Critical Media Studies Research Articles

The beginning of despair: aggressive Retsuko and the Sanrioization of women’s ‘transgressive rage’

In 2016, Sanrio debuted a series of shorts featuring Retsuko, a cute lesser panda with a penchant for bursts of death-metal infused violent rage. The shorts, eventually transformed into a full show on Netflix, were a comedic look at Retsuko’s anger at unfair treatment in the Japanese workplace, casting a critical eye on issues of sexism, harassment, and overwork. But while Retsuko has been explicitly positioned as counter cultural, what does it mean to be transgressive and Sanrio? This paper analyzes this question from a cross-disciplinary perspective, drawing on critical feminist studies, rage studies, media studies, and sociolinguistics. Approaching the framing, content, and speech of Retsuko throughout her media appearances, we argue that while Retsuko is certainly critical of contemporary Japan, her transgression is ultimately limited, with any potential paths to freedom or rebellion hampered by a corporate system that reabsorbs transgressive behavior and sells it back to customers, closing off the potential to imagine new ways of being.

Artificial journalism: the reverse of human-machine communication paradigm. Mapping the field of AI critical media studies

The study for the first time endeavours to elucidate the distinct conceptual nuances of AI-driven journalism, exploring how it reshapes the core technological and communicative attributes of the field while influencing societal dynamics. The crisis within AI-driven human-machine interaction in journalism rooted in the essence and processing of information is defined. Despite the paradigm of journalism is rooted in a human-centered approach, its AI-driven paradigm is the same - but in a reversible mode. Journalism involves the translation of personal perspectives and experiences through the filter of memory. Algorithms function without the nuances of personal and social memory, thereby undermining the core principles of the journalistic profession. The loss of genuine, “analog” memory among journalists and their audiences, alongside the digital “memory” of algorithms, jeopardizes the fundamental societal role of journalism-upholding social order. Re-thinking the AI phenomenon as artificial communication, the authors propose the term “artificial journalism”. At the basic technological level it is based on various forms of automation and embedded within digital infrastructures; at the societal level it is designed for the central purpose of journalism and entangled with human practices. Both the levels are reversible. The term could serve as an umbrella term for all the AI-driven journalism activities. Also it removes contradictions not only in human-machine communication but clarify the essence of AI performance in journalism and media studies, and for the users. The emergence of AI-driven media practices opens the basic crisis conceptual contradictions which provokes new realms of research and necessitates the establishment of critical AI media studies.

The curious case of the lion from Berlin in summer’ 23: how Internet media shapes risk perception from wildlife-human conflict

Introduction. This paper explores the reactions of citizens to a perceived security risk at the human-wildlife interface mediated by social and traditional media sources. We take the case study of a reported ‘lioness’ appearing in the outskirts of Berlin as a risk to human and domestic animal life, sparking media frenzies.
 Methods. The subjects’ reactions to and perceptions of risk can be analysed through a mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) approach to information obtained via the respective media channels in covering the phenomenon as a newsworthy event of this research identifies three distinct peaks in public interest and response.
 Results. Following a Foucauldian tradition of problematisation, and a scholarship of critical media studies, we demonstrate that the ordering of animals in relation to society allows for a normalisation of certain threats from human-wildlife conflict while placing others in a state of exception which needs immediate action. We do not take the social conditions of predator-prey relations as a given, but seek to ‘de-normalise’ them and question the level of risk constructed, which plays out across public and media spheres and may carry over into human-wildlife conflicts. Our case study shows how social media posts can lead to the emergence of a perceived risk to society, which is reacted to dramatically, and whose emergency situation becomes a newsworthy event that confirms and seems to justify the level of security measures taken. The engagement of citizens online and with the emergency response teams can be viewed as overreacting to the situations based on having a real sense of danger of a ‘lioness’ penetrating their interactions with larger wildlife.
 Conclusions: That is, until it is determined that no immediate risk exists, and the actions taken are critiqued as a hysterical misinformed approach of ‘city dwelling’ officials lacking knowledge of wildlife in one’s region. We then speculate about what ethical and political repercussions this may create for multispecies co-existence with predators and pests in Germany.

