference from watching a game or a sport in the field (the stadium) to the viewing experience through a proxy (the medium). The present article argues that sport broadcasts on television in the twenty-first century do not merely provide a sophisticated view of what takes place at the stadium but a new creation with unique characteristics. By using the latest technology-driven examples and assuming that other ones are already being used such as the "second screen" combination of watching TV and simultaneously using a smartphone or tablet for better statistics or social interaction, it is asserted that "being there" has become less imperative, as alternatives to watching matches live and in person at many sporting events have become in many cases better options.
Globally, the digital media has played a key role in generating attention, creating controversy and showcasing changes in media coverage of women’s sports. Social media have made sports coverage an interpersonal, intercultural and international public domain. For the news media, however, the values used to cover and construct representation women athletes and women’s sports have not changed. An historic overview of media coverage of women’s sports is compared with today’s digitized, diversified and globalized sports coverage. The Olympics provide a media microcosm to explore gender equity in sports reporting.
In this essay, we examine a series of platform, content, reception, and lifestyle factors likely to shape sports fans’ use of traditional and newer digital media. Because of signal fidelity, screen size, presence, and the rights to air top-tier sports events, television is likely to remain the medium of choice for fans ready to watch live sports. Fans will use newer media, with their interactive options and affordance of agency to supplement and enhance their viewing experience. Although traditional and newer media are competing for fan attention and advertising dollars, use of these media for live sports is not a zero-sum game. This may not be the case for sports journalism and related programming about sports where, over time, fans may turn to newer media at the expense of the old.
This article highlights sport broadcasting as an emergent battlefield of "globalization from above and below" based on analysis of the strained relationship between Al-Jazeera Sport (AJS) and sports fans in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over subscription fees to the 2010 and 2014 World Cup games. The article illustrates how sports globalization weakened national broadcasters’ bidding power and allowed corporations to turn the World Cup from a free to high-fee event, leaving angry citizens from the MENA region to fend for themselves. A survey of online media illustrates how these angry citizens shared tactics to resist these fees.
The death of television has been long predicated in the digital age, yet it remains a powerful mediator of live sports. This article focuses on football and examines the implications for the sport of the move to an age of screens and content. These may be large screens in public places or in our homes or those at work or smaller screens carried in the palm of our hands, but what we use them for, how content gets onto those screens, and the implications for sports and sports fans remain compelling questions in the digital age. The article argues that through reflecting on major media sport events such as the FIFA World Cup, we see patterns of continuity in the role played by television as well as evidence of change.
This piece is a short rejoinder to César Bolaño’s paper The Political Economy of the Internet and related articles (e.g., Comor, Foley, Huws, Reveley, Rigi and Prey, Robinson) that center around the relevance of Marx’s labor theory of value for understanding social media. I argue that Dallas Smythe’s assessment of advertising was made to distinguish his approach from the one by Baran and Sweezy. Smythe developed the idea of capital’s exploitation of the audience at a time when both feminist and anti-imperialist Marxists challenged the orthodox idea that only white factory workers are exploited. The crucial question is how to conceptualize productive labor. This is a theoretical, normative, and political question. A mathematical example shows the importance of the "crowdsourcing" of value-production on Facebook. I also point out parallels of the contemporary debate to the Soviet question of who is a productive or unproductive worker in the Material Product System.
The privatization of the Internet meant not simply a passage from a state-logic organization to an economic one but something more complex. The year 1995 marked a disruption when the National Science Foundation (NSF), the public agency that controlled and exploited the network, transferred its regulatory responsibilities to the private sector. Despite the system’s provision of free access to information, the Internet’s entire economic logic was modified when advertising became the standard norm. The objective of this article is to summarize the history of the Internet and the points that are important to understanding its actual political and economic logic via an emphasis on social networking sites. Our argument also involves a Marxist critique of a theoretical element that Fuchs has contributed to this discussion.
The experience of watching sport on television is changing with the proliferation of screens, the diversification of screen-based content, and the extension of interactive screen-facilitated communication. In recent decades, sport broadcast television viewing opportunities shifted from a primary reliance on a single "box in the corner" in the domestic living room environment to the availability of a multiplicity of television sets in different household spaces. Later, as television screen size increased, picture quality improved, and public viewing sites multiplied, new interactive screen-based devices emerged that have enabled audiences simultaneously to watch sport in many different spaces and to communicate about the experience to distant others. This "live" performance of mediated sport spectatorship parallels in some respects "live" mediated athletic performance, involving sharing the now and the making of digital memory.
This article investigates how the rise of social media affects European public service broadcasting (PSB), particularly in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. We explore the encounter of "social" and "public" on three levels: the level of institution, professional practice, and content. After investigating these three levels, we address the more general question of how public broadcasters are coping with the challenges of social media. How can public television profit from the abilities of social media to engage new young audiences (and makers) without compromising public values? And will PSB be able to extend the creation of public value outside its designated space to social media at large? While the boundaries between public and corporate online space are becoming progressively porous, the meaning of "publicness" is contested and reshaped on the various levels of European public broadcasting.
This article uses the neoclassical economic principles of substitutable goods and switching costs to examine how the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) intended its digital media ecosystem, UltraViolet, to intervene in the U.S. market for long-form digital video. The article provides a detailed blueprint of the ecosystem’s industrial arrangement, an account of its bungled rollout, and an analysis of the DECE’s long-term strategy. The piece also contributes to a dialogue on the use of economics within the field of digital distribution scholarship by arguing for the value of neoclassical principles within this field.
