Morbid Curiosity: The Driving Force Behind Success of Necromarketing – Analysing Events after Liam Payne’s Death

Taiwanese culture is diverse, rich and sophisticated. After a long-term accumulation, it also has acquired solid cultural capacity. In the meantime, in recent years, the government has actively promoted policies on the cultural and creative industry, which has stimulated the developmental trends of creative industries and created new opportunities for many cultural and creative products. As a result, it has brought a lot of negative phenomena of “cultural industry” to Taiwan. Consequently, the initially good intention of the government in promoting the cultural and creative industry has eroded away the subjectivity and creativity of culture. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore and find the balance between two aspects – “commercialization” and “preservation of the spirit of cultural connotation” – in the process of developing cultural and creative products. Through case studies and fieldwork survey, this study performed analysis based on observations of special cultural activities and sceneries in Taiwan. Questionnaires were designed through the three-level theory of cultural coding. Design patterns and indicators of cultural and creative products were formulated based on visitors’ feedbacks and will be provided as a basis of reference for future designers of cultural and creative products. There are three findings obtained from this study: (1) High degree of correlation between cultural and creative product designs and cultural activities is fundamental and will create a memory connection with the products in a consumer’s brain. (2) Experiential models and handmade designs can enhance consumers’ understanding of culture. (3) Through the three-level theory of model design – integrated thinking of the strategic level, the connotative level, and the technical level – cultural products can effectively deliver cultural messages to consumers and at the same time create cultural styles.

Taking the Tianjin Binhai Art Museum in China as a case study, this research adopts wetland observation and questionnaire survey methods to explore the relationship between the perceived value of cultural creative product visual design and consumer satisfaction. The study revealed that the functional value, experiential value, and cognitive value of the visual design of the Tianjin Binhai Art Museum’s cultural creative products have positive effects on consumer satisfaction, with the lowest satisfaction score found for experiential value. This investigation also underscores the significance of visual typesetting components, such as aesthetic charm, societal images, and interactivity, can impact the overall observation of an product. By inspecting the interplay between these aspects, this analysis emphasizes that shoppers’ emotional and cerebral participation is as critical as the operational worth of the goods. The analysis puts forward an comprehensive paradigm that consolidates shows, cultural items, and art teaching plans to improve the demonstration and distribution of cultural resourceful merchandise. This research remarkably highlights how visual elements like appealing appearance, cultural signs, and interactivity can affect overall perception. By examining the interplay between visual style factors, consumers' emotional and intellectual involvement, and functional value, the study proposes an integrated model of exhibitions, cultural products and programs to enhance presentations and spread of cultural creative works. The research proposes a model that combines exhibitions, cultural creative products, and art education programs to enrich the presentation and dissemination of cultural creative products while emphasizing the enhancement of functional and cognitive values, as well as focusing on interactivity and consumer experience.

Modern Dictatorships and Their Art Worlds

As tourism functions continue to integrate, the practice concept of ‘experience-centered’ has reshaped the spatial narrative of museums. As a complex cultural assemblage, museums' cultural production may also undergo profound transformation in this process. Taking the China Grand Canal Museum (CGCM) as a case study, this research analyses the assemblage process of cultural production in history museums under the integration of tourism through field investigation and textual analysis. The research finds that the assemblage process of CGCM's cultural production can be deconstructed into three sub-assemblages: content production, media production, and symbol production. These assemblages embody the interactions between non-human elements – such as exhibition halls, heritage, texts, digital technologies, food, and cultural and creative products – and human actors, including tourists and suppliers. We further discuss the characteristics of each sub-assemblage and the entanglements among them. This study responds to the call of ‘New Museology’ to conceptualise museums as cultural assemblages, contributing new insights to the research agendas of museum cultural tourism and the (re)materialisation of museums. It also offers potential directions for a conceptual shift in heritage discourse studies.

This article introduces the idea of cultural reinvention for cultural textile products. Fundamentally, the term ‘cultural products’ consists of culture and product. Culture means a symbol of a particular time and society. Cultural products can be thought of as artefacts produced by and for a specific cultural group. However, commercial needs and desires may and often do mean that although the form and style of the artefact may remain, it can be produced by other cultural groupings. This article builds an understanding of the term cultural reinvention through the historical and modern consideration of tartan as a case study. It then provides a taxonomy of traditional and cultural Korean textiles and identifies possible strategies for the cultural and commercial reinvention of bojagi textiles. A website has been developed as a design marketing tool to allow consumers to learn about and create their own bojagi designs. This website has been evaluated by five focus groups.

