Media Scholars Research Articles

Production, policy and power: the screen industry’s response to the environmental crisis

Climate change is a concern for many nations, industries and citizens. However, for some it will also be a moment of opportunity. As witnessed in relation to the pandemic, dynamics of power have a particular purchase at moments of crisis. This article proposes a greater concern with questions of policy and power in relation to green strategies within the screen sector and highlights the role that media scholars might play in developing this critical lens. There has been a recent rise in efforts to mitigate particular environmental harms and the article outlines some of the initiatives that are emerging from both commercial and public bodies. Here are no shared systems for auditing and reporting, and few formal policies are widely recognised or adopted. As different ideas and approaches garner greater traction, travelling from one national and industrial setting to others, the article scrutinises the industrial, structural and policy obstacles which hinder a meaningful shift for film and television production to be environmentally sustainable. The article reflects on the agendas and forces at play in this space and attempts to stimulate debate about how those researching media production might productively engage in critiquing these policies and dynamics of power.

Research on the Characteristics of American War Communication Practice and the Impact on Communication Study

Communication now covers every aspect of our lives, and the widespread availability of communication media such as WIFI and mobile phones has led to air becoming intermediation[1]. The unprecedented interest of scholars in new media has overlooked the coherent and complete set of roles and histories behind the act of communication as a necessity of human civilization. To better understand the interaction between communication and society, it is useful to look back at it from a historical perspective as a way of grasping this complex and changing human communication practice. The main object of this study is war in American history, including famous communication events from the American War of Independence, Civil War, World War I and World War II as examples focusing on the application and characteristics of communication in the American war history and how it has influenced the study of communication in the United States through a brief review of American war communication. The analysis of major events is seen as a useful method for communication studies. Through review and analysis, we can see three main features of American communication about the war: rationalized war, civilian narratives, and political pragmatism. These characteristics have also profoundly influenced the direction of communication studies, with pragmatism, political service and elitism becoming prominent characteristics of American communication studies.

When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture by Jenna Supp-Montgomerie (review).

Reviewed by: When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture by Jenna Supp-Montgomerie Timothy H. B. Stoneman (bio) When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture By Jenna Supp-Montgomerie. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 312. The tale of the Atlantic telegraph (1858–66) has been told many times (Gordon, A Thread across the Ocean, 2002, Muller, Wiring the World, 2016). The reader need not worry, however, since the title of the current treatment is slightly misleading. The book only tangentially covers the history of the Atlantic telegraph and the electromagnetic telegraph. And it does not concern the missionary or religious usage of the transatlantic cable in any traditional sense. The author, a religious and communications studies scholar at the [End Page 300] University of Iowa, uses her study on the attempt to create the world's first undersea cable connection to pose a larger and arguably more important question. How did the Atlantic telegraph succeed so remarkably in the popular American imagination despite its marked early technical failures? And why did the telegraph experience become the template for how we think about all subsequent networked communication technologies, including the contemporary internet? To answer the question, Supp-Montgomerie forays into new ground by connecting the history of technology with the history of American religion and a range of critical theoretical approaches. For the author, the initial technical failure to lay the Atlantic telegraph was fundamental to its success. The unreliability of the underwater cable, which operated briefly for twenty-three days, prompted American popular imagination of a utopian global community united through communication technology. "Infrastructural religion" in the form of public Protestantism in the United States provided critical resources that proved essential for creating social imaginaries of communication through connection. The early failure of the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable created a formative and durable template, and as a result, "we broadly define networks as systems of connection." The chapters of When the Medium Was the Mission cover an array of topics that follow the discursive components of the author's argument (rather than chronology). The book begins by recounting the story of the Ottoman telegraph, emphasizing the role of Baptist missionaries, from initial efforts in 1847 to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1919 (ch. 1). Then it considers nineteenth-century alternatives to the electromagnetic telegraph, including the optical, spiritual, grapevine, and teaching telegraphs (ch. 2). A case study of the Oneida Community (1848–81) in upstate New York follows as a stand-in for U.S. religious utopianism around the telegraph (ch. 3). More abstract is the following chapter, which applies structural and post-structural theories of communication to analyze the content of the 1858 cable (ch. 4). An epilogue suggests the continued influence of religious motifs, "protestant dreams for the telegraph," in imaginaries of the internet and social media technology today (p. 32). Readers of Technology and Culture will find this work a frustrating read at times. It draws heavily on media and cultural theory and resorts all too often to seemingly jargonistic language. The author's argument focuses exclusively on a narrow, unrepresentative time period (1858–66) in the history of the Atlantic telegraph characterized by endemic difficulty and prior to longer-term stabilization. Supp-Montgomerie brings no new major archival research to light and relatively little primary evidence, relying on discourse analysis and the forceful elaboration of her conceptual argument to make her central case. In the end, she fails to demonstrate exactly how or why "fractures and failures" are foundational to both nineteenth-century communication-based globalization and network logic more generally. [End Page 301] Nonetheless, When the Medium Was the Mission well warrants the effort to wade through its theory-driven waters. The book serves as a useful introduction to contemporary critical cultural scholarship on media and communication as well as major media scholars. The author shows an adept familiarity with several subfields in the history of technology, while her "infrastructural approach to network media" develops the intersection between media studies scholarship and STS/history of technology (p. 27). Supp-Montgomerie makes...