Provoking Gut-Level Reactions: A Study on Journalistic Framing During the 2020 Meatpacking Crisis

ABSTRACT This study investigates news frames used by mainstream news media in the United States to portray the 2020 meatpacking crisis. By integrating framing and animal standpoint theory, it reveals the mechanisms that perpetuate social ignorance about daily practices within the meat industry, particularly those that exclude the perspectives of farmed animals. Through an engagement with intersectional ecofeminism and Critical Animal and Media Studies (CAMS), the investigation probes the cyclical patterns of violence inflicted upon farmed animals in the meat industry as portrayed by news outlets, a phenomenon that simultaneously impacts marginalized human communities. The inclusion of farmed animals as news sources in journalism is discussed as a prescriptive approach to remedy social ignorance on animal agriculture news.

Livestreamed land: Scams and certainty in Myanmar’s digital land market

Scams are endemic to digital capitalism, whether they manifest as bitcoin bubbles or bullshit jobs. Drawing on two years of digital ethnography in Myanmar’s Facebook land markets, this article explains what happens when the land scam migrates online. By unraveling warnings of trickery, interviewing wary participants, and inhabiting Facebook Live real estate tours, we argue that the scam is a vocation born of hope and desperation that targets land as the most-stable asset amidst crisis, one which operates through the networked and affective affordances of social media sites. Specifically, we highlight how Facebook enables brokers to ‘crowd’ transactions and amplify hype around sought-after plots, obscuring risk and responsibility while generating excitement and competition. Live video formats enable brokers to cultivate digital intimacy and authenticity from afar, creating a collective emotional investment in what we call the “virtual reality of land.” Bringing together critical geography and media studies, our analysis situates the scam in particular histories of inequality while explaining how these relations are reformulated through social media sites' sensory, affective, and connective affordances.

The Work of Art in the Age of Transmedia Production (With Regards to Walter Benjamin)

This essay is a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a classic text in critical theory and media studies. Appropriating Benjamin’s sentence, paragraph, and essay structures, the essay presents a series of theoretical reflections on the status of art during the current age of transmedia production. The essay seeks to contribute to a theory of contemporary art that moves beyond capitalist, and increasingly fascist, ideologies. As in Benjamin’s essay, this work is an effort to think dialectically about the contradictions that structure our contemporary moment, and therefore to formulate a socialist aesthetics.

Structured like a language model: Analysing AI as an automated subject

Drawing from the resources of psychoanalysis and critical media studies, in this article we develop an analysis of large language models (LLMs) as ‘automated subjects’. We argue the intentional fictional projection of subjectivity onto LLMs can yield an alternate frame through which artificial intelligence (AI) behaviour, including its productions of bias and harm, can be analysed. First, we introduce language models, discuss their significance and risks, and outline our case for interpreting model design and outputs with support from psychoanalytic concepts. We trace a brief history of language models, culminating with the releases, in 2022, of systems that realise ‘state-of-the-art’ natural language processing performance. We engage with one such system, OpenAI's InstructGPT, as a case study, detailing the layers of its construction and conducting exploratory and semi-structured interviews with chatbots. These interviews probe the model's moral imperatives to be ‘helpful’, ‘truthful’ and ‘harmless’ by design. The model acts, we argue, as the condensation of often competing social desires, articulated through the internet and harvested into training data, which must then be regulated and repressed. This foundational structure can however be redirected via prompting, so that the model comes to identify with, and transfer , its commitments to the immediate human subject before it. In turn, these automated productions of language can lead to the human subject projecting agency upon the model, effecting occasionally further forms of countertransference. We conclude that critical media methods and psychoanalytic theory together offer a productive frame for grasping the powerful new capacities of AI-driven language systems.

