Global Mediascape Research Articles

Popular Culture

Abstract Scholarship on the creation and circulation of forms of popular culture has always been concerned with questions of audiences and reception. Initial theorizations of audiences as overly credulous, easily swayed masses have long been significantly complicated to account for more active participation. One of the key drivers of this move of framing audiences from passive to active has been the emergence of the discipline of fandom studies. Today, the field is truly multidisciplinary, encompassing popular culture and media studies, literary studies, communication studies and psychology, marketing and tourism studies, amongst others. Additionally, while fan communities have always been transnational and transcultural, the explosion of cross-cultural phenomena like the Korean Hallyu Wave (the worldwide popularity of Korean media texts and celebrities) has brought renewed attention to the interconnected nature of the contemporary global mediascape. Even as it has expanded, one of the main challenges to the discipline has been criticism that it has overemphasized aspects of fan identity, such as gender identity and sexual orientation, while neglecting the role of race. This critique challenges the structure of the field, whereby certain critical genealogies, methodologies, and even fandoms themselves, are granted a canonical and universal status while others are seen as tertiary. This review of published works in popular culture studies focuses on studies of fandom that aim to break these silos, selecting three publications that address different aspects of today’s globalized fandom mediascape to underline the necessity for fandom scholars to expand their understanding of how these spaces are interconnected. Thematically, the review considers how these publications address and extend three core interests of fandom studies: 1. Digital Platforms and Politics; 2. Identity and Community; and 3. Transcultural Flows.

TikTok and its mediatic split: the promotion of ecumenical user-generated content alongside Sinocentric media globalization

TikTok has ousted Google as the world’s favorite online destination in 2021. As China’s first emergent social media app making its mark across the Global North and South, it has prompted a shift in our global mediascape. Following in the footsteps of YouTube and Instagram after it, TikTok is facilitating new identities through User-Generated Content (UGC) while challenging the hegemony of American-led platform culture. UGC analyzed in this article views it unabashedly as a youthful narcissism through which a form of self-reinvention online is created. This is culturally surmised as an intriguing new form of global creativity that I label ecumenical UGC. Yet, scholarship has largely examined TikTok through empirical and content analysis frameworks only, negating the compelling cultural studies issues evinced in this trendy media. In conjunction with discussions of TikTok’s meteoric rise, this article also probes how the Chinese company that owns this app bends several UNESCO media principles, creating its mediatic split with its twin, Douyin operating only in the PRC. By laying out this other path, one detects a shrinkage of cultural globalization in the pandemic era as TikTok becomes a carrier of ‘underglobalization’ flows, a disrupter and provider of algorithmic content, all going under not against older notions of global culture.

“Their skirts are too short!” and “He’s gay!”. Backlashes on Transnational Popular Culture Consumption in BlackPink and Bright’s Case Studies

The internet era has facilitated online streaming and social media platforms to burgeon, causing the flow of transnational pop cultures across regions and also offering diverse consumption of media content from around the globe. In Indonesia, the discussion on pop culture has often been centered on the proliferation of K-Pop's popularity among local audiences. Besides, the Boys Love (BL/Y) series from Thailand has also gained considerable interest in the last couple of years. While the consumption of K-Pop and Thailand's BL series in global mediascape is widely accepted without much controversy, incongruous feedbacks are present among Indonesian audiences, particularly pointing at the clash of ideological perspectives between its Muslim conservatives and the youth. The conservative group considers the media contents "vulgar" and "too liberal," while the latter defends them as part of contemporary youth culture and the freedom of expression. This paper then examines two study cases: Shopee's advertisement featuring the K-Pop group, BlackPink, and the case of Ruangguru's ambassador from Thailand, Bright Vachirawit. This paper uses qualitative textual analysis to focus on the two contested ideas (global versus local). The findings illustrate how BlackPink's female bodies and Bright's fluid identity as a lead actor in the BL series have been stigmatized and adjusted to become more acceptable commodities among pious audiences. This study helps to reveal the complexity of global consumption in a Muslim majority country where audiences' cultural identity construction has always been contested. Furthermore, it provides a glimpse of Indonesian society's current perspectives on gender and tolerance.