Within media organizations, cultural intermediaries are the conduits between the organizational, management and production stakeholders, and the audiences wishing to participate in the co-production of cultural artefacts. They are translators of tastes, languages, norms, rules and regulatory frameworks between the organizational and audience stakeholder groups. Cultural intermediaries have historically been perceived as one of three substructures. First, cultural intermediaries have been observed as the construction of new facilitating roles between production and consumption of cultural goods (Bourdieu in A social critique of the judgement of taste. Routledge, London, 1984). Second, they are conceived as the taste agents that promote a relationship between creativity and economy (Smith Macguire and Miller 2014). Third, cultural intermediaries can be conceived as both new cultural production facilitators and economic taste agents within the cultural industries. In the context of this book, cultural intermediation takes on the role of the third substructure by both representing emerging new roles within media organizations that engage the increasingly blurred lines between cultural productions, while also incorporating the significance of the marketplace within cultural production. Further, and within public service media, cultural goods production facilitates a particular role within society insofar as content performs specific normative functions, for example, to educate, innovate and entertain. In this context, this chapter makes a case for the importance of cultural intermediation and how it is applied within the public service media sector engaging in co-creative cultural production, primarily through the efforts of online communities. This chapter then explores how online communities tend to employ heterarchy models of governance, where lead users influence the community norms and collaborative efforts. Heterarchy governance models indicate the rejection of top-down hierarchies, presenting a tension in how these spaces are governed: Is it by the hosting organization or the participants? Contradictorily, institutions operate through hierarchies as indicated through levels of management, which are in place to provide a clear focus for the organization’s goals while also facilitating the management of multiple individuals to mitigate concerns surrounding group complexity. The praxis of heterarchies and hierarchies indicates the necessity for cultural intermediation to not only manage the difference between polities, but to also ensure the interests of the stakeholders are calibrated and that information and knowledge are suitably exchanged to collaboratively produce cultural artefacts. Cultural intermediation provides the backdrop for exploring co-creation within the media organization setting, particularly when exploring participation across non-organizational platforms as the basis for the following four case studies. In doing so, this chapter also looks at the role new media technologies, specifically social media, play in the production methodology and ecology of institutional arrangements.

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the social and economic significance of the arts and cultural production, or 'creative industries'. Research into the relationship between the latter and community changes has been brought to the fore by the introduction of interactive media technologies, and by the need to understand and conceptualise them culturally. However, this is not to say that the issue is a completely new one and thus, in this article, I aim to investigate film-first in general, and then specifically the New German Cinema (NGC), and its complex interconnectedness with the postwar West German society. I would like to highlight, though, the fact that one finds different voices within this cinematic movement, and that it is less homogeneous than the term 'New German Cinema' might suggest. Initially, it has to be noted that the feature films of the Nac can be broadly categorised as political interventions, since they use the medium's capacity to make 'narratives for change' discursively available to a mass audience. However, these productions are not straightforward political propaganda but rather fictional texts, which are composed in a range of different ways (formally, as well as in terms of their story content). Hence the NGC has to be seen as a project within which diversity (in the form of complex articulations) is held together by the aim to create 'new films' for a 'new society'. In this vein, film can be theorised as a practice that is part of a social process (Turner, 1993). A distinctly cultural studies approach to film is useful in this analysis. Since 'culture' became redefined by cultural studies as 'a whole way of life', subject to construction processes within society and carried out on the basis of shared beliefs, specifically symbolic systems such as literature and film have become prime research targets. As a consequence of wanting to understand how film might be part of the particular culture under analysis, cultural studies scholars such as David Morley (1993) and Roger Bromley (2001) have looked more closely into film itself as a specific means of cultural (re-)production. Subsequently, film has been examined as a cultural product and as a social practice, valuable both for itself and for what it can tell us about the systems and processes of culture. Today, the analysis of film is not restricted to film studies but is a common practice in many disciplines, including cultural studies. However, although film is the object of study within various cultural studies investigations, it is hardly ever the final target of inquiry, but rather part of a broader argument about representation. This makes film one case study within the vast area of cultural production, and the methods applied to its analysis are not confined to it as such, but are transferable to the examination of other media. This introduction of the concept of film as a social practice leads me to the discussion of the NGC as an example of changes within the media landscape in post-war West Germany. For this purpose, the 'old' German cinema and its respective productions have to be understood as a point of departure for the NGC. Here I am thinking especially of the so-called 'Heimat' films: a genre which, with regards to production and reception figures, dominated the 1950s cinematic scene in West Germany. In narrative terms, these films perpetuate an unproblematic sense of community, which is rooted both in the past and in tradition, linked to a bounded space that mainly takes the shape of a rural idyll, and generally seems to be a timeless allusion to essentialist notions of communality. The films' realist mode and linear plotlines call on the audience to identify with the protagonists, who are usually caught up in romantic and happy-ending love stories. A prime example of the 'Heimat' films' hero is the forester in Grun ist die Heide (Green Is The Heath, Deppe 1951). …