TikTok as Television

As much as users and advertisers have flocked to it, TikTok has been a success. To this point, research on TikTok has been concerned with the nature of TikTok texts and the ways that laterally organized networks on TikTok have intermedia interface points. Instead of focusing on the text or the authors, this article argues that Raymond Williams concept of flow is critical for an initial characterization of a social media platform, proposing and implementing a Markov process model for critical media studies of the experience of TikTok flow. The result of this analysis challenges many commonly held ideas about what TikTok “is” and offers evidence that TikTok is television, not social media. We argue that this shift of perspective is important for advancing understanding of this platform.

Caring for Communities through AI Language

AI-mediated communication (AI-MC) assists and creates dialogue between people to suggest responses during digital conversations. Users see this when automated suggestions appear in text and email communications. This technology has the potential to be used on a mass scale and to eventually lead to complete conversation formation, possibly without any knowledge of one knowing they are engaging in dialogue with AI. Knowing that users adopt digital behaviors that contribute to efficiency, research must look at the influence of this tool in shaping social constructs. Understanding that gender bias exists in both the English language and in the development of AI leads to my inquiry in analyzing the role that AI-MC plays in constructing social norms with language usage. I argue that the use of gender biased language in AI predictive-text suggestions contributes to the social construction of gender in the creation, execution, and use of AI-MC. My research included searching for articles related to AI-MC, human computer relationships, and historical bias concerns with AI and language. Using the keywords gender, language, artificial intelligence, and AI-MC, I compiled research articles from the fields of human computer learning, critical media studies, and psychology to conduct a discourse analysis. Informed by feminist STS scholarship on marginalization, gender and language, and the theoretical framework of social construction theory, I performed an ideological critique of the scholarship to articulate how language constructs reality, specifically gender, and the underlying consequences and assumptions. Care is given to recognizing other underrepresented communities and cultural rhetoric in digital communication tools to add a layer of nuance in highlighting the impact this approach can have toward uncovering social constructs and contributing to solutions that embrace diversity. My argument also considers the impact this intervention could have during the formative years of youth given the influence of language and symbols in forming identities and social practices. I discuss solutions of using gender fair language and neutralized language, while encouraging caution around solutions that still lean toward the masculine. AI-MC needs to be created without gendered terminology as much as possible and with the automatic inclusion of gender-neutral terms when gendered terms are suggested (e.g., suggesting he, she, and they). Additionally, I recognize the tendency for society to construct norms around “acceptable” language, for example with methods such as tone policing. I call for advancements that consider the impact of these actions on marginalized groups by developing technologies that respect diverse rhetoric. Embracing various forms of expression leads to a more authentic representation of communities and thus society at large. Therefore, efforts to create AI-MC experiences that do not reinforce binary gender, nor only one model of acceptable discourse, are essential in future developments of this tool to embrace a more inclusive digital environment. Understanding the prominence of algorithms in our communicative experiences emphasizes the need for AI language design that embraces inclusivity to encourage positive relationship formation that is representative of all people regardless of gender identification, sexual orientation, dis/ability, race, or other identities.

MENTAL HEALTH AND THE LIBERTARIAN STRUCTURES OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS: EXPERIENCES OF PEOPLE WITH EATING DISORDERS

Most research on social media and mental health takes a social psychological focus on associations between types of use (social comparisons) or content (idealised images of thinness) and negative effects. Drawing on critical media studies research on platforms, this presentation shifts the conversation towards exploring how social media platforms or mechanisms shape vulnerable users’ experiences of use and content. Interviews with people with eating disorders (EDs) (n=31) highlighted three key experiences: (i) messaging apps that afforded interpersonal communication with chosen trusted audiences and modes of interaction enhanced wellness, whereas platforms and features pushing interaction and extensive, competitive connections were distressing and shunned, (ii) diet influencers, reeled by algorithms, were especially harmful for people with EDs who sought to steer their feeds towards recovery influencers, which however could rehash triggering aesthetic codes informed by the attention economy; (iii) social media support groups, coaches and mental health advice were deemed useful, however the sheer plenitude of offer and business models also created a minefield. The findings map onto historical intertwining of the countercultural quest to open a space for user-generated content and interaction and commercial entrepreneurialism, both characterised by libertarianism. The participants sought to carve out spaces in social media with trusted friends and alternative vernacular content. Yet, the platforms catapulted them out of their comfort zones into harmful interactions and content streams. The problem here is not specific use or content, but libertarian and commercial social media infrastructures that do not afford safe spaces for vulnerable people with eating disorders or others.