The labor of video game testers has barely registered within political-economic analyses of work practices in the game industry. This article addresses this gap through a critical deployment of the concept of precarity and its multiform nature experienced by game testers. Drawing on Harry Braverman’s concept of "degradation of labor," I aim to contribute to media labor literature by introducing the concept of "degradation of fun," where testers are alienated from play and forced to develop instrumental and selective ways of play. I make the argument that as opposed to popular representations, game testing is a decidedly precarious labor, due to its assumed low-skill status, and because of the existence of a large reserve army of labor, which depresses the wages and renders testers expendable. Ultimately, the "immateriality" and joy of testing as labor comes with material physical and bodily pains, and sentiments of second-class citizenship.
Using ethnographic observation, this study explores the television (TV) formatting of Ugly Wudi, the Chinese version of Ugly Betty. The article explicates how Chinese producers followed the "bible" of format production, differentiated ideological points of contestation, and modified narratives contradictory to Chinese ideology in the localization process. Ugly Betty’s localization reflects the political, cultural, and commercial imperatives in China. The producers recreated a televised drama with its own unique Chinese modernity, which invited a large spectatorship within the boundary of the current politico-social landscape. It also initiated an innovative marketing model that could maximize profits through format localization. As a new industry development strategy, TV formatting brings western values into China and is changing the landscape of Chinese TV.
It has been argued that cuteness is emerging as one of the dominant aesthetic categories of the twenty-first century. In this essay, I analyze the star text of actress and singer Zooey Deschanel to trace the impact of cuteness on the political energies of "Millenials," the generational cohort arguably most affected by the deleterious aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis. Deschanel is a particularly multi-mediated celebrity with an extensive presence in new media, a hit sitcom, and a number of commercial endorsements. I analyze how cuteness facilitates Deschanel’s appeal to both mainstream and alternative modalities, and trace the affective power of a cute aesthetic to harness commercial imperatives and aid in the creation of a juxtapolitical intimate public that utilizes a "restorative nostalgia" to neutralize political energies amid straitened economic and social conditions.
Digital visual effects (VFX) now comprise one-third of total production spending on major feature film releases. They also are a significant and growing component of production budgets for television programming and commercials. Yet, despite the rising status of VFX, this sector of the media business has been in turmoil for over a decade, a situation made palpable by recurring waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, most notably including Rhythm & Hues, the company that scored the 2013 Oscar for VFX in Life of Pi. This essay analyzes the increasingly globalized mode of production in the VFX industry. We critically examine the specific practices and protocols of the VFX business, demonstrating their impact on workers and labor-organizing efforts. Tying together insights from political economy, creative economy, and production studies, the essay offers a middle-range analysis that connects specific local labor conditions to broader trends in the media industries.
Since 2006, Kuwait-based Teshkeel’s The 99, billed as the world’s first Islamic superhero team, has developed into a transnational cross-media brand, with theme park tie-ins, merchandizing, and an animated series coproduced with Endemol sold to nearly a dozen countries around the world. The 99 is intended to be a transformative brand that repairs and redefines Islam’s reputation through branding and marketing. Yet, attempts to bring the TV series to U.S. audiences have repeatedly been met with accusations that The 99 is attempting to indoctrinate non-Muslims into Shari’a law. American resistance to The 99 reveals both the limits of consumer capitalism as a great equalizer and some of the incompatibilities of brand marketing and correcting misperceptions about Islam. In particular, I argue that emphasis placed on "brand authenticity" functions as a double-edged sword for Islamic brands, which are simultaneously perceived as both inauthentic and too authentic for broader commercial appeal.
As the quintessential digital archive, Facebook no longer requires an introduction; its user-base is currently estimated at one billion profiles. On the front end, it is the epitome of the postmodern living archive. Its underbelly, however, remains much less explored and theorized. What kinds of servers are required to host such large amounts of "free" information, offering up data so rapidly, across so many platforms? Taken together, these pragmatic questions inform an important theoretical intervention: these dislocated centers—existing in "enterprise zones" and arctic hideaways—not only effectively blind us to the potential environmental costs of our everyday obsession with self-archiving but also demand a serious revision of the preservation ideals that underpin the archive. This article offers up a series of provocations about data storage centers, as the archive’s underbelly, with the intent of reconnecting Facebook to the bodies and machines that enable it and the ideals that inform it.
This article analyzes the operation and subsequent failure of TiVo in Australia. Drawing on actor-network theory, we unpack the TiVo assemblage throughout our paper, and look at the various human, technical, and institutional interventions that constituted it and constrained its possible futures. This analysis will be conducted by tracing how TiVo attempted to establish itself as a viable social and technical assemblage and assessing its influence on "new locales of regulation, new practices, new ethical stances, and new institutions." Our approach offers an inclusive analytical lens by considering how a collection of actors—large and small, human and nonhuman—were actively involved in assembling and disassembling the network required by TiVo for an ongoing presence in Australia. It also contributes to a growing body of work that outlines the usefulness of ANT to media studies scholarship.
This article presents comparative results about the ways Brazilian working-class and middle-class youth interpret class messages in telenovelas. This work thus explores class differences in light of the current context of Brazilian peripheral modernization and argues for the continuing centrality of telenovelas in communicating to cross-class audiences about modernity. It further develops a systematic methodology for reception studies to account for the complexity of everyday sociocultural interactions and how hegemony functions. The conclusion suggests preferred and negotiated readings of poverty may be associated with telenovela viewing, which, in turn, promotes faith in personal merit and obscures Brazilian inequalities.
