Contemporary Media Research Articles

This study aims to analyze the representation of yōkai in the anime Mononoke (2007) as a visual manifestation of the characters’ psychological trauma. Unlike the portrayal of yōkai in traditional Japanese folklore—which tends to emphasize mythological or horror aspects—Mononoke reconstructs these figures as embodiments of unexpressed inner wounds such as guilt, repression, anger, and loss. This research employs a qualitative-descriptive approach with symbolic and narrative analysis methods, grounded in trauma theory as proposed by Cathy Caruth. The analysis reveals that yōkai in this anime function not merely as horror elements, but as media through which complex psychological conflicts are conveyed. Through symbolism, visual atmosphere, and metaphorical narrative structure, Mononoke gives voice to trauma that cannot be articulated directly. As such, the anime does not simply depict supernatural beings but serves as a reflective space that connects folklore, psychology, and visual cultural expression. This study is expected to contribute to interdisciplinary understanding across Japanese cultural studies, literary psychology, and contemporary media analysis.

Intermediality has become one of the most significant concepts in contemporary film and media studies, highlighting the ways cinema negotiates its borders with other art forms. Pelin Esmer’s Queen Lear (2019) exemplifies this negotiation by bringing Shakespeare’s canonical tragedy into dialogue with the lived experiences of five women from the Toros Mountains. At once a documentary, a record of performance, and a cinematic re-imagining, the film becomes a space where theatre and cinema intersect, overlap, and reconfigure one another. This article explores the film as a case of cinematic intermediality, tracing how Esmer’s camera reshapes theatrical performance through framing, montage, and sound, while simultaneously opening new horizons of meaning. Yet Queen Lear is not only about intermedial crossings; it is also about how gender itself is performed, embodied, and contested. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, the article examines how the women’s staging of King Lear produces a double performance: enacting Shakespeare’s characters while voicing their own stories of labor, struggle, and resilience. In this sense, Esmer’s film does not merely adapt Shakespeare but re-visions him from the margins, offering a feminist intervention that destabilizes cultural hierarchies and reframes tragedy through local and collective voices. Ultimately, Queen Lear demonstrates the transformative potential of cinema as both a medium of intermediality and a site of gendered resistance.

This article examines the discursive representation of the Nile Water Treaties as portrayed by Ahram Online , Sudan Tribune and The Ethiopian Herald , national newspapers in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, respectively. Guided by Postcolonial Theory, the study employs the Postcolonial Critical Discourse Analysis method. Findings reveal that these newspapers divergently portrayed the Nile treaties as binding, alternative and obsolete trichotomies, respectively. We argue that the structural legacies of colonialism, as evidenced by colonial treaties, still influence how contemporary media portrays projects on transboundary resources. Consequently, such divergences contribute to conflicting terms rather than cooperation between the three riparian countries regarding the project.

Teaching medieval English literature in a non-Anglophone classroom presents challenges, as students are often unfamiliar with the cultural context of medieval Europe. This paper discusses how the subject is taught in Taiwan, highlighting how students in my classroom explore medieval elements in modern media and adaptations as they conduct research on topics of their own choice. Three student-selected topics are shared: the film The Green Knight, the Japanese mobile game Fate/Grand Order, and Arthurian-themed tarot decks. While the analyses of these papers may not be fully developed and mature, they show students’ critical thinking and creativity as they engage with contemporary media. Through these explorations, medieval studies become more accessible and relevant. By sharing this teaching experience, the paper aims to demonstrate how modern media and entertainment can motivate students in the non-Anglophone classroom to think critically and creatively about medieval English literature.