Novelty in Multidisciplinarity

The launch of Insights into Language, Culture and Communication (ILCC) by the Academy Publishing Center (APC) is a recognition that multi-disciplinarity not only shapes the social landscape of language, culture and communication but also establishes a significant and dynamic area of investigation in contemporary communication and interaction. More specifically, the journal marks an important shift in the status of multidisciplinarity theoretically, methodologically, and empirically carving new routes through several disciplinary terrains to consolidate and advance the development of linguistics, culture and media scholarship. What makes ILCC stand out among recently emerging journals is that it serves as an international forum for the growing body of works in several interlocking disciplines, engages in critical discussions of key contemporary challenges arising from the scale and speed of new media development, and opens up an entirely new line of research premised on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. ILCC encourages submissions from a wide range of disciplines such as: philosophy, sociology, linguistics, applied linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, critical theory, media studies, gender studies and the visual arts, all of which assist scholars to shoehorn their multidisciplinary arguments.

‘You have got such a beautiful symphony in front of you!’ Use and resistance to mobile music devices among adventurers

Since Michael Bull's seminal work on the Walkman, media scholars have observed how sound and technology enact certain interactional frameworks in urban contexts. We know little about the materiality of listening in non-urban space. This article contributes to these conversations by examining how adventurers (climbers, bushwalkers) adopt or resist mobile music devices when they are in the bush or mountains. I show how device use is moralised in this context, wrapped up in broader conversations about what it means to be a bushwalker or climber, particularly with respect to its impacts on connection to place and the embodied experience of being there. The analysis shows three modes of mobile music device use or non-use: 1) resisting devices to fully connect with the immediate environment; 2) attending to both the sounds of place with selective engagement with music as an additional layer of experience; and 3) device use as a strategy to disconnect mind from body at times of difficulty or boredom.

CrossEWT: Cross-Medial Analysis of World War II Eyewitness Testimonies

The CLARIAH research pilot project ‘CrossEWT’ entailed an inventory of interviews with eyewitnesses of the Second World War as published in newspapers, television documentaries and oral history databases. The aim was to analyse the topics of these interviews, and how these may have differed per medium and over time since 1945. The Media Suite facilitates comparative research into collections of different media types that traditionally are studied separately. Especially for oral history research, this is innovative and promising, in at least two ways. First, it potentially stimulates the re-use of interviews, not only by media scholars who might accidentally discover this material, but by (oral) historians as well. Second, a video annotation tool is provided that enables analysing the visual, non-verbal and performative aspects of oral history interviews, while traditional oral history research often heavily relies on the transcript.