The success of Canada’s Little Mosque on the Prairie (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC], 2007–2012) suggests that multicultural broadcasting policy can serve as a tool to overcome the tendency in Western media to stereotype Muslims. But close examination of the show’s genesis and production reveals that policy was one factor within a complex network of factors, including the religious beliefs of the creator and executive producers, the desire for relevance among network executives, and the need to devise strategies for funding production. In other words, policy’s effect was indirect: it did not cause the production of Little Mosque, but it did provide an impetus for the CBC to take a risk it might not otherwise have taken.
This article examines the affective labor of nightlife photographers within the surveillance economy of social media. I examine nightlife photographers as "below the line" cultural laborers who employ their identities and communicative capacities to create and circulate images of nightlife online. These images stimulate interaction that can be watched, tracked, and responded to by the databases of social media. The study draws on interviews with nightlife photographers to examine how they account for the creative and promotional aspects of their labor. I argue that the analytical capacities of social media databases, and the modes of promotion they facilitate, depend in the first instance on the affective labor of cultural intermediaries like nightlife photographers.
This article investigates marketers’ new media strategies targeting the millennial generation. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with industry professionals and an assortment of business discourses, I find that this consumer demographic is routinely conceptualized as "digital natives" who exhibit a "networked hypersociality" and a "participatory exhibitionism." A variety of innovative promotional tactics are being used to solicit self-expression and cultivate community within branded spaces and flows online. This development could reshape the advertising industry as commercialization further blurs with social and cultural content, obfuscating branding’s persuasive purpose from audiences. It also raises concerns about commercialization hijacking the political potential of an often-cited "empowering" new media environment as well as diminishing opportunity for youth identity to exist autonomous from the consumer marketplace at a time of escalating personal debt.
Although most massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) remain entrenched in a binary system of gendered avatars, the limited representational framework of avatar creation is only one among many different strategies for what sociologists refer to as "doing gender." This essay explores how a doing gender approach might be useful for analyzing the interactive dimensions of gender play in the rich communicative environments of MMOs. Specifically, this essay explores how players do (or do not) hold one another accountable to sex category membership through their interactions, in so doing either reproducing or resisting normative forms of gender. A doing gender approach, I argue, holds out the promise of being held accountable to a different set of rules for doing gender—of doing gender differently or, in a more utopian sense, perhaps doing away with it altogether.
This study analyzes the identity politics of Adult Swim’s brand culture in the context of post-network American television’s technological, textual, and cultural shifts. It shows how Adult Swim texts and paratexts, news stories about the network, and industry trade journals discursively construct the Adult Swim audience as an embodiment of dominant cultural identities (i.e., young, white, heterosexual masculinity), while simultaneously framing this community within discourses of subcultural taste and oppositional distinction. In doing so, the network alternately profits from and disavows white-male privilege by promoting this structurally dominant and highly valued group as a cultist, counterhegemonic fan base. This articulation of young, white, heterosexual masculinity to subcultural politics of taste and community both reflects and feeds the continued valuation of the young-white-male demographic in a nominally fragmented American media environment.
In this article, I discuss the lessons from South Korea’s digital switchover, considering its development in the process and the remaining challenges. South Korea completed the digital switchover on December 31, 2012, but the analogue cable conversion to digital cable has not yet been completed for some ten million households. Furthermore, a mere 2.6% of all households eligible for government support benefitted from the support scheme. Although Korea embarked on its journey toward digital television relatively early, its progress has been slow and the outcome was only a partial success. I examine the national politics leading up to pilot programs for eliminating analogue television signals in two phases: Wuljin, Kangjin, and Danyang during September and November 2010, followed by Jeju in June 2011. Based on these experiences and the diagnosis of the current situation after the switchover, I conclude that South Korea’s digital switchover is a partial success and there is continued need for a centralized hub collaborating between the government, the broadcasters, and the television manufacturers to communicate more effectively and to increase public awareness to overcome the remaining challenges.
In the ongoing debates about the role of immaterial labor in digital media economics, the work of feminist researchers into affective labor performed in the home—"women’s work"—has barely featured. This article is an attempt to address this gap in the dominant framework for discussing consumer labor in digital contexts. It draws on feminist frameworks, particularly the work of Fortunati, in arguing that affective, immaterial labor has a variable and often indirect relationship to capitalist exchange. This indirect relationship allows the products of such work to retain their use-values while nevertheless remaining implicated in systems of exchange. This in turn draws attention to the immaterial product of reproductive labor, which is the social order itself, and the importance of the disciplining function of reproductive labor.
This article examines drumnyc.org, the website of New York–based South Asian activist organization Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), and interrogates the politics of the site within the overlapping contexts of the racialization of South Asian immigrants, online activism, and desi cultures in the United States. My central argument is that drumnyc.org foregrounds working-class South Asian immigrants as active political subjects negotiating their pathways to cultural citizenship in the United States by articulating belonging to technologies of race, transnational class formations, and network cultures. Drumnyc.org also exemplifies the web’s role in revealing the instability of ideals of desi diasporic identification with the "original" South Asian homeland in the face of new temporal and spatial expressions of immigrant belonging such as websites devoted to representing and advancing working-class desi activism.