Participatory Design and Critical Media Studies: a Convivial Conversation

In the age of platform society, Critical Media Studies are faced with the challenge of developing not only theoretical proposals capable of critically addressing the power exerted on society by GAFAM-owned digital platforms, but also of envisioning a praxis capable of changing the political economy of this corporate-driven digital media ecosystem. To do this, we believe that Participatory Design and Critical Media Studies should dialogue when it comes to theoretical frameworks and intervention practices. In this paper we propose to start this dialogue building upon the work of Ivan Illich, especially his book Tools for Conviviality. We find that in order to imagine a possible digital media design process able to avoid the creation of radical monopolies, it is necessary to adopt a Convivial Participatory Design approach where issues related to scale, people needs and power inequalities are considered by designers in collaboration with the users.

Verified play, precarious work: GamerGate and platformed authenticity in the cultural industries

This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced policing of journalists and users during GamerGate and the rise of ‘authenticity’ as a key resource for journalists and other platformed creators in the present. We draw on digital games, journalism and critical media studies to analyse the work of ‘authenticity’. We argue that platform affordances such as identity verification badges are fundamentally implicated in the work of users to appear ‘real’, even as the visibility requisite for realness brings uneven risks for marginalised cultural workers.

Review: Women’s Voices in Digital Media: The Sonic Screen from Film to Memes, by Jennifer O’Meara

Review: <i>Women’s Voices in Digital Media: The Sonic Screen from Film to Memes</i>, by Jennifer O’Meara

Ruinous Speculation, Tunnel Environments, and the Sustainable Infrastructures of the Border

AbstractThe US-Mexico borderlands used to host a wide range of natural and social environments, many of which have become irreversibly altered by the structures built to reinforce geopolitical boundaries. To rethink the form and purpose of these borderlands is a political objective of utmost importance, yet most future thinking about the border has remained restricted to imagining new versions of border walls euphemistically rebranded as “sustainable” alternatives. This essay analyzes the limitations of popular design projects that effectively greenwash the securitization imperative of the nation-state. It then turns to a lesser-known speculative project that reimagines the borderlands from the perspective of underground tunnels through a multimedia model. The essay draws on the insights of critical environmental media studies to illustrate the affordances of specific media forms for articulating future worlds with a greater focus on care. This analysis proposes ruinous speculation as an affirmative form of future thinking that orients toward infrastructures that enable human and nonhuman worlds to thrive and away from infrastructures that reinforce the violent hierarchies of the geopolitical divide.

Confronting Skam in Each of us in the Critical Media Studies and Cultural Trauma Theories

This paper will conduct a TV series from Norway called Skam (Shame) as a case study and discuss its impact by utilizing critical studies of media and cultural trauma theories. Simply put, this paper aims to illustrate that Skam depicts the shame arisen from mythical norm labeled by the dominant narratives under the mainstream media and understands the true meaning of healing for traumas in two aspects based on cultural trauma theories. For one, trauma is intersectional and therefore varying from every individual. For another, the mainstream power-over approach cannot help to heal trauma, but only the person herself/himself can be the one to deal with own relationship and confront with the truth. Lastly, this paper will bring up a rebuttal to criticize the drawback of mainstream media to the paradigm shift of understanding cultural trauma theory.