“Down the Middle”: CNN 10 and the Ideology of Objectivity

ABSTRACT CNN 10 is a popular digital news show that explicitly targets schoolchildren with reporting branded as “objective.” The show helps to introduce many young people into Western news logics, but it has received little scrutiny in media scholarship. This critical textual analysis examines the show’s content in light of its metajournalistic ideology, focusing on coverage of U.S. elections, the COVID-19 pandemic, and environmental disasters. Analysis suggests that by promoting “balance” as the highest journalistic value, CNN 10 reifies simplistic conceptions of media bias and obscures journalism’s more essential truth-telling responsibility, with implications for broader discourse around news.

Relatable Motives and Righteous Causes; or, Why the Sympathetic Antihero is Not a Moral Psychological Mystery

Morally flawed antiheroes in TV and film, such as Dexter Morgan and Dirty Harry, often inspire sympathetic engagement from audiences. Media scholars have argued that it is these antiheroes’ status as fictional characters that allows audiences to flout their moral principles and side with the antiheroes. Against this view, I argue that these problematic sympathies can be explained without reference to a special fictional attitude. Human morality is sensitive not only to abstract moral principles but also to the concrete motives and situations of an individual moral agent, and the motives and situations of the sympathetic antihero very often seem exculpatory.

Secret Agencies: How a Critical Media Scholar Got Inside Advertising

Abstract: This access narrative recounts how I conducted ethnographic research on the lack of diversity within advertising agencies in New York City during the summer of 2010. It positions this effort as a response to the scholarly tendency to make semiotic analysis the dominant mode of critical advertising studies and follows cultural studies scholar Richard Johnson's call to "decenter the text" and move the attention of cultural studies toward what Marx called "the hidden abode of production." My hope is that this essay will help demystify my process for securing entrance to agency settings and thereby encourage emerging critical scholars to generate new methods of understanding (and disrupting) the closed social networks that enable and perpetuate White opportunity hoarding throughout the creative industries.

How Does Perceived Overload in Mobile Social Media Influence Users’ Passive Usage Intentions? Considering the Mediating Roles of Privacy Concerns and Social Media Fatigue

ABSTRACT Social media is becoming an important instrument for interpersonal communication. However, more and more users attempt to use social media passively and have negative emotional responses. The critical question arising is what causes people to use social media passively. Furthermore, the roles of social media fatigue and privacy concerns between the perceived overload and passive usage intentions have not yet been investigated in depth. The study aims to explore how perceived overload affects the passive usage intentions of social media users. The conceptual model incorporated “perceived overload,” “social media fatigue,” “privacy concerns,” and “passive usage intentions” into a cognition-affect-conation framework to reflect the influencing process. This study collected data from 335 users on mainstream social media platforms and analyzed it using the partial least square-structural equation model (PLS-SEM). The results show that perceived overload positively affects the passive usage intentions of mobile social media users. Particularly, it is found that privacy concerns and social media fatigue mediate the relationship between perceive overload and passive usage intentions. The mediating effect of social media fatigue is significantly stronger than privacy concerns. This study enriches the research of information system use. It also provides theoretical and practical implications for social media scholars and practitioners.

“Shifting old-fashioned power dynamics”?: women’s perspectives on the gender transformational capacity of the dating app, Bumble

ABSTRACT Digital dating apps have impacted contemporary intimacy. One popular app, Bumble, claims to be “shifting old-fashioned power dynamics” by requiring women to “go first” in conversations with “matched” men. Drawing on focus groups with predominantly white, university-educated women who have used Bumble, this article articulates the challenges to gender norms during app use. Bumble provided a safe space to subvert gendered expectations, gain confidence to initiate conversations and appreciate the societal expectations often put on men. Contributing further to feminist media scholarship, we critique Bumble’s advertising as articulating a post-feminist sensibility and expose the limits of the transformations such a sensibility claims to herald. Our focus on women’s understanding and experiences of the app gives essential insights into how technological design challenges, to some extent, the existing gendered patterns while also creating tensions between such challenges and women’s internalized gendered behaviors and expectations.