Powerful women, postfeminism, and fantasies of patriarchal recuperation in Magnificent Century

ABSTRACT This article examines the complex and contradictory gendered desires and anxieties that reveal themselves in the representation of powerful women in contemporary global television. Focusing on the internationally most popular TV series of the Turkish TV industry, Magnificent Century, screened in over 75 countries and seen by more than 500 million people, the central objective of this article is to assess the cultural implications of the series’ portrayal of influential and dominant women. Set in the 16th-century, Magnificent Century projects into the past a postfeminist interpretation of history, celebrating competitiveness, self-interestedness, and ambition, especially for its central character Hurrem Sultan, who rises from her slave origins to become a powerful empress. The series promotes women’s individualistic empowerment in a patriarchal world, while recurrently re-asserting male hegemony. Magnificent Century relies on gendered power reversals between femininity and masculinity as its main narrative and affective structure in which postfeminist empowerment and misogyny co-exist. Close textual analysis of the series coupled with examination of online viewer responses demonstrate that popular feminism and popular misogyny have concurrent audience appeal and that the powerful woman is a figure of cultural disquiet in the contemporary global mediascape.

News repertoires and information behavior in Austria\u2014What is the role of social inequality?

The changes in the global mediascape have had a tremendous impact on societal news flows. Using data from the Social Survey Austria 2018 and a quantitative application of the media repertoire approach, the article illustrates how information behavior and news seeking relate to social status, political orientation and sociodemographics. The results confirm that the developments in Austria—often referred to as a representative of a traditional media landscape—are mostly in line with international trends, as new media have been added to the media repertoires of approximately two-thirds of the sample. Effects tied to social inequality generally match previous assumptions: Higher educational achievements and income lead to more diversified news repertoires. Additionally, the overall structure of the data indicates that the online-only users are still a small minority, consisting of younger individuals who are less likely to work and more likely to vote for left-wing parties.

From Rivers to Confetti: Reconfigurations of Time through New Media Narratives

From Rivers to Confetti: Reconfigurations of Time through New Media Narratives

Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age: (Re)Mapping Connectivity and Belonging

This article charts new directions in digital media and migration studies from a gendered, postcolonial, and multidisciplinary perspective. In particular, the focus is on the ways in which the experience of displacement is resignified and transformed by new digital affordances from different vantage points, engaging with recent developments in datafication, visualization, biometric technologies, platformization, securitization, and extended reality (XR) as part of a drastically changed global mediascape. This article explores the role of new media technologies in rethinking the dynamics of migration and globalization by focusing in particular on the role of migrant users as “connected” and active participants, as well as “screened” and subject to biometric datafication, visualization, and surveillance. Elaborating on concepts such as “migration” and “mobility,” the article analyzes some of the paradoxes offered by our globalized world of intermittent connectivity and troubled belonging, seen as relational definitions that are always fluid, negotiable, and porous.

Maps, Distant Reading and the Internet Movie Database

The presence of large-scale data sets, made available thanks to information technology, fostered in the past few years a new scholarly interest for the use of computational methods to extract, visualize and observe data in the Humanities. Scholars from various disciplines work on new models of analysis to detect and understand major patterns in cultural production, circulation and reception, following the lead, among others, of Lev Manovich’s cultural analytics. The aim is to use existing raw information in order to develop new questions and offer more answers about today’s digital landscape. Starting from these premises, and witnessing the current digitisation of television production, distribution, and reception, in this paper we ask what digital approaches based on big data can bring to the study of television series and their movements in the global mediascape.

Diasporic youth culture of K-pop

ABSTRACTThis study examines how diasporic Korean youth engage with the recent global circulation of South Korean pop music (‘K-pop’). It explores how young diasporic Koreans negotiate K-pop as an ethnic and/or global cultural form in their transition to adulthood. Drawing on interviews with young people of Korean heritage in Canada, the study addresses how a diasporic sound, which connects the nostalgia for the ancestral homeland and the global mediascape, is appropriated for young people’s identity work. By examining diasporic Korean fans’ consumption of K-pop, this study suggests a perspective for understanding the recent K-pop phenomenon as a diasporic youth cultural practice.

Gang glocalization: How the global mediascape creates and shapes local gang realities

This article introduces the concept of ‘gang glocalization’ to capture the processes by which global media myths and conventions create and shape local gang realities. The different stages of gang glocalization, and the motives to engage in this process, are examined by comparison of two empirical cases – Congolese gangs in Brussels and Afro-Caribbean gangs in London. This multi-sited ethnography finds that youth use fiction and imagination in order to create individual and collective gang identities. Police and political action against gangs is then informed by the same fiction and imagination, resulting in new gang realities based not on what is real. We find that mythmaking is an essential aspect of gangs – without the myth there is no gang – and that imagination is at the core of some of its most harmful activities, namely spectacular symbolic violence. This is an update on Thrasher’s (1927) old themes. The driving forces behind gang glocalization are emotions and desires tied to lived experiences of social and cultural exclusion. Implications for research and practice follow.

