Media Scholars Research Articles

The Field as a Black Box: Ethnographic Research in the Age of Platforms

This article aims to provide a detailed rendering of the struggles we experienced while undertaking ethnographic research for the study of music curators working at online music streaming platforms. Based on the field notes generated during a multi-sited ethnography, the article will critically discuss the “black boxing” strategies employed by these platforms in order to protect themselves from public scrutiny, and how media scholars can counteract in order to (partially) circumvent the restrictions posed by them. In light of this discussion, we propose five tactics that we argue can be employed in order to perform ethnographic research in the age of platforms. We conclude with a reflection on what we can learn from “failures in the field” and why it is important to advance ethnographic studies of the new places of cultural production.

Decolonising Digital Media Research Methods: Positioning African Digital Experiences as Epistemic Sites of Knowledge Production

ABSTRACT This introductory essay argues for a decolonial approach that privileges qualitative methods in ways that position African digital experiences as “epistemic sites” of knowledge production in their own right in digital media scholarship. In proffering this argument, we challenge and confront elements of the global knowledge system, which are driven by an implicit “civilising mission” in which methods and intellectual approaches drawn from the West are seen as sacrosanct, while approaches and concepts emerging from the Global South are deemed to have a lower ontological density in the hierarchical ordering of knowledge. We explore methodological questions that relate to the studies carried in this Special Issue and consider various strategies for aligning digital media scholarship with Southern epistemologies—whether these are found in the “epistemologies of everyday” popular culture or epistemologies emerging through the work of African activists and artists. Equally, we emphasise the value of methods that pay attention to issues of power and economic extraction to understand the very different roles of social media platforms in various African countries. The paper also considers how the precarious and contingent nature of infrastructure and African cities in general demands methods that pay attention to issues of digital materiality and infrastructure. Finally, we discuss Big Data methods and the need for African researchers to establish themselves more firmly in this space.

Locative disconnection: The use of location-based technologies to make disconnection easier, enforceable and exclusive

Today we live in a time of unprecedented connectivity making it increasingly difficult to disconnect from the Internet. In this article we theorize that location-based technologies are transforming the practice of disconnecting from the Internet. To justify this claim we cross-articulate perspectives on disconnection and locative media studies, two scholarly fields in media studies that intersect with location and place. In a review of disconnection literature, we argue that views towards disconnection have been informed by changing perceptions of location and place in relation to Internet connectivity. Conversely, we observe locative media scholarship that has demonstrated the influence of location-based technologies in creating location-based connections that have become integral to Internet platforms and applications. We then synthesise disconnection and locative media studies to theorize the dynamics between the practice of disconnecting from the Internet, a physical location and a location-based technology. We first offer the concept of locative disconnection to describe the designation or localization of disconnective practice to a specific place. Secondly, we argue that location-based technologies are increasingly utilized to simulate locative disconnection in response to the spread of mobile connectivity and have the effect of making practices of disconnection easier, enforceable and more exclusive. Through the discussion of examples from leisure, entertainment and education, we demonstrate how locative disconnection is increasingly operationalized as both a luxury commodity and/or risk management tool and critically examine the threat and appeal of such technologies for governing populations and user behaviour.

The Airwaves Belong to the People: A Critical Analysis of Radio Broadcasting and Licensing in Zimbabwe

This article reports on a study that focused on the radio broadcasting and licensing scene in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2020. The study interrogated the sincerity of the Zimbabwean government in advancing both media pluralism and diversity. Opposition political parties and civic organisations pressured Zimbabwe into adopting a liberal approach that they hoped would widen the political and media space. The study examined how the government has taken and implemented such a liberal approach. Drawing on the competitive authoritarianism concept, the study argued that the cosmetic application of contested and undemocratic media laws that pretended to be democratising the media was indeed gagging democracy. This is called a pseudo-progressive stance. The study gathered data using qualitative interviews with three media activists, three policymakers, two media professionals, and two media scholars in Zimbabwe. In total, 10 qualitative key informant in-depth interviews were carried out. The analysis revealed a silhouette of grandiose but empty media laws that have continued to impede democracy in Zimbabwe. Therefore, the study concluded that the monopoly of media influence and concentration of broadcasting media ownership within the ruling party is dire and not conducive to the development of diverse and creative content for the nation. Thus, collaborative efforts are needed for real change to be achieved in the broadcasting media in Zimbabwe.