Interrogating (In)visibilities

Critical attention to invisible disability raises interesting questions about the social and corporeal (in)visibility of disability. The article conceptualizes invisible disability in relation to the visible body, while maintaining the category’s ties with social visibility. To explore invisible disability, economies of visibility—originally proposed in black feminist media scholarship—is developed as a lens to explore the connections between (in)visible embodiment and social visibility in media texts. The lens is used to examine the representation of characters with invisible disability and visible disability in the case study of the popular Australian soap opera Home and Away. The examination illuminates economies of visibility as a productive way of grappling with how invisible disability vexes the visual binary of disabled/able-bodied.

The sociology of style: Writing and influence within literary families

Since Michael Bull's seminal work on the Walkman, media scholars have observed how sound and technology enact certain interactional frameworks in urban contexts. We know little about the materiality of listening in non-urban space. This article contributes to these conversations by examining how adventurers (climbers, bushwalkers) adopt or resist mobile music devices when they are in the bush or mountains. I show how device use is moralised in this context, wrapped up in broader conversations about what it means to be a bushwalker or climber, particularly with respect to its impacts on connection to place and the embodied experience of being there. The analysis shows three modes of mobile music device use or non-use: 1) resisting devices to fully connect with the immediate environment; 2) attending to both the sounds of place with selective engagement with music as an additional layer of experience; and 3) device use as a strategy to disconnect mind from body at times of difficulty or boredom.

Public Theology in the Age of Social Media

Abstract The ubiquity of social media is a defining characteristic of our contemporary life. It has significantly changed the patterns of communication and altered the landscape of the public sphere. As a consequence the discipline of a public theology needs to reconsider its methodologies. With the aid of the study of political and media scholars, this article contends that the traditional public sphere, which is relatively stable and homogeneous, is experiencing a process of destabilization and pluralization under the impact of social media. The theoretical foundation of the widely adopted bilingual approach to public theology has been shaken. This article proposes that a transformational approach that attempts to shift public perception with the language of faith as its resource may fit the changing landscape of the public sphere better.

Tweeting ourselves to death: the cultural logic of digital capitalism

Media scholarship has long argued that public discourse is a function of the architecture of the media by which it is carried. Media architecture is, as political economists have argued, in turn shaped by the capitalist regime of accumulation within which the media operate. This paper draws together these two strands of literature to ask: as the accumulation of data is coming to define contemporary capitalism, what cultural logic does this produce? The paper argues that, as media are shaped around the extracting user data, they become organized around personhood and the extension of commodification deeper into our sense of self. The lifestyle fragmentation and segmentation engendered by new media technologies carry over into public discourse, shaping a public, and political life defined by identity and difference. If, as Neil Postman suggested, a society’s way of knowing reflects its media technology, the emerging epistemology of the social media society is truth as identity, as our very ways of knowing are reduced to expressions of who we are.

Post-truth, fake news and the liberal ‘regime of truth’ – The double movement between Lippmann and Hayek

Since the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit vote, media scholarship has lamented the state of democratic public communication. Scholars have used the concepts ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ to describe the cocktail of disinformation and devaluation of facts. This article illustrates how ruptures in democratic public communication stem from the contradictions characterising liberalism and its ‘regime of truth’. Liberalism has oscillated between efforts to discipline the media market with such techniques as professional journalism and, on the other hand, the attempt to enhance the position of the market mechanism as a superior knowledge processor. The article builds on the thinking of Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, two influential liberal thinkers with differing ideas on the role of experts in society. Moreover, Karl Polanyi's concept of ‘double movement’ is used to argue that the problems regarding public communication are systemic features of liberal media logics.

Cosplay as vernacular adaptation: the argument for adaptation scholarship in media and cultural studies

ABSTRACT From inventive memes to fan films, contemporary popular culture continues long-standing traditions of adapting existing content to new formats. Despite the centrality of adaptation to popular culture, adaptation studies methods are rarely applied by researchers working in this area. Cosplay, in which enthusiasts dress as characters from popular culture at fan gatherings, is an increasingly visible part of contemporary culture. Through its reliance on a recognized source text, cosplay is a form of vernacular adaptation. By drawing on narrative interviews with cosplayers, this article illustrates how applying key adaptation studies approaches to cosplay can provide a fresh perspective on the fan phenomena. Vernacular adaptation like cosplay is not an esoteric practice. From fan fiction to movie-inspired protest signs, adaptation is a fundamental framework of popular culture. Yet, all too often, the tools and approaches of adaptation studies are ignored by media and cultural studies scholars. Focusing on cosplay as a form of vernacular adaptation, this article will demonstrate that adaptation studies is a valuable, yet overlooked, tool in the study of popular culture.