Global media and time: A conceptual and historical perspective

This paper addresses the role of time and meaning-making in the global mediascape. Particular attention will be paid to the role of past and future narratives, connections of messages with a global outreach and time as a topic of communication. The empirical analysis will use a comparative approach to explore these different dimensions by analysing three global media events, such as, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination US President John F. Kennedy and the Fukushima Daiichi incident. The main findings of the paper will show that time is a constitutional part in the process of meaning-making in global communication.

Korean Masculinity in Global ‘Hollywood’: Hallyu Megastar Jang Dong Gun and The Warrior’s Way

This article examines the emergence of Hallyu stars in global Hollywood since 2008/2009. Specific attention is given protagonized articulations of Korean masculinity, which, on the backdrop of Hollywood Orientalism, is a strikingly peculiar phenomenon. It certainly calls to question how Hallyu megastars are ideologized as they make way in the Anglophone realm of global cinema. Examining ideological inflections of Koreanness, I employ the term worlding as a “making of worlds.” The empirical point of gravity is the cinematic part of the Jang Dong Gun-oeuvre that arguably always holds an ethnic edge, which makes it great to think worlding with. The first part of the article introduces the emergence of Korean masculinity on the global stage and Hallyu megastars in Anglophone cinema. The second part focuses on a reading of the Korean-authored and Christian “Hollywood” film The Warrior’s Way (2010). In the film Korean masculinity arguably assumes a pastoral humanitarian role as protector of the planet and its minorities, which reads as a form of transnational minjung ideology. With this I hope to contribute to an increased understanding of the on-going reformation of ethnoracial and cultural boundaries pertaining to Koreanness as it emerges in the global mediascape.

Participatory Media Fandom

Recent years have seen the rise of consumers’ voluntary translation and distribution of foreign cultural products on a global scale. Such a practice does not only facilitate the grass-root globalization of culture but also questions the cultural industries’ current model of global distribution. This paper explores the nature and implications of fan-translation and distribution of cultural commodities through a case study of English fansubbing of anime (subtitling of Japanese animation in English). Anime fansubbing is situated on the disjuncture of global mediascape, which intensifies with the increasing public access to means to copy and share, the expansion of collective knowledge and the rise of fans’ voluntary labour coordinated on a global scale. It exemplifies participatory media fandom whose globalization exceeds that of cultural industries in terms of extent and velocity. The paper argues that fansubbing, pursued as a hobby, can unsettle the global mediascape by allowing multiple mediations of cultural text and presenting a new model of content distribution and its organisation based on consumers’ voluntary work.

The polyphonic choir of well-doers: Do the voiceless get their voices heard via humanitarian organisations?

The global mediascape has changed. New technology has opened new information avenues, but this very fact has also meant growing competition in the attention game, including the areas of concern of humanitarian activity. Celebrities have emerged as politicians, diplomats and humanitarians. Politics has turned into a branding exercise; it is equally important how a public move looks as what it actually means. How have all these developments influenced the strategic communication of international humanitarian agencies? This article analyses the online information dissemination of six international humanitarian organisations, with special attention to the use of new technology and social media, as well as delivery. Whom do these agencies want to reach? The assumption that UN organisations appear more formal than the rest is not supported. Even one-issue movements, such as Reporters Without Borders, do not give much space to the ‘voiceless’. All these organisations frequently use new media but in an old-fashioned way, aiming at mediated information distribution via mass media, while avoiding discussion and debate.

Networked multilingualism: Some language practices on Facebook and their implications

Integrating research on multilingualism and computer-mediated communication, this paper proposes the term ‘networked multilingualism’ and presents findings from a case study to explore its implications for the theorising of multilingualism. Networked multilingualism is a cover term for multilingual practices that are shaped by two interrelated processes: being networked, i.e. digitally connected to other individuals and groups, and being in the network, i.e. embedded in the global mediascape of the web. It encompasses everything language users do with the entire range of linguistic resources within three sets of constraints: mediation of written language by digital technologies, access to network resources, and orientation to networked audiences. The empirical part of the paper discusses the Facebook language practices of a small group of Greek-background secondary school students in a German city. Data collection follows an online ethnography approach, which combines systematic observation of online activities, collection and linguistic analysis of screen data, and data elicited through direct contact with users. Focusing on four weeks of discourse on profile walls, the analysis examines the participants’ linguistic repertoires, their language choices for genres of self-presentation and dialogic exchange, and the performance of multilingual talk online. The findings suggest that the students’ networked multilingual practices are individualised, genre-shaped, and based on wide and stratified repertoires.

Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian independent cinema: Essays, documents, interviews. Edited by Tilman Baumgärtel. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 273, Notes, Bibliography, Index. - Southeast Asia. Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia. Edited by May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Pp. 239, Illustrations, Bibliography.