Reconceptualizing Arab Media Research: Moving From Centrism Toward Inclusiveness and Balance

This essay provides a brief overview of the dominant trends in Arab media research, paying particular attention to the most common methodologies they rely on. To understand the current state of Arab media scholarship, the article explores the various influences that have played a decisive role in determining the quality and quantity of research productivity. Factors such as the Arab countries’ historical roots, traditional societies, patterns in education, and current conflicts in the region are shown to have an impact on Arab scholars’ engagement with research. To aid the advancement of theory of Arab media research, this essay advocates for conducting collaborative research and proposes a hybrid approach that merges epistemologies in a culture-sensitive, empirical manner that is capable of making universal generalizations while staying true to the specificities of the region itself.

The Mediatization of Human Rights Memory in Chile

Abstract The current pandemic-imposed reliance on media-centered forms of civic engagement underscores the need for empirical mediatization research on the relationship between media, partisan conflict, and political culture. Drawing from critical Latin American media scholarship, mediatization theory, and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), this article proposes a framework for comparative political communication research that centers on media practices and sociocultural change. By analyzing how a 1988 political advertising campaign in dictatorial Chile instantiated a peculiar vision of democratic transition, this article provides an examination of the disjuncture between televised representations of cheerful political reconciliation and abominable human rights abuses as the initial stage in the mediatization of Chilean human rights memory (HRM).

Casual Resistance: A Longitudinal Case Study of Video Gaming’s Gendered Construction and Related Audience Perceptions

AbstractMany media are associated with masculinity or femininity and male or female audiences, which links them to broader power structures around gender. Media scholars thus must understand how gendered constructions develop and change, and what they mean for audiences. This article addresses these questions through longitudinal, in-depth interviews with female video gamers (2012–2018), conducted as the rise of casual video games potentially started redefining gaming’s historical masculinization. The analysis shows that participants have negotiated relationships with casualness. While many celebrate casual games’ potential for welcoming new audiences, others resist casual’s influence to safeguard their self-identification as gamers. These results highlight how a medium’s gendered construction may not be salient to consumers, who carefully navigate divides between their own and industrially designed identities, but can simultaneously reaffirm existing power structures. Further, how participants’ views change over time emphasizes communication’s ongoing need for longitudinal audience studies that address questions of media, identity, and inclusion.

‘We [mostly] carry guns for the internet’: Visibility labour, social hacking and chasing digital clout by Black male youth in Chicago’s drill rap scene

Much negative attention has been given to the ‘drill’ music genre, a subgenre of gangsta rap that was born in Chicago’s underground hip hop scene in early 2010s. Previous scholarship has highlighted how social media has shifted how gang-affiliated youth in Chicago carefully manage their street reputations, communicate with peers and fuel gang rivalries through platformed creation. Yet still, in the context of drill, I argue that social media self-branding practices also provide these youth a way out of containment and sequestration to gain visibility in the music industry and empower their neighbourhoods. Based on interviews with drill recording artists and their support workers, I explore the content and character of their work, the centrality of work ethic to their racial identity construction and the way they use social media work to build and maintain status, authenticity and cultivate connections with fans, friends and other cultural producers. Bridging traditional theories of urban sociology with emerging new media scholarship, I suggest this group of artists is a representative case of how the digital practices of disadvantaged Black youth have typically gone mischaracterized in the literature. This study offers new insights into ‘capping’ as an important tenet to hip hop’s visibility labour on social media and how the ‘always on’ nature of digital labour adds another dimension to the typical utilization of street authenticity in narratives of hip hop music. This article concludes by illuminating the many deep contradictions and misconceptions about technological ingenuity, Black youth agency, hip hop culture and street credibility in urban communities.