From Hey, you there! to Got you: re-materializing the encoding/decoding model in the computationally mediated city

ABSTRACT For European media studies, Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model epitomizes the transition from the mass communication research paradigm to the cultural one in the 1970s. Given its canonical status, Hall’s model offers an apt point of reference for reflecting on the challenges that cultural media studies itself faces today—after more than a decade into the turn to materiality in social theory. My suggestion is that the pervasively computed contemporary city provides a strategic context for media scholars in discussing the theoretical relevance of the encoding/decoding model, as well as semiotic models more generally, in terms of the ongoing paradigm shift.

Editors’ Introduction

Editorial| October 01 2021 Editors’ Introduction: Centering Latinas in Film and Media History Mary Beltrán; Mary Beltrán Mary Beltrán is an associate professor of Radio-Television-Film and an affiliate of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is focused on U.S. television and film history, with an emphasis on Latina/o representation and authorship. She is the author of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom (University of Illinois Press, 2009), co-editor (with Camilla Fojas) of Mixed Race Hollywood (NYU Press, 2008), and author of the forthcoming Latino TV: A History (NYU Press, 2022). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Mirasol Enríquez Mirasol Enríquez Mirasol Enríquez is the Director of the Moody College's Latino Media Arts and Studies program, and an Assistant Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship focuses on U.S.-based Latina filmmakers and media production culture, and her work has appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. As a film and media scholar and an arts administrator, she has devoted her career to community building through film and the arts. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2021) 7 (4): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Beltrán, Mirasol Enríquez; Editors’ Introduction: Centering Latinas in Film and Media History. Feminist Media Histories 1 October 2021; 7 (4): 1–6. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.4.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Latinas have played significant roles as content creators, media professionals, performers, and audience members throughout the development of film, television, radio, commercial music, and digital media culture in the United States and throughout the Latina/o/x diaspora. However, as is the case for the subjects of feminist media studies more generally, the histories of influential Latinas are rarely encountered in film and media scholarship. Similarly, they have often been overlooked by scholars who aim to recover the histories of women in film and media. Scholarship that takes “the history and experiences of Latinas and the media seriously,” as Angharad Valdivia notes, participates in an inherently feminist intervention.1 In this regard, it is thanks to scholars such as Valdivia, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Frances Aparicio, Ana M. López, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, each of whom made great strides in bringing... © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California2021 You do not currently have access to this content.

(IN)DEPENDENCY ON THE HEGEMONIC TO BE HEARD: NEWS-FOCUSED WECHAT OFFICIAL ACCOUNTS IN AUSTRALIA AS A CASE STUDY

This paper contextualizes an alternative perspective to a common academic discourse that ethnic media in the West provide a voice for the marginalized from the original bourgeois public sphere. The paper investigates an emergent industry – news-focused WeChat Official Accounts (hereafter WOAs) in Australia. The WOA is an information broadcasting feature launched on WeChat in August 2013 and then adopted by Australian-Chinese media entrepreneurs to produce and circulate the ethno-specific news stories among the Chinese diaspora in Australia and even beyond. From 2019 to 2020, I interviewed 24 media professionals to understand the internal working of news-focused WOAs in Australia. I argue that the anatomy of these Chinese-language digital media organizations reveals their financial independence from the nation-state in contrast to Australian hegemonic taxpayer-sponsored media. Contrary to many media scholars have argued, news-focused WOAs do not completely represent antithetical voices to Australian English media. The commercial imperative does not translate well into agonistic pluralism. News-focused WOAs are attached to the hegemonic journalism and internalize interethnic racism alongside white supremacist discourse against black people in order to be part of the dominant media structure.