ABSTRACT Kylie Minogue has had an enduring career as a global popstar since the 1980s and has acquired a dedicated queer fan base, especially of gay men, that leads to her status as a ‘gay icon’ among her fans. This article examines fan and contemporary media interpretations of this status. First, reinventions of her pop star persona can be constructively compared with the queer experience of coming out of the closet. Second, Minogue employs queer sensibilities associated with the drag tradition, which include her embodiment of exaggerated femininity contrasted with other performers’ masculine homoeroticism. Lastly, Minogue both adheres to and challenges some of the stereotypical qualities of the woman-identifying celebrity diva, with her depictions of mature femininity and sexuality, a simultaneous reiteration and subversion of feminine symbols and tropes, and her understated, selective but significant forms of queer solidarity.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the modern image of the Golden Horde in Russian-language media and journalism in the Russian-speaking post-Soviet space, to identify key discursive frames and their influence on the construction of identities and cultural processes. In Russia today, many actors are challenge this narrative, highlighting cultural hybridity and the Horde’s administrative sophistication. In Central Asian republics like Kazakhstan, the Golden Horde is increasingly reclaimed as a source of pride and state legitimacy. Research materials: The research materials are articles, books and films about the Golden Horde, which were produced in the post-Soviet space (primarily in Russia and Kazakhstan). The article traces representations of the Horde in contemporary media, literature, and the performing arts, revealing a spectrum from exoticized enemy to civilizational partner. Results and scientific novelty: Through discourse analysis, the study highlights how the memory of the Golden Horde functions as a contested space for negotiating historical trauma, cultural legacy, and aspirations for pluralistic identity. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that the Golden Horde remains a powerful cultural metaphor – serving simultaneously as a mirror of modern anxieties and a resource for alternative historical imaginaries. The novelty of the study is that in this article we show for the first time how the image of the Horde is reflected in modern culture not only as a space of competition, but also as a space of interaction and positive rethinking. The relevance of this study lies in the enduring role of historical memory and representations of the past in shaping contemporary cultural processes, as well as in the need for a nuanced understanding of identity formation within the multiethnic and multireligious landscape of post-Soviet Eurasia.

The current transformations in how audiences are datafied, including how that data is then traded and sold, used in various algorithms and AI models, and executed on to shape our media ecosystems, necessitate renewed frameworks for conceptualizing these datafied audience ontologies, which we refer to in this issue as ‘big data audiences’. Big data audiences are the lifeblood of the contemporary digital media ecosystem, with significant epistemic and cultural consequences that social scientists and humanists have not sufficiently grappled with. While political economy remains central to understanding the contemporary contexts of audience datafication, this issue demonstrates how theories and methods from the domains of social and humanistic research are equally essential for conceptualizing big data audiences. The issue brings together a range of methodological approaches and aims to catalyze critical media scholarship on audiences that explores the industrial and cultural aspects of datafied audience ontologies in media industries big and small across the globe.

This study examines the commodification of individuals with disabilities in advertisements by prominent fashion brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Gucci, and Smarteyes Denmark. The research is grounded in the growing narrative of inclusivity within the fashion industry, which, on the one hand, opens up representational space, but on the other often masks visual exploitation. Using a semiotic approach, this study analyses how disabled bodies are constructed within the visual and discursive frameworks of fashion advertising. Findings reveal that such representations frequently combine disability with a superficial aesthetic of diversity, wherein disabled bodies are depicted not as complex subjects, but as empathetic objects commodified for brand image purposes. The study highlights the need for a critical reading of the interrelation between disability, gender, and power dynamics in the contemporary commercial media landscape.

Purpose: This article investigates the formation and operation of algorithmic audiences within platformized media environments, focusing on how processes of identity, influence, and power intersect to shape audience behaviour. It seeks to theorise the algorithmically produced publics that emerge from data-driven engagement on social media, streaming services, and online gaming platforms. Methods: The study employs a critical conceptual synthesis of current literature in media studies, platform capitalism, and communication theory, supported by illustrative case studies of user-platform interactions. Through thematic analysis of secondary sources (2017–2023), it maps how algorithmic recommendation systems, identity performances, and influence mechanisms mutually reinforce each other to establish dynamic audience configurations. Results: Findings reveal that algorithmic audiences are neither passive recipients nor purely autonomous actors, but datafied hybrid entities produced through collaborative interplays of user self-presentation, platform logics, and commercial surveillance. Identity construction increasingly depends on visibility metrics, while influence is redistributed through opaque recommendation architectures producing echo chambers and filter bubbles. Power asymmetries deepen as platforms gain control over information flows, data extraction, and behavioural manipulation, raising serious ethical and regulatory concerns. Conclusion: Algorithmic audiences represent a paradigm shift in the understanding of contemporary media publics. Their emergence compels scholars and policymakers to move beyond traditional audience theories and to confront new questions surrounding data ownership, platform governance, and audience agency in the age of automated curation. Future research must address how regulatory frameworks and ethical design interventions can protect user autonomy while ensuring transparency and accountability within platformised media ecosystems.