Disaster Media: Bending the Curve of Ecological Disruption and Moving toward Social Justice

This essay introduces a special stream of *Media+Environment* focused on “disaster media.” In the process, the authors conceptualize this term in relation to “natural” and other disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and explore how understandings of “disaster media” are embedded within several areas of humanities-based film and media scholarship. Writing from the social ecological premise that consequences of disasters stem in large part from systemic actions, the introduction develops three general arguments about disaster media as an analytic. First, disasters cause people to rethink what “media” are and to contend with the fact that, especially during disasters, media are constantly changing and being updated; they also escape the screen and sculpt the environment (media are not only representational but also affective and infrastructural). Second, because they come to the fore in relation to crisis situations, disaster media help expose structural inequalities; practices of relief and reform need to happen and can be facilitated (or inhibited) by mediatic means. Finally, disaster media need to be considered in relation to the multiple temporalities of climate disruption (from the *longue durée* of glacial flow to uncertain and sudden extreme weather). Discussing these issues, the authors also introduce pieces in the stream that are focused on humanitarian drone interventions and glacier-melt artworks.

Mobilizing Media Studies in an Age of Datafication

We are at a pivotal moment for understanding and deciding what is actually at stake with datafication. In this contribution, I argue for the increasingly important and politicized role of media scholarship to privilege lived experiences and situated practices as a counter to the active neutralization of data-driven systems and their implications. In particular, I argue for the relevance of media studies to emphasize the uses to which technology is put and explore how data practices relate to other social practices and historical contexts as a way to broaden the parameters of response, moving data politics beyond the confines of the technology itself, and contending instead with the premise and terms of the debate.

Vernacular Feminism: Gendered Media Cultures and Historical Perspectives on Postdiscourse

Although media studies as a discipline has long been involved in various theoretical elaborations of the “post,” it has been concerned far less often with the past that is purportedly posted. In this piece, the concept of postfeminism provides a useful case to highlight how thoughtful engagement with the past has immense value for contemporary media scholarship. I suggest that postfeminist scholarship has typically tackled history only obliquely—via generational tropes—and that a more direct engagement with media history allows an understanding that reaches past the “now” with which postdiscourse tends to concern itself. Patterns of continuity and change have been brought into view through the access to historical media formats facilitated by digital archives. I propose a concept of vernacular feminism as a tool for analyzing historical postfeminism, pointing to the broader relevance for postdiscourses that involve an evocation of the past in the present.

Google, Facebook and what else? Measuring the hybridity of Italian journalists by their use of sources

The contemporary media systems present hybrid logics and features that imply an increasingly interdependence among actors, media and communication formats. The hybrid media system approach underlines that legacy news media and non-elite media actors construct flows of news through different media technologies and according to complex temporal structures. A media environment arises in which traditional distinctions between concepts like ‘online’ and ‘offline’, ‘producer’ and ‘audience’, ‘citizens’ and ‘journalists’ become blurred. The emphasis appears to be on change more than continuity, and on difference more than similarity. Although the hybrid media approach is appreciated by numerous contemporary media scholars, hybridity in media often remains an all-encompassing concept and few attempts have been made to measure it. This article assesses the level of hybridity by investigating journalists’ uses of sources. It considers mainly journalists’ use of sources by the medium for which they work (from newspapers to web or radio) and the kinds of news that they produce (hard or soft news, business/finance, tech/science). The assumption is, therefore, that, within a homogeneously hybridized media system, journalists use the same sources regardless of the medium for which they work and the topics with which they deal. This objective is pursued by analysing the data collected via a survey conducted by means of structured interviews with a sample of 1424 Italian journalists between October and November 2016. The findings show that the analytical distinction among platforms for which journalists work still matters in terms of sources. Except for the use of Facebook and Google, journalists have still very defined paths to collect sources according to the medium they work for. The article has implications also for the literature on journalists’ authority and expertise.