My argument, simply put, is that if the study of the reception of the Bible and popular culture is going to offer insights into the function of scripture in contemporary consumer societies, then it must move beyond methodologies designed for the study of sacred literature; there must be meaningful engagement with the cultures of production and consumption of popular culture, and biblical scholars must be prepared to surrender their privileged interpretive position. I have argued elsewhere that in reception histories of biblical tropes in popular music, the typical approach is to identify a favored genre or artist, then utilize a similar methodology as found in approaches to the study of scripture that reception scholars critique or wish to move away from. The focus is on the production of culture through recourse to biographies and interviews, and the consumer of popular culture is the trained biblical scholar through the close reading of lyrics as text. In the case of popular music, then, reception studies of the Bible in contemporary popular culture are methodologically incapable of telling us as much about the current reception of the Bible as they would like to, since engagement with the world beyond biblical scholarship is limited to the production of popular culture. In the case of the study of biblical tropes in contemporary advertising, I think the methodological question is more pronounced. Without engaging the culture within which advertising is produced, in addition to engaging the culture within which advertising is consumed, advertisements might appear as fully formed ideological artifacts without the complexities that biblical scholars have recognized inform the production and reception of scripture.

ABSTRACTInequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts, particularly in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched.The article considers inequality and cultural value from two points of view: how cultural value is consumed and how it is produced. The paper argues that these two activities are absolutely essential to understanding the relationship between culture and social inequality, but that the two activities have traditionally been considered separately in both academic research and public policy, despite the importance of culture to British and thus international policy agendas. The article uses the example of higher education in the UK to think through the relationship between cultural consumption and production. In doing, so the article maps out a productive possibility for a new research agenda, by sketching where and how research might link cultural consumption and production to better understand inequality.

Author Marissa A. Harrison, a long-time research psychologist, describes her journey to writing Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers. She recounts her pathway to conducting research on female serial killers (FSKs) and broadly introduces the concepts, content, and approach to writing this book. She describes her work with fellow researchers in various explorations of the psychology of serial murder and introduces her published work in scientific journals such as Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, and Current Psychology. Harrison describes her team’s work on morbid curiosity and protective vigilance, thought to motivate the great interest in serial murder. Included is a case study of Amy Archer-Gilligan to illustrate how FSKs can be just as deadly as male serial killers (MSKs). The author underscores the mandate for proper attribution of others’ work in scientific writing and her endeavors to provide extensive documentation for all factual information in this book to ensure a science-based presentation.

After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

PurposeMost studies pertaining to social tagging focus on one platform or platform type, thus limiting the scope of their findings. The purpose of this paper is to explore social tagging practices across four platforms in relation to cultural products associated with the bookCasino Royale, by Ian Fleming.Design/methodology/approachA layered and nested case study approach was used to analyse data from four online platforms: Goodreads, Last.fm, WordPress, and public library social discovery platforms. The top-level case study focuses on the bookCasino Royale, by Ian Fleming and its derivative products. The analysis of tagging practices in each of the four online platforms is nested within the top-level case study.Casino Royalewas conceptualized as a cultural product (the book), its derived products (e.g. movies, theme songs), as well as a keyword in blogs. A qualitative, inductive, and context-specific approach was chosen to identify commonalities in tagging practices across platforms whilst taking into account the uniqueness of each platform.FindingsThe four platforms comprise different communities of users, each platform with its own cultural norms and tagging practices. Traditional access points in the library catalogues focused on the subject, location, and fictitious characters of the book. User-generated content across the four platforms emphasized historical events and periods related to the book, and highlighted more subjective access points, such as recommendations, tone, mood, reaction, and reading experience. Revealing shifts occur in the tags between the original book and its cultural derivatives: Goodreads and library catalogues focus almost exclusively on the book, while Last.fm and WordPress make in addition cross-references to a wider range of different cultural products, including books, movies, and music. The analyses also yield apparent similarities in certain platforms, such as recurring terms, phrasing and composite or multifaceted tags, as well as a strong presence of genre-related terms for the book and music.Originality/valueThe layered and nested case study approach presents a more comprehensive theoretical viewpoint and methodological framework by which to explore the study of user-generated metadata pertaining to a range of related cultural products across a variety of online platforms.