This article offers a critical and self-reflective analysis of Symptom, a long-duration performance created and performed by the author, Yiannis Pappas, under the auspices of the Marina Abramović Institute. Framed as both aesthetic expression and ethical provocation, the performance engages with Freud’s dialectic of the death and life drives, Susan Sontag’s reflections on spectatorship and suffering, Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body and Simone Weil’s idea of personal reckoning. Situated within the culturally neutral context of Switzerland, Symptom deliberately unsettles passive spectatorship by invoking the ethics of witnessing through silence, duration, slowness and opacity as essential resistance to the spectacle and desensitization of contemporary media. Drawing on the author’s embodied practice, the article positions performance as a site of confrontation, where the absence of narrative and the refusal of catharsis foreground the viewer’s implicated gaze. The reception of the performance, marked by discomfort and haunting after-effects, underscores its effectiveness in disrupting visual consumption and demanding ethical attention.

This article frames digital infrastructures as “geographies of digital hope,” to propose new epistemologies rooted in everyday digital practices of the marginalized majority in the Global South. We critically examine the prevailing pessimistic bias in contemporary media scholarship, with an overemphasis on the extractive and exploitative dimensions of digital labor and infrastructures, and the underemphasis of the enablement and empowering aspects of these digital terrains. This commentary calls for reassessing the value of infrastructures from the everyday digital negotiations and lived realities with media of communities in the Global South. We propose a conceptual counterforce to dominant pessimistic and deterministic narratives—surveillance capitalism and algorithms of oppression—with alternative framings of surveillance of care and algorithms of aspiration, to uncover how marginalized users leverage emergent and existing digital spaces, despite the harms and risks, to create new forms of livelihoods, solidarities, care-giving, and agencies to carve their everyday futures.

Diligence is often considered to be one of cherished Slovene characteristics. At the same time contemporary Slovene discourses problematize it, for example, as wrong and as a possible path leading towards burnout. The article therefore describes the variety of meanings and values attributed to the Slovene adjective “pridnost”. It is based on the analysis of one collection of Slovenian riddles and of one collection of proverbs, as well as of the public media discourse. Mainly through posts in a selected Facebook group Burnout, bye bye the author specifically observed the relationship between burnout and diligence. In the article anthropological literature on medical anthropology, anthropology of work and critical anthropology of care, related to the topic of an article, is therefore presented. The change in meaning of the adjective “priden” in Slovenia over time is illustrated using two mentioned collections of proverbs and riddles, which is further compared with the contemporary media discourses, linking diligence to burnout. As the author establishes, proverbs as well as only two examples of riddles manifest adjective “priden” as, among other things, diligence, care, perseverance, the opposite of laziness and greatest wealth (against poverty, hunger). In the context of the former, predominantly agricultural economy “pridnost” is supposedly related to the economic survival of the individual and the community. Contemporary sources, on the other hand, associate “pridnost” with uncreative, non-innovative and inefficient work, with intolerance of individualization, while learning to be diligent – as it can lead to burnout – is considered undesirable. However, as the proverbs show, “pridnost” was already in the past supposedly cultivated through rigor, example and overcoming difficulties. Nowadays, burnout is interestingly perceived as one such difficulty that forces an individual to change and cultivate a different, more contemporary self. Burnout is therefore said to teach individuals to take care of themselves first, of their health and energy, which is consequently supposedly good and useful for the whole community and its economy. According to the author, unlearning to be “priden”, perceived as industrious and fulfilling of duties, is therefore accompanied with a process of learning new understandings of diligence. As illustrated, an updated meaning of “pridnost” is emerging, linked above all to self-care. At the same time, proverbs illustrate that in the past diligence was not sufficient for changing the existing personal economic and social situation. Contrary to that, contemporary incentives to “to take power back into one's own hands” describe self-care as one own's responsibility and the only way of changing personal situation.