This article will explore the industrial character of the Korean broadcasting industry from the perspective of its creative workforce. This study focuses on the independent television production sector, which epitomizes current changes in the Korean cultural industry in terms of greater global integration, increasing commercialization, and digitalization. Qualitative research results illustrate that the "digitalized flexible production regime" of independent production companies exacerbates working conditions and job insecurity. Under this regime, workers see themselves as "creators" and "freelancers" for only a limited period. Findings suggest that an antagonistic relation exists between "the workers’ passion for more creative and liberal work" and "the survival of the industry" within Korean broadcasting.
Smartphones are increasingly becoming an all-pervasive and embedded part of everyday life. In this phenomenon, the rise of high-quality camera phones and growth in distribution services via social media has heralded new forms of visuality. With geotagging almost a default setting, these new visualities are marked by a different relationship between information, co-presence, and place. In particular, these new visualities are shaping, and shaped by, gender. One key location that has become famous for its high deployment of camera phone practices, especially self-portraiture (sel-ca) by women, is Seoul, South Korea. However, as camera phone practices increasingly intertwine with locative media, we see a shift in the motivations, genres, and affects. In this article, I explore some preliminary studies conducted into women’s use of camera phones and how, with the overlay of locative media like geotagging, this is shifting the role of camera phone images in depicting place and intimacy.
In this article, I consider the formal and textual attributes of Apartment Therapy, a popular design blog, to argue that it offers "aspirational disposability" as an imaginative solution to commodity capitalism’s problems of both overconsumption and conformity. I first historically ground my discussion in an examination of the roots of midcentury modernism and the notion of the home as a curative space. I then discuss "everyday modernism" as a consumerist formation that informs aspirational disposability, particularly through Ikea goods. Finally, I turn to an analysis of the main features of Apartment Therapy that articulate aspirational disposability. Midcentury modernism, and its disposable incarnations from Ikea, allows readers to "hack" material culture to construct an affective domestic space, engaging in therapeutics of the self while substituting taste for class mobility.
The article explores television scheduling in the phase of proliferation, a period following phases of monopoly and competition, characterized by a drastic multiplication of content, television channels, and new platforms. Based on interviews with professionals involved in scheduling and cross-platform promotion at Norway’s four main broadcasters, a sample study of actual cross-platform promotion, and relevant statistics for the Norwegian TV market, the article explores changes in scheduling with a particular focus on the distinction between commercial and public service television. The transformations in scheduling are addressed in relation to the broader question of how television is developing in the "post-network" era. The article argues that contrary to claims that scheduling has become obsolete, analyses show that it continues to be a central craft within the television industry, one responding actively to times of change, revising its tools and developing new ones.
This article explores the use of the Black American cultural tradition of "signifyin’" as a means of performing racial identity online. In the United States, race is deeply tied to corporeal signifiers. But, in social media, the body can be obscured or even imitated (e.g., by a deceptive avatar). Without reliable corporeal signifiers of racial difference readily apparent, Black users often perform their identities through displays of cultural competence and knowledge. The linguistic practice of "signifyin’," which deploys figurative language, indirectness, doubleness, and wordplay as a means of conveying multiple layers of meaning, serves as a powerful resource for the performance of Black cultural identity on Twitter.
The FOX television series Glee has been lauded for its progressive portrayals of gay characters and criticized for trafficking in stereotypes. We position Glee within a transmedia framework, using textual analysis of program storylines, ethnographic fieldwork, and messages about Glee circulated on the microblogging site Twitter, to examine fan responses to and uses of Glee. We find that young adults experience and deploy Glee in two ways. First, they use Glee as a text to interpret their own life experiences, and imagine how they might articulate queer desires and acceptance of them. Second, as a malleable and mobile symbolic object, Glee acts as a strategic device used to signal identifications with and levels of awareness and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT)–identifying people. Although some of the engagement with Glee on social media echoed textual themes, we also find devoted fan engagement that diverges from that of our ethnographic observations.
This article presents the results of a study of social media uses and standards from the perspectives of online newspaper managers in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela, Spain, and Portugal.1 Interviews with online news managers and a content analysis of journalists’ use of Facebook and Twitter accounts show that cultural, economic, and organizational factors handicap news outlets’ adoption of social media. At the same time, evidence shows that these professionals’ drive and enthusiasm for transitioning to online and using social media have made meaningful changes in the ways news is produced in the Ibero-American region.
This article analyzes Pranked—a reality-TV show that takes amateur videos from YouTube and formats them into MTV broadcasts—to reconsider the culture industry as social media reconfigures it. For television’s first seven decades, the calculated infliction of severe pain on unsuspecting victims was not deemed suitable for mass consumption. To explain why such broadcasts are possible now, this study analyzes the underappreciated role of entertainment insurers, advancements in social media technologies that allowed the culture industry to circumvent entertainment insurers, and a subcultural turn that valorized sadistic pranking. By offloading risk from the insured and compensated professionals of traditional media to the uninsured and uncompensated amateurs of social media, Pranked inaugurates a fundamentally novel shift in the culture industry: a shift from creation to curation. The article concludes by returning to Horkheimer and Adorno’s original culture industry critique to assess the stakes of the turn from broadcasting distraction to broadcasting suffering.