Encounters with Western media theory: Asian perspectives

The academic discourse on the West and the East is not new, and it has been commonly believed that non-Western countries must learn from the West in order to develop their own societies. Here, comprehending the notion of the West is considered significant, as it offers a model of comparison. While it is not necessary for the perspectives and process to be radical, it should be convincing to grasp Asia as a formation of a changeable force to the West. Of course, media scholars have to avoid limited perspectives emphasizing only intra-Asian dialogues; instead they must analyze Asian perspectives in the globalization context. What non-Western scholars must contemplate are not only paradigms that are unique to Asian society but also general trends and norms that apply to the globe so that they can identify new trends and directions, which provide fundamentals to advance new theories and norms in global media studies. This certainly contributes to a broadening of media theory and comprehension in a way that takes account of the practices of non-Western countries outside the Anglo-American sphere.

Capturing Digital News Innovation Research in Organizations, 1990–2018

ABSTRACT Journalism scholars have acknowledged the importance of innovation in journalism. A common finding is that journalism has difficulty adapting to change and uses multiple coping mechanisms, including making excuses for not innovating by relying on their professional norms and practices. However, such research does not more broadly show how journalism studies research has shaped what scholars have learned about innovation practices. The goal of this study is to provide a systematic literature review of news innovation research since the 1990s. This article deploys a qualitative content analysis of peer-reviewed journal articles about news innovation in media and journalism studies. It shows that journalism and media scholars discuss news innovation as normative, participative, and experimentative. Journalism studies scholarship has also focused on innovation as a process, integrating elements of audience engagement, structure, system, and network. The goal of this study is twofold. First, it discusses the methodological and conceptual/theoretical approaches taken in scholarly journal articles about news innovation. Second, it outlines limitations of such approaches and draws conclusions to conceptualize knowledge in this subfield of research. It argues that it is important to take into account those limitations, as they pose problems for the cumulative nature of news innovation research knowledge.

Aplicabilidade dos Jogos Eletrônicos no Ensino de Geografia: proposições para o jogo Red Dead Redemption 2

Enquanto os videogames têm sido uma forma de entretenimento por décadas, só recentemente eles têm chamado a atenção da academia. Embora haja um número crescente de estudiosos que trabalham com videogames nas novas mídias e Gamestudies, a Geografia está apenas começando a se debruçar sobre os jogos e as práticas a eles associadas. Portanto, este trabalho tem como problema de pesquisa perceber de que forma o jogo Red Dead Redemption 2 contribui para o ensino desta ciência. Assim, seu objetivo foi investigar elementos geográficos do jogo como subsídios para o ensino de aspectos da Geografia física, para a alunos a partir do 9º ano. O artigo faz uso da metodologia criada por Ash (2009) para analisar a epistemologia dos Gamestudies através de uma abordagem geográfica, a qual propõe destacar as geografias nos videogames (em termos de representações), e então fazer uso do jogo como ferramenta pedagógica. Como resultado deste trabalho, foi realizado um levantamento de diversas imagens do jogo que permitem assimilar aspectos como relevo, formações rochosas e fósseis, entre outros, que podem ser incorporadas no planejamento de aulas que envolvam estas temáticas. A partir deste estudo espera-se ampliar a abordagem geográfica dos videogames e permitir a compreensão da interconexão dos jogos com o ensino.

Digital Mis/Disinformation and Public Engagment with Health and Science Controversies: Fresh Perspectives from Covid-19

Digital media, while opening a vast array of avenues for lay people to effectively engage with news, information and debates about important science and health issues, have become a fertile land for various stakeholders to spread misinformation and disinformation, stimulate uncivil discussions and engender ill-informed, dangerous public decisions. Recent developments of the Covid-19 infodemic might just be the tipping point of a process that has been long simmering in controversial areas of health and science (e.g., climate-change denial, anti-vaccination, anti-5G, Flat Earth doctrines). We bring together a wide range of fresh data and perspectives from four continents to help media scholars, journalists, science communicators, scientists, health professionals and policy-makers to better undersand these developments and what can be done to mitigate their impacts on public engagement with health and science controversies.