Advertising represents one of the most powerful forms of contemporary communication, functioning not only as a persuasive instrument but also as a cultural text that encodes values, myths, and ideologies. This paper approaches advertising through the lens of semiotics, drawing on the classical frameworks of Saussure, Peirce, and Barthes, while integrating more recent perspectives from cultural studies and digital media theory. The study argues that advertising is a complex semiotic system that relies on iconic, indexical, and symbolic dimensions in order to produce meaning and to establish an emotional and cognitive connection with audiences. By analyzing selected case studies from global brands, european campaigns, and digital environments, the article demonstrates how advertising constructs cultural myths of consumption, happiness, and identity. The findings contribute to the growing field of applied semiotics by highlighting the interplay between denotation and connotation, the circulation of signs across media platforms, and the ideological underpinnings of consumer culture.

In the context of the accelerated development of artificial intelligence, this paper analyzes the use of traditional and new media, as well as the perceptual changes brought about by the technological environment and changes in the way citizens are informed. The habits and changes of the digital audience and their media preferences are analyzed on the basis of the conducted survey. Caution was also observed regarding the influence of technology, as well as awareness of the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in the information sphere. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the work contributes to the understanding of the contemporary media landscape and its interactions with artificial intelligence. The findings indicate differentiated patterns of behavior and the need for a critical evaluation of the impact of AI on media literacy and perception of reality.

The research analyses the varying relationships between online media platforms and printed newspapers. We evaluate the demographic differences of age, educational level, and digital literacy in influencing media consumption, as well as the perceived impact of online media. In this study, purposive sampling was used, and a total of 101 participants were recruited across the demographic spectrum to ensure that a broad base of participants was included. This methodological decision was critical in achieving a wide range of participants’ ages (from 20 years old and younger to those of 60 years old and older), with various levels of education and employment statuses. Self-developed questionnaires provided quantitative data on the participant demographics, digital literacy, and their beliefs about how online media affected printed newspapers. To validate the findings, the various statistical techniques such as descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, ANOVA, T-tests, chi-square tests and regression analysis were used. Our research established a positive relationship between digital literacy and age, and the consumption of online media with perception on the effect of digital media on the sale of newspapers as well as revenue obtained from advertisement. In particular, the young people with higher digital media literacy were more inclined to consume online media products and estimated the negative effects on traditional newspapers as being much bigger than the others. The implications of the study suggest that traditional media needs to come up with strategic adaptation mechanisms in view of declining dominance in the contemporary media world.

ABSTRACT In contemporary cities, media façades and urban screens play a pivotal role in shaping the cityscape. However, their spatialisation is often examined through an anthropocentric lens, primarily as platforms for social interaction and human-centric perceptions of both urban and cinematic experience. This focus tends to overlook the material relationships these cinematic elements establish within the built environment. Using the concept of cinematic placemaking, this paper proposes an alternative framework centred on material performativity to examine cinema’s role in transforming urban space. By analysing the ‘Human Beeing’ (2014) and ‘The Spectre of People’ (2015) media façade projects showcased in the Helsinki Media Façade Festival, the paper explores how cinema operates within space beyond anthropocentrism, even when curated for human response. Understood as a critical framework that transcends anthropocentrism, cinematic placemaking highlights results that pivot around a posthumanist perspective, shedding light on cinema’s material presence in urban space.