Paying particular attention to the ways in which lesbian consumers and programming are co-constituted, this article examines lesbian programming on cable TV as a strategic method for attracting audiences and branding networks. Drawing on interviews with TV industry practitioners and market researchers, I examine the impact of institutional beliefs and practices on the production of lesbian programming. Based on these interviews and investigation of the contemporary cable and marketing industries, I consider the use of lesbian programming as a method for targeting cable’s increasingly fragmented audiences. I use the basic cable network Bravo and the premium cable network Showtime as case studies, positing an emerging trend in television: cable channels use lesbian programming to tap into multiple markets. What I have termed multicasting, targeting several distinct audience demographics, provides a framework for understanding why lesbian images are commodifiable in the postnetwork cable TV landscape.
Known for its sophistication, enigmatic narrative, and small but voracious fan base, the British series The Prisoner is an enduring example of cult television. However, its import to American television beginning in 1968 and its reimagining as an AMC miniseries in 2009 demonstrates that the program’s endurance has as much to do with its viability as a commodity as its value as a canonic cult text. By tracing the industrial and press discourses around various incarnations of The Prisoner on American television, this article argues that show’s cult status has been perpetuated, in large part, by the industrial logic, marketing, and branding that has structured the rebroadcast and reimagining of the series. As such, this article builds on studies of cult television by examining how such discourses may be co-opted by the industry, repackaged as a commodity, and sold to advertisers and audiences.
This article analyzes main melody TV drama—an official genre that has emerged in the context of China’s most recent social and cultural transformations when the old socialist TV drama was losing viewership. Focusing on the TV drama Provincial Party Secretary as a case study, the author argues that main melody TV drama reconstructs socialist TV drama with a Hollywoodized creative strategy through which the didactic tradition of socialist TV drama has been transformed from direct propaganda to ideological persuasion. The development of main melody TV dramas since the 1990s indicates that a soft and repackaged propagandistic model has been developed in contemporary Chinese television with the aim of revitalizing the Party’s ideological control over society.
This article examines the horror movie industry’s mobilization of web content and digital distribution outlets, such as video-on-demand (VOD), and how specific fan practices get encoded into business models shaping web 2.0 strategies. Specifically, it examines the emergence of the multiplatform brand Fearnet, a joint cable channel, website, and VOD service owned by Comcast, Lionsgate, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. It argues that the service, which features horror movies taken from the Sony/MGM library and includes a host of interactive features, not only illustrates the changing impact of new media technologies on film distribution but also the growing industrial utility of VOD services for both cable and film industries. By relying on subcultural practices and discourses specific to horror fandom, digital services like Fearnet act as branded media conduits for the various markets and commerce that sustain niche-oriented categories of horror as a commodified experience.
This article explores the site-specific location and objecthood of the Swedish television during its inception. It offers an understanding not only of how people in Sweden experienced the arrival of the television but also of the ways in which its material properties fashioned peoples’ use of space and how this worked in tandem with social stratifications, national discourses, and gendered ideals. Engaging in the historical and material actuality of the television offers additional insights into the ways in which the television is experienced today, and how these experiences continuously contribute to fashioning peoples’ experience of the TV object.
Simultaneous media use has become a prominent part of the contemporary media landscape. While critical media scholars continue to presume that audiences engage media one at a time, industries and advertisers are increasingly examining how viewers split their attentions across multiple screens at once, and how best to integrate these screens into synergized content streams. This article relates industry discourses on simultaneous media to longer-standing interest in audience inattention, specifically the ways that producers are reconceptualizing multitasking from a distracting activity to a potentially interactive one. Examining these discourses provides a foundation from which critical scholars can engage with the multiscreen contexts in which audiences use new media, while critiquing the presumptions of interactivity at the heart of convergence culture.
This essay contributes to a materialist understanding of institutional dynamics in commercial television in the United States. It considers the mutual constitution of business administration and social developments in technology. It is argued herein that ongoing organizational shifts in television are motivated by the imperative to exploit the full productive capacity of commercial television. A case study of Canoe Ventures demonstrates that television increasingly employs the evaluative criteria of direct marketing to rationalize the process of producing audiences-as-commodities. The business of commercial television is being organized to verify return on investment and to locate causality between advertising and sales.
This article explores the ethical implications of the rise of a new style of personality presenter-led wildlife programming in the 1990s, reliant, in part, on digital video and aimed at creating a sense of "liveness." It takes the BBC series Big Cat Diary (1996) as its focus, looking at how the BBC responded to increased market pressure by creating the first wildlife docusoap. Despite the lightweight connotations of the docusoap format, this series put forward a new ethical practice for representing the lives of individual wild animals. Through an exploration of how ethics are implicated in changing conditions of production and evolving media technologies, it is proposed that debates about the ethics of wildlife documentary need to be recentered on the complex ethical relationships between wildlife documentary makers and the animals and ecosystems they film rather than on issues of audience deception.
At the start of the 2000s, there were dire predictions about the future of music videos. Faced with falling industry profits, ballooning production costs, and music television stations that cared more about ratings, music videos no longer enjoyed the industry support they once had. But as music videos were being sidelined by the music and television industries, they were rapidly becoming integral to online video aggregates and social media sites. The "days of the $600,000 video" might be gone, but in recent years, a new music video culture and economy has emerged. Exploring how music videos are being used, how they are being made, and how money is being made from them, the article not only documents the impact that digital convergence has had on music videos but it also describes the lingering role that older music and media industry paradigms might play in shaping the future of online video.