Southeast Asian independent cinema: Essays, documents, interviews Edited by TILMAN BAUMGARTEL Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 273, Notes, Bibliography, Index. Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia Edited by MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ and BENJAMIN MCKAY Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Pp. 239, Illustrations, Bibliography. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000131 Given the heterogeneous geographies and disjunctive histories of Southeast Asia, any attempt at discussing the region's cinema must always err on the side of the plural. In turn, discourses on its independent cinema must attend to contesting notions of independence. Through what forms of relationality can cinema become independent? And independent of what? Such questions are posed by both Southeast Asian independent cinema and Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia, the first two published collections of literature devoted exclusively to the study of the field. The appearance of the two titles within the same year marks a milestone not only for the region's independent cinema, but also its screen culture as a whole, considering that previous discussions of Southeast Asian films were mostly framed within the larger context of Asian cinema. Comparing the two collections to earlier titles such as Being & becoming: The cinemas of Asia (ed. Aruna Vasudev, Latika Padgaonkar and Rashmi Doraiswamy, Macmillan India, 2002) and Contemporary Asian cinema: Popular culture in a global frame (ed. Anne Tereska Ciecko, Berg, 2006) also reveals the shifts in approach, for their chapters are titled not after countries but issues and ideas--a reflection of the post-national paradigm in which Southeast Asian independent cinema operates today. Southeast Asian independent cinema is divided into three sections: 'Essays', 'Documents' and 'Interviews'. The first two essays by John A. Lent and editor Tilman Baumgartel give a broad overview of the region, foregrounding the affinities shared by the independent filmmaking practices of its different countries. Lent's 'Southeast Asian independent cinema: Independent of what?' identifies three forms of independence: of government control, of the studio system and of traditional film aesthetics. While his arguments are mostly cogent, the attempt at designating aesthetic independence as a category in itself is questionable, for it obscures the social realities and economy of means from which 'independent' aesthetics often emerge. Meanwhile, Baumgartel's 'Imagined communities, imagined worlds: Independent film from Southeast Asia in the global mediascape' takes as its key theoretical reference Arjun Appadurai's concept of 'imagined worlds'. Theorised by Appadurai as transnational relational fields through which people, media, technologies, finances and ideas circulate, these 'imagined worlds' are insightfully posited by Baumgartel as 'zones of territorial and cultural disjuncture' (p. 31) in which independent films in the region are made, challenging the Andersonian 'imagined communities' formed through mainstream, state-sanctioned cinema. Another notable essay is Alfian bin Sa'at's 'Hinterland, heartland, home: Affective topography in Singapore films'. Analysing films such as 12 Storeys (1997), Eating Air (1999) and Singapore Dreaming (2006), Alfian puts forth a compelling thesis on how the heartland, referring to the neighbourhoods of high-rise public flats where most Singaporeans live, operates as an imperfect hinterland for a country with none to call its own. Less convincing is the added claim that such images of the Singaporean heartland bear the traces of the kampungs as depicted in Malay films of the sixties, which smacks of romanticism and retroactive rationalisation. Intan Paramaditha's 'Cinema, sexuality and censorship in post-Soeharto Indonesia' also offers keen insights. Through a historical examination of the uneasy relationship between cinema and public morality in Indonesia, Paramaditha illustrates how the shift towards a post-Soeharto institutional environment did not ease censorship laws concerning cinematic depictions of gender and sexuality, but merely transferred the power to oppress from a paternalistic regime to a social climate governed by revived Islamic values. …

Participatory media fandom: A case study of anime fansubbing

Recent years have seen the rise of consumers’ voluntary translation and distribution of foreign cultural products on a global scale. Such a practice not only facilitates the grassroots globalization of culture but also questions the cultural industries’ current model of global distribution. This article explores the nature and implications of fan-translation and distribution of cultural commodities through a case study of English fansubbing of anime (subtitling of Japanese animation in English). Anime fansubbing is situated at the disjuncture of the global mediascape, which intensifies with the increasing public access to means to copy and share, the expansion of collective knowledge and the rise of fans’ voluntary labour coordinated on a global scale. It exemplifies participatory media fandom whose globalization exceeds that of cultural industries in terms of extent and velocity. The article argues that fansubbing, pursued as a hobby, can unsettle the global mediascape by allowing multiple mediations of cultural text and presenting a new model of content distribution and its organization based on consumers’ voluntary work.