Beyond colourblind casting: historical revisionism and Afrocentric blackwashing of Cleopatra in contemporary media

The subject of this study is the phenomenon of occasional use of the Spanish indefinite article with anthroponyms and the semantic effect of subjective evaluation it produces. Unlike previous studies that emphasized isolated stylistic cases, this article offers a comprehensive analysis of the mechanism as a systemic linguistic phenomenon. The research methodology is based on a combined application of descriptive and contrastive-descriptive methods within the framework of Guillaume’s psychomechanics of language. This approach makes it possible to analyze the linguistic material not as a series of exceptions but as the outcome of mental operations of actualization governed by the vector of extensivity/anti-extensivity. The practical analysis is carried out on a representative corpus of examples drawn from contemporary Spanish-language media, literary texts, and journalistic discourse. The novelty of the study lies in its proposal of a unified explanation of three types of evaluative meanings (referential-indefinite, metaphorical-typifying, and situational-role) through the prism of the anti-extensive function of the article in Guillaume’s system. This perspective reveals the underlying mechanisms of the transition of a proper name as an asemanteme into the status of a semanteme, a phenomenon that has not been given comparable attention in previous works, which often limited themselves to merely acknowledging the fact of antonomasia. The main findings of the research may be summarized as follows: the indefinite article functions as a grammatical operator that suspends the uniqueness of the referent and initiates a process of categorization, which serves as the basis for evaluation. Thus, the analysis of specific corpus examples confirms that the evaluative effect is systematically generated by a shift in the referential status of the name. The author’s distinctive contribution is to demonstrate that this phenomenon should not be regarded as a stylistic accident but rather as a regular instrument of expressive syntax, which is of relevance both for linguistic theory and for the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language.

The study examines media speech that develops within the framework of strategic partnerships between media structures, using Russian–Chinese interaction as a representative and illustrative case study. The object of analysis includes the linguistic, stylistic, pragmatic, and discursive features of media texts reflecting institutional coordination, communicative alignment, and the dynamics of intercultural negotiation. The terms media speech, media discourse, and media communication are clearly differentiated to clarify their respective roles and hierarchical relations in shaping a unified strategic media space. The author identifies mechanisms of the “collective voice” of media institutions, manifested in the unification of terminology, rhetorical models, interpretative frames, and metaphorical means of meaning construction. Special attention is paid to the influence of the digital environment and platform algorithms on adaptive dynamics, pragmatic potential, and cognitive alignment in contemporary media speech. It is demonstrated that media speech functions not only as a form of linguistic representation but also as a deliberate tool of strategic communication that fosters shared identity, ideological coherence, and value coordination within the international media sphere. The research applies discourse analysis, content analysis, and comparative methods to reveal the structural, pragmatic, and stylistic features of media speech emerging in strategic media cooperation. The novelty lies in conceptualizing media speech as a product of institutionally coordinated transnational interaction that forms a unified strategic communicative space and illustrates how digital mediation increasingly standardizes, hybridizes, and restructures modern discourse practices across cultures.

This study investigates the influence of viral challenges, a prominent trend in contemporary social media culture, on the behavioral patterns of students in private secondary schools within Egor Local Government Area (LGA) of Edo State, Nigeria. Employing a quantitative descriptive survey design, data were collected from 428 students across seven private secondary schools through a structured questionnaire that assessed levels of participation in viral challenges and their associated impacts on social conduct, academic engagement, and emotional well-being. The findings reveal that viral challenges exert a considerable effect on adolescent behavior by fostering peer influence, promoting conformity, and encouraging risk-taking tendencies. Although such challenges often stimulate creativity, entertainment, and social connection among students, they also create avenues for negative outcomes, including impulsive decision-making, unsafe practices, and significant distractions from academic responsibilities. The dual nature of these challenges highlights both their potential for positive youth engagement and their inherent risks. Based on these insights, the study recommends the integration of digital literacy programs into school curricula, the strengthening of parental supervision, and the promotion of prosocial and educationally beneficial challenges. Overall, this research contributes to the broader discourse on the intersection between social media trends and adolescent development within the Nigerian educational landscape.