This article explores the representations and tonal qualities of British "structured reality" programming. Focusing on The Only Way Is Essex and Made in Chelsea, it investigates their glocalizing of the model established by MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills. It argues that while they blur boundaries between docusoap, drama, and soap opera, the British programs also recognize and foreground issues of construction for their reality TV-literate youth audience. It suggests the programs play a key role in their respective channel identities and the ideologies of British youth television, connecting to larger issues of class, gender, and taste. This is articulated through their regional and classed femininities, with the article exploring how the programs draw on classed ideologies surrounding "natural" and "excessive" femininities and of the role of this in their engagement with construction and camp play. This play contributes to the tonal shift offered by the British programs, mixing the melodrama of the MTV programs with a knowing, at times comic edge that can tip into mockery. In doing so, the programs offer their audience a combination of performative self-awareness and emotional realism that situates them clearly within British youth television.
Based on fifteen months of fieldwork with television and new media producers at the transnational "European" public television channel, ARTE, this article describes the ways in which staff are in the midst of reimagining the channel’s "audience." On the one hand, staff continue to understand television audiences as primarily national, and only nationally coherent; on the other hand, ARTE’s audiences are understood to be fast-dispersing as a result of new broadcast technologies and streaming web content. To reach dispersing audiences, and to better articulate its programming across borders, ARTE has partly shifted its efforts toward regathering its public through international events, festivals, and other off-screen engagements where its viewers become differently coherent and knowable. The article argues that such a strategy re-emplaces "fans and followers" of ARTE in ways that might foster collective identifications in ways that may be literally replacing those engendered by traditional public broadcasting.
This article traces the history of in-vision announcers in public service television in Flanders and Norway from the public service monopoly days over the multichannel to the postlinear television landscape. The title "Hello Ladies" refers to the everyday nickname for in-vision announcers, used by particularly Norwegian viewers. It analyzes the shifting role of in-vision announcers focusing on four key functions: creating flow, personalization, live-ness, and branding, evaluating their respective relevance—and that of linear, general interest, public service television—in the move to a postlinear television context dominated by digitization, convergence, and trends to time shifting and on-demand services. Although the functions of guide and flow, personalization, and live-ness seem to have taken a backseat, in-vision announcers remain central as part of the unique selling proposition of television branding, indicating the continued importance not just of in-vision announcers but of (public service broadcasting) linear, general interest television channels.
This article presents a cultural revision on the ongoing debate about the new media’s civic influence, as well as that of the "old media" Television. Specifically, it introduces the notion of "cultural citizenship" into the theoretical discussion and empirical pursuits. In exploring how this concept comes to play at the intersection of television and new media, this article sheds light on the continuing debate within the theoretical camp of "cultural citizenship," expands the notion of "political talk" in current studies of media and democracy, and pushes the field from normative and instrumental limitations toward a more culturally rich and comprehensive direction. I systematically examine public discourses surrounding a popular talent show in China’s cyberspace and show the connection between nonpolitical media experiences and political expressions. In doing so, I also discuss the internet’s unique potential in lending voice to ordinary Chinese citizens outside the mainstream media.
During the ten years that have passed since the mediated terrorist attacks in the United States on 9.11, 2001, they have become—through instant historicization as well as endless repetitions—stable points of reference for transnational collective memory. Focalizing the anniversaries of September 11, 2002 and 2011, on Swedish television, this article pursues how the medium annually commemorates the tragedy. Fusing television research with memory studies, the argument is that we may approach the anniversaries as an electronic "lieu de mémorie": a material-symbolic space reappropriated annually as media become vehicles for "working through" in commemoration, mourning, debate, and critique. Despite the fragmentation of both television and collective memory in the context of digitalization, on the anniversaries, Swedish television promotes itself as a central "nucleus" for connectivity offering viewers a return to the traumatic site—to the television set—while interpellating them as a "global we," of media witnesses.
The task of this article is to analyze the political economy of Wikipedia. We discuss the specifics of Wikipedia’s mode of production. The basic principles of what we call the info-communist mode of production will be presented. Our analysis is grounded in Marxist philosophy and Marxist political economy, and is connected to the current discourse about the renewal and reloading of the idea of communism that is undertaken by thinkers like Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. We explore to which extent Wikipedia encompasses principles that go beyond the capitalist mode of production and represent the info-communist mode of production. We present the subjective dimension of the mode of production (cooperative labor), the objective dimension of the mode of production (common ownership of the means of production), and the subject–object dimension of the mode of production (the effects and products of the mode of production).
This article reconstructs how Americans processed their experience of the assassination, mourning period, and funeral of John F. Kennedy over a four-day period in November 1963 as fundamentally a "television trauma." Using viewer mail sent to NBC news anchors in the midst of the "Black Weekend," as well as some surveys and interviews conducted at the time by social scientists, the article argues for the centrality of television to the experience. It also explores how the relative "newness" of the television phenomenon required Americans to grapple with the "uncanniness," as well as the anguish, of what they were going through. The letters show viewers highly conscious of the medium and of television news personnel as workers in an era before television news had become so routinized and conventionalized as to be taken for granted and invisible as a medium.