The study of groups’ behaviors in conflicts has shown that societies favor the in-group, delegitimize the out-group, and provide explanations for members of society as to why the conflict erupted and how to cope with it. It has been claimed that societies share a psychological in-group repertoire, an ethos of conflict, and that they develop a culture of conflict. As part of societies’ mechanisms, culture and fictional products – films, books and plays – have an important role in shaping the way people perceive, think and act in conflicts. Yet fictional texts, by their mere characteristics, provide a discourse which is more ambiguous and more equivocal: They speak in different voices, have many layers, and present the fictional reality in complex and even self-contradicting ways. There is therefore a contradiction between the role cultural texts supposedly have in an ethos of conflict, and the complex discourse they present. Looking at novels and films produced in Israel in the 1980s as a case study, the article shows that cultural products do not necessarily go in line with what one could expect from texts produced in a society in conflict. It is shown that in this particular case the cultural products provide a picture that resembles the ethos of conflict that will take the forefront 20 years later but not of the time in which they were produced. Three hypotheses are suggested in order to explain this gap.

In an era defined by globalization and rapid technological advancement, Chinas cultural industry is undergoing a significant transformation. This study investigates the profound effects of digital transformation on Chinas cultural industry, focusing on digital cultural innovation products such as digital art, virtual reality experiences, and online cultural creations. As globalization and technological advancements reshape cultural production, dissemination, and consumption, Chinas digital cultural sector has emerged as a significant global player. This research systematically reviews literature, industry reports, and case studies to analyze how Chinese digital cultural products are influencing marketing and communication strategies. The findings reveal that advancements in virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence are leading to the creation of immersive and diverse cultural experiences, significantly enhancing consumer engagement and market reach. The study also highlights the transformative role of digital tools in marketing, including dynamic content creation and interactive experiences, while addressing challenges such as market saturation and the need for balanced engagement strategies. Future research should incorporate quantitative and qualitative data to further explore these dynamics.

Background. Since the start of the Russian full-scale invasion, major transformations in the media consumption of Ukrainians have occurred. Social media platforms are utilized as means of informational warfare and play a major role in the cultural production of everyday content on both local and nationwide levels. The logic of content production on social media platforms fosters the constitution of the so-called 'digital public sphere', and in this way affects the Ukrainian public sphere overall. The goal of this article is to explicate the potential uses of social media platforms as sources of research, that allow to observe the cultural production on the occupied territories, and in this way foster the creation of policies for the re-integration. The research objectives are to identify established social media informational infrastructures in the occupied town of Berdiansk and explore the utilized principles of cultural production of the image of the city, through the concept of the digital public sphere. Methods. Case studies, content analysis, netnographic study, narrative, and textual cultural analysis, interdisciplinary analysis of metadata and statistic data available online, and cultural history approach – reconstruction of the logic of material devices, and functioning of virtual spaces overall. Results. Two simultaneous and mutually exclusive informational infrastructures are established, Ukrainian and Russian. Both are creating mutually exclusive but intersecting images of the city, framing ongoing events as either occupation or 'liberation'. The images of the city are constituted via the cultural production of everyday content on social media platforms. This cultural production follows the logic of attention economy. Conclusions. Russian informational military units and occupational administrations actively utilize social media platforms as an instrument of informational warfare, to reinforce and legitimize their presence. However, at the same time, social media affordances foster the emergence of new practices of resistance from the Ukrainian side. The openness of the network environment allows Ukrainian citizens under occupation to stay in touch with the Ukrainian media sphere, and vice versa. The digital public sphere allows us to research the transformations occurring under occupation. New forms of social and cultural production emerge within a network environment of social media platforms, particularly within a situation of a full-scale war.