Comparing Alternative Media in North and South: The Cases of IFIWatchnet and Indymedia in Africa

Alternative media form an important part of the global mediascape. Research on this phenomenon is, however, often drawn from studies in the ‘global North’. In this paper we discuss alternative media in the ‘global South’, by exploring two case studies of cooperation between Northern and Southern partners: IFIWatchnet in South America, and Indymedia Centre in Africa. We highlight how Northern and Southern partners differed in identity, organizational forms, and accountability. We find that Northern partners were oriented to more ‘marginal’ identities, fluid organizational structures, and informal structures of accountability. In contrast, Southern activists articulated more ‘mainstream’ identities, relied on more structured forms, and linked to formalized modes of accountability. The result was often significant clashes over what it meant to be alternative media, how alternative media should be organized, and how people should be held to account. This meant that North–South cooperation was often fraught with struggle. These difficulties are reminiscent of the limitations of creating global cooperation through seeking to spread modes of activist organization developed in the North, which emphasize autonomy, networks, fluidity, and, in some instances, direct action.

Imagined communities, imagined worlds: Independent film from South East Asia in the global mediascape

ABSTRACTThe article gives an overview of the recent upsurge of independent cinema in South East Asia. I argue that these films are examples of a new transnational cinema for the lack of alternative: as the political and social situation in the countries where they have been made does not allow for their inclusion into the mainstream of the national cinema, they have turned to an international market to find an audience. I argue that a new generation of film-makers has been empowered by the easy and cheap access to digital video. Thanks to digital cinema technology, film-makers from South East Asia have the opportunity to produce their alternative and often very personal works. Using Arjun Appadurai's influential essay ‘Disjuncture and Difference’ (1996) as a theoretical framework, I discuss some of the specific traits of recent independent films from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Singapore and the Philippines, and point out their genuinely transnational nature with regard to distribution and reception.

The Difference a Letter Makes

Barack Obama is often compared to past national lenders: Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., to name a few. These comparisons have, for the most part, produced narratives of continuity in which Obama figures as the current leader in a legacy of social progress. However, on bumper stickers, t-shirts, posters, screensavers, Facebook icons, and other-digital and physical paraphernalia, another adequation has emerged for a radically different political purpose. Since the early days of his presidential campaign to the present, moment, adversaries of Obama have associated him with Osama bin Laden in efforts to cast Obama as a. domestic of sorts. From verbal slips on newscasts to political cartoons, to YouTube videos that transform Obama into bin Laden, to bumper slicker campaigns exemplified in the figure above, these correlations between Obama and bin Laden illustrate more than just an internationalized form of American racism. They represent the role that politics of identity and difference play in today's global mediascape--which is defined by decentralized forms of communication, social networks, peer-produced knowledge, and a general sense of openness for production, distribution, and reception. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This analysis will trace recent developments in the global mediascape as they relate to the representation of bin Laden and Obama within the new public sphere. I will begin by focusing on the ways bin Laden was generated as a figure of digital terror- in the early years of the War on Terror, and will primarily focus on the reception of his video messages in western via Al Jazeera. I will then look at the use of new in Obama's presidential campaign that established his identity as a product of mass collaboration in the my media society and how this identity created the conditions for his comparison with bin Laden--often manifested in mass-produced forms of pop art, such as the bumper slicker that claims only difference between Obama and Osama is BS. IN SEARCH OF OSAMA BIN LADEN WITHIN SATELLITE TELEVISION On October 29, 2004, news anchor Aaron Brown introduced a segment entitled Uninvited Guest' explaining that Just after 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time today, bin Laden stopped being a shadowy presence, stopped being a talking point, and once again started talking. (1) Brown went on to explain that earlier that day, the Arab television network, Al Jazeera, released a video submitted to their offices in Qatar that depicted bin Laden standing at a podium in front of a brown rock wall, delivering a speech to the American people about the upcoming (2004) U.S. presidential election and the causes of terrorism. In the days that followed the release of the video, Brown and other American news anchors continuously analyzed the meaning of the video. The central focus was not the content of bin Laden's speech so much as the impact his resurfacing would have upon the election. Analysts touched on everything: his apparent health, his facial expression when speaking directly to the American people, and his apparel--which one pundit even suggested included a John Kerry campaign button. All of these observations were used to support claims regarding the questionable safety of the presidential election and which candidate would be helped or hurt by the presence of bin Laden. After the first post-9/11 video message from bin Laden was circulated in October 2001, bin Laden's videoed body became a site upon which the American War on Terror was marked. The United States Department of State, CNN, and terrorist watch websites scoured images of bin Laden's body for meaning, including deconstructions of the image to determine if it is really bin Laden, analyses of the positioning of his appendages relative to the setting to assess hidden messages, and claims that the video files hold digitally encrypted messages for sleeper cells. …