Discourses about independence: A corpus-based analysis of discourse prosodies in Spanish and Catalan newspapers

The present study is a corpus-assisted analysis of discourses on the Catalan movement of independence in the Catalan and Spanish press. A referendum for Catalan independence was held on 1 October 2017 but was not approved by the central Spanish government and was declared illegal. Spanish and Catalan newspapers differed considerably in their treatment and representation of the conflict, which also drew the attention of the international press to Catalonia. My analysis interconnects theoretical perspectives from linguistic critical discourse studies, cognitive linguistics, and media studies. The methodology is based on the analysis of two comparable corpora of journalistic texts (in Catalan, Spanish). My aim is to identify and compare different features of the semantic prosody of words describing the event of geopolitical separation and the different narratives on this sociopolitical conflict that these prosodies contribute to producing. More specifically, I focus on a selection of keywords, like independence, secession, and sovereignty, that seem to be indicative of different discursive strategies consciously, and possibly unconsciously, chosen by a selection of national Catalan and Spanish newspapers. By carrying out a contrastive analysis of the two corpora, I am able to describe certain similarities, like the similar frequent use of the word independence, and differences, like the more frequent use of the word secession in the Spanish corpus, that indicate different framings of the same event and can be related to different ideological positionings against or in favor of Catalonia’s independence from Spain.

Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue “Communication in Defense of Nonhuman Animals during an Extinction and Climate Crisis”

When honored with the opportunity to edit our first Special Issue in a media journal, we knew that we would concentrate on the subdiscipline of “critical animal and media studies” (CAMS) [...]

Augmenting digital monopolies: A corporate financialization perspective on the rise of Big Tech

Building on the notion of corporate financialization, this article analyzes the financial dynamics of the world’s largest digital platforms over the period 2000–2020: Alibaba, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and Tencent. These “Big Tech” corporations jointly form the infrastructural core of the digital economy. Taking cues from critical media studies and political economy, we probe their financial statements according to three stylized indicators of corporate financialization: (i) expanding financial assets and debt; (ii) augmenting asset structures, with intangible assets in the form of goodwill ballooning alongside tangible capital; and (iii) maximizing shareholder value. Our findings point to commonalities among the ‘avantgarde of digital capitalism’, where feedback loops between mounting market dominance, data extraction, and above-average profits have been successfully leveraged with key tools of corporate financialization to accelerate Big Tech’s infrastructural dominance across economy and society.

Unlocking Silent Histories of the Lumbee Community: Supporting Educational Sovereignty Through Video Ethnographies

This article draws on Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) to explore how Eurocentric education serves as a vehicle for the assimilation and acculturation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States. Departing from deficit approaches to Indigenous education, we explore the implementation of a community-based youth participatory action initiative, Unlocking Silent Histories (USH), with the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. USH is a leadership and learning initiative grounded in critical pedagogy, media studies, and Indigenous transformative praxis. USH engages youth in setting learning goals, identifying the purpose of their research, interviewing elders, and ultimately creating short films. In this study, we examine how participating youth take up and transform USH based on the context in which it is being implemented. We illuminate moments of agency, social inclusion, and healing as emergent from this community-connected and youth-directed approach to learning through a grounded theory approach.

Singapore, City of the Future

In the context of critical global media studies, this article demonstrates how Western visual-aesthetic registers can invisibilize an existing place and its inhabitants through the uncritical celebration of its imagined futures. Taking Singapore as a case study, the article focuses on two sites of mediatization: the 2018 National Geographic documentary feature, City of the Future: Singapore, and 2019–20 media reports on the filming of HBO’s Westworld in Singapore. It argues that these media artifacts employ the trope of allochronic futurity: a denial of coevalness that seeks recourse in a future time-outside-time. This media trope is produced and sustained by two kinds of registers—a discursive register and a visual-aesthetic register—that inform promotional mediatized genres. While the promotional genres and discourses analyzed here construct Singapore’s distinctiveness, the visual-aesthetic register renders Singapore generic in its visualized futuristic-ness.