Screenwriting has been the subject of extensive literature in the past three decades in relation to both the techniques of the trade and the pursuit of profit and fame. This article demonstrates that how-to screenwriting manuals both feed into and exemplify the new cultural economy and the position(s) of creative labor within that economy by offering the opportunity to dream up and invent one’s own career and providing blueprints for doing so. The article draws on a critical discourse analysis study of a selection of the most popular manuals and analyzes the discursive strategies the texts deploy to concretize aspects of screenwriting labor, from story structure and formatting to pitching and rewriting. The manuals are discussed as a type of psy-technology and as a sophisticated form of professional self-help, and they are also analyzed as precarious governmental tools that shape industries, practices, and subjects but in ambiguous and chaotic ways.
Despite The Wire’s (HBO, 2002-2008) successful, interesting structural analysis of urban politics and problems, its (few) portrayals of African American mothers exhibit a view of black motherhood as irresponsible, irrational, and emasculating, a view that hearkens back to that of the Moynihan Report. In this article, I look at the fourth season of the show to examine how mothers’ desires are presented as being central to the negative outcomes their sons face, as well as unrelentingly and sexually pathological. This aspect has been paid little if any attention in the show’s overwhelmingly positive critical reception; I explore the show’s political economic network context and the effects of The Wire’s self-proclaimed "authenticity" in furthering this discourse among its viewers. The treatment of these characters, encouraging mothers to "help [themselves], but [not] take too much" imbricates The Wire in the discourses of personal responsibility and self-governance that undergird neoliberal regimes it critiques.
This article focuses on 4chan’s /b/ board, a—if not the—pillar of online trolling activity. In addition to chronicling the history of the site, as well as the emergence of the nebulous collective known as Anonymous, the article considers the ways in which early media representations of and subsequent reactions to trolling behaviors on /b/ helped create and sustain an increasingly influential subculture. Echoing Stanley Cohen’s (1972) analysis of moral panics, the article goes on to postulate that trolls and mainstream media outlets, specifically Fox News, are locked in a cybernetic feedback loop predicted upon spectacle; each camp amplifies and builds upon the other’s reactions, thus entering into an unintended but highly synergistic congress.
The emergence of "prosumers" and "produsers" suggests that production and reception are more conflated now than ever before. But is their mediation through the performance of hybrid roles new? And were the two ever separate? This article criticizes social theories of the media and "production studies" for overstating the distinction between producers and audiences and the instrumental means whereby the former engage the latter. It rejects this postulate of a "structured break" between production and reception by discussing the producers’ tacit knowledge of the audience, their reflexivity and socialization, and their use of "audience images." The article then draws on Goffman (1959) and Meyrowitz (1985) to propose a new model for understanding production: as a social situation sustained by participants but explicitly oriented to an absent third party: the audience. It concludes by discussing the implications of the model for the study of production and producers.
The situation comedy Madam & Eve (2000-2005) debuted on e.tv, a free-to-air South African television channel, and emerged as one of the most popular local shows, even winning international recognition. Raising pertinent issues of race, class, and gender within the context of domestic service in postcolonial South Africa, Madam & Eve follows the interconnected lives of Gwen Anderson, a well-to-do, white "Madam," and Eve, a younger, working-class, and black "Maid." Although directly confronting inequalities of race and class by integrating the perspectives of the maid and the employer, and undermining hierarchies of power through the unruliness of mimicry, the comedy confines racial resolution to the individual. By scapegoating individuals for their discriminatory attitudes, and effectively quelling the motivation for collective resistance, the show embodies the larger industrial trend of promoting profitability at the expense of progressive politics.
In an age in which social networking sites have become the preferred way of socializing online, the question of how to think about the contours of friendship in and through these mediated spaces becomes all the more important. In contrast to much existing research on online friendship, this article takes on a software-sensitive approach. Through a close reading of various sociotechnical processes in which friendship is activated on Facebook (i.e., registering, making a profile, finding friends, communicating, etc.), this article suggests that friendships online need to be understood as a gathering of heterogeneous elements that include both humans and nonhumans. Moreover, this article attempts to show how the traditional notion of friendship as something created between equals and free of structural constraints does not apply to the realm of social networking sites, where software increasingly assists users in making certain choices about who will and who will not be their friends.
This article identifies that the current literature on "distant suffering" lacks a nuanced account of the relationship between televised representations of suffering and the audiences that encounter these in their everyday lives. Text-centered studies overemphasize how news narratives cause compassion fatigue, while audience-centered studies enumerate audience responses with inadequate references to the textual elements and social factors that shape these responses. While recent theorizations about "media witnessing" have provided a guidepost in thinking about the ethical consequences of showing and seeing suffering in the media, it however obscures the normative from the descriptive and universalizes the experience of the "witness" it speaks about. To address these gaps and develop a holistic approach to examine televised suffering, the article proposes the use of mediation theory to account for the distinct ethical questions that arise from the specific "moments" of mediation and how they should altogether inform the ethical critique of media.
This article examines an entertainment-education program, The Team, which began airing in Kenya after the 2007–2008 postelection violence. The show promotes cooperation and national unity among Kenyans through the metaphor of Kenya as a football (soccer) team. The focus of this article is twofold: viewers’ identification with and reaction to certain morally ambiguous characters and audience members’ interaction with the program through the online social networking site Facebook. We argue that the producers’ attempt to create less didactic storylines and more complex characters resulted in unanticipated audience opposition to the death of a character the producers understood to be negative but audience members viewed as sympathetic. Second, the adoption of social media resulted in less controlled discussions in which Facebook users occasionally questioned, challenged, and sought to reshape the producers’ goals and strategies.
