{"title":"Entertainment journalism as a resource for public connection: A qualitative study of digital news audiences","authors":"J. Penney","doi":"10.1177/01634437231168310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231168310","url":null,"abstract":"Entertainment journalism has long been a marginal object of academic inquiry due to its reputation as a trivial distraction from public affairs journalism, yet this view has since been challenged by scholars who emphasize its substantive role in political discourse. Although previous research has disputed the idea that entertainment news helps audiences forge connections with public issues, the present study renews this line of inquiry at a time when this journalism has increasingly become a driver of political reporting and opinion, particularly in tandem with activism efforts addressing the media representation of marginalized identity groups as well as celebrity-fueled public advocacy. In-depth interviews are used to illuminate the interpretive processes of US audience members