‘No one is trash, no one is garbage, no one is cancelled’: the cultural politics of trauma, recovery and rage in RuPaul’s Drag Race

ABSTRACT Historically, Drag Race has mobilised stories about homophobia, family violence, racism and femmephobia that produce drag as a technology of recovery: a means of rising above trauma, in line with media scholarship on the centrality of personal trauma narratives in reality TV. Queer scholars have argued that this imperative to tell positive stories silences more melancholic, ‘negative’ voices; of the tension between the need to speak of ‘damage’, and a ‘related and contrary desire to affirm queer existence’. Seen as the embodiment of the histrionic, dramatic drag queen villainess and dubbed ‘the whistle-blower of the season’, Season 10 queen The Vixen subverted familiar trauma narratives, engendering an opening up around narratives of trauma, racism and transmisogyny. This paper examines The Vixen’s absence and her re-emergence on social media, reading her viral tweet declaring ‘no-one is cancelled’ as a provocation that unsettles dominant accounts of mental health, survival and trauma. I argue that in speaking up for the ‘trash, garbage and cancelled’ subject, The Vixen speaks to Heather Love’s call for a queer politics that consider injury as something that might be ‘lived with, not necessarily fixed’. In this sense, her flawed star persona resonates with a mad scholarship that constituting a productive mad and queer politics of vulnerability.

Manifestations of surveillance in private sector dance education: the implicit challenges of integrating technology

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to illuminate the challenges of integrating new technologies in private sector dance education and explores the formation of digitally mediated identities in adolescent female dancers. Autoethnographic research is supported by Foucauldian theory as well as surveillance and social media scholarship. Research examines how the imagined audience, produced by live-streamed closed-circuit television (CCTV), perpetuates the status quo in systems of Western concert dance education and creates new dimensions in dance competition culture. The values of the dominant class are embedded in institutional systems of training. Structural systems of oppression exclude marginalized groups and maintain the status quo. The argument is extended to include how the imagined audience produced by social media plays a role in reinforcing dance’s established exclusionary aesthetic, as dancers create online identities to meet perceived audience expectations and build cultural capital. The discussion explores ways in which the imagined audience exacerbates current concerns in the field of dance education. Existing socioeconomic and institutional barriers perpetuate patriarchal values and reinforce gender expectations. In a post-pandemic world, teachers and students will negotiate new dimensions in dance education produced by manifestations of surveillance as this technological mediation will continue to be the norm.

Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa: Opportunities and Conundrums in African Women’s Navigating Digital Media

Over the past decade and earlier, much of the academic and grey literature has painted an optimistic picture of rapidly increasing access and growth of digital technologies in Africa. Industry statistics put internet penetration in Africa close to 40 percent and growing, even though the continent still lags behind the world average of Internet users (Internet World Statistics, June 2019). Some estimates predict that by 2025 the sub-continent will add 167 million mobile subscribers to its existing 456 million (GSMA Report, 2019). Mobile devices, especially, have assumed centrality in the lives of ordinary people and provide prospects for Africa to leapfrog into the modern digital world. Smart phones are enabling millions of Africans to share news and information more easily and to tap into all kinds of essential services, much like elsewhere in the world.

Russian Orthodox Clergy and Laity Challenging Institutional Religious Authority Online: The Case of Ahilla.ru

With the rise of new computer technologies, scholars of religion and media came to raise questions of how digital communication affects institutional forms of authority. In the digital realm, a number of alternative platforms emerged that empower religious communities to partake in the production of religious narratives outside organized religion. Ahilla.ru is a recent example of such an alternative place facilitated by digital technology. Founded by a former Russian Orthodox priest in February 2017, the website is a response to the politics and official rhetoric of Orthodox Church hierarchs who appeared ever more comfortable in conflating religion and politics and presenting themselves as the moral voice of the nation. Since his enthronement in 2009, Patriarch Kirill has centralized and hierarchized the Church, widening the gap between the episcopate and the low-level clergy and laity. Criticism of institutional religious authority that provides space for the articulation of alternative views of Orthodox faith and identity is at the core of Ahilla.ru. Ahilla.ru merits special attention, as it emerged not outside but within the Russian Orthodox Church and poses a challenge, via digital media space, to the dominant discourse articulated by Orthodox Church authorities and Russian mainstream media. This article seeks to answer the question of how online communication enhances media non-professionals to reflect upon their experiences within institutional religious settings and makes these experiences—previously unmediated and unknown—part of the media discourse.