The article examines how old imaging technologies figure in AMC’s Mad Men, including the Kodak slide projector and the Super 8 home movie, and more broadly speaking, postwar advertising and ideals of home and family. It links the nostalgia for these old media to contemporary masculinity and the ephemeral nature of new media in order to question what significance the baby boom era holds today.
In this essay, I advance a reading of Dexter—the character and series—that focuses on the complicated ways that the construction of normative masculinity serves to define, and sometimes legitimate, certain types of violence. I demonstrate that the show locates violence within a series of masculine homosocial realms in order to highlight Dexter’s alienation from these spaces and, thus, his "monstrosity." I am interested in achieving two things with this reading. First, I want to pay extended attention to Dexter’s location within the representational context of contemporary television—a context filled with police and forensic shows, murder, and hyperbolically violent (and masculine) men—in order to articulate what this program is doing differently. Second, I want to use Dexter as a means of thinking about the ways that violence and gender become linked through representational practices in ways that visibly and invisibly constitute social and gender norms.
Cosmopolitan stars like Angelina Jolie not only urge charity and care; increasingly, they link Western media audiences to international aid and development agencies, enjoining them to become empowered, socially entrepreneurial "world" citizens through online participation in global civil society. These developments are indicative of significant shifts in the cultural life of both media celebrity and citizenship, as charitable stars and the small acts of digital caring they solicit from their media audiences have emerged as central linchpins in global governmentality. Tracing the social, cultural, and political-economic productivity of celebrity branding and media interactivity for global regimes of governing, this essay shows how caring stars and audience labor are mobilized to fuel a digital economy of global care that sustains the social welfare work of the international community.
By drawing on eighty-nine qualitative interviews in which people account for their use of information and communication technology, this article analyzes how people negotiate their choices and principles in relation to prevalent discourses about proper and questionable conduct and content and whether old discourses are changing in the new media environment. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the cultural category of hobby is used as a speech repertoire that ennobles internet use. By describing their complementary use of different media and the meanings of different artifacts, informants are able to reverse default cultural hierarchies.
This essay examines the increasing interdependence of television news organizations and citizen journalism, specifically focusing on CNN’s citizen journalist website called iReport. Using Tiziana Terranova’s notion of "network culture," I show how CNN simultaneously denigrates and depends on the unpaid labor of its iReporters, especially when covering a political uprising. I draw on a series of interviews conducted with iReporters who covered the Iranian elections and protests of 2009, in an effort to address the complex political imperatives that inspired their unpaid labor for CNN. In this sense, my case study ultimately reveals that citizen journalism is less a story of exploitation and more a story of negotiation, as hegemonic journalistic representations of world events ultimately unfold within the increasingly disruptive informational milieu that is the product of network culture.
This article demonstrates how The Family (2009), a fly-on-the wall UK reality series about a British Indian family, facilitates both current public service broadcasting requirements and mass audience appeal. From a critical cultural studies perspective, the author examines the journalistic and viewer responses to the series where authenticity, universality, and comedy emerge as major themes. Textual analysis of the racialized screen representations also helps locate the series within the contexts of contested multiculturalism, genre developments in reality television and public service broadcasting. Paul Gilroy’s concept of convivial culture is used as a frame in understanding how meanings of the series are produced within a South Asian popular representational space. The author suggests that the social comedy taxonomy is a prerequisite for the making of this particular observational documentary. Further, the popular (comedic) mode of conviviality on which the series depends is both expedient and necessary within the various sociopolitical contexts outlined.
This article departs from the concept of "double articulation" within domestication theory, which views media as both objects and texts. Unfortunately, its empirical application has been problematic because researchers tend to concentrate on the contextual, losing sight of specific meanings of objects and texts. Therefore, we subscribe to the concept of "triple articulation," viewing the immediate sociospatial context of consumption as a specific articulation. Still, the practical relevance of this concept has been questioned. Therefore, we develop and test a methodology that explicitly incorporates this triple articulation in the field of convergent audiovisual media consumption. The results indicate that audiovisual media technologies are meaningfully articulated as objects, texts, and contexts. Moreover, the devised method, which allows the uncovering of articulation interactions, points out that each articulation is able to contribute independently to consumption meanings. Hence, the variation within objects, texts, and contexts raises questions about what we consider "television."
Researchers are increasingly recognizing anime and manga as worthy of scholarly examination. However, relatively little research examines how fans synthesize the cultural content of anime. This paper provides an analysis of representations of race/ethnicity and gender in two televised anime, and contrasts the understandings of scholars to fans. As anime can weave together images from Japanese culture, other cultures, as well as fantasy, anime presents many faces to fans. Fans do not necessarily see all of these faces at once, and they interpret the cultural content of anime differently. As a result, anime has the potential to generate different types of cultural influence.
This essay examines the love–hate relationship—overt hatred and secret love—that surrounds reality shows about Roma and other racialized celebrities in postsocialist New European nations. Taking the case study of the wildly popular yet universally despised Hungarian Gyõzike show and its national reception, it argues that the aversion to the cultural quality represented by reality TV and the aversion to the ethnoracial quality represented by the Roma and other minorities are thoroughly intertwined. Reality television has disclosed the unspoken role assigned to racial minorities to mark the whiteness of East European nations, a crucial but hardly discussed aspect of belonging to Europe. This study also demonstrates that understanding the role played by reality TV under the particular conditions of postsocialist nationalisms and media globalization requires expanding the focus of reality TV scholarship on post-welfare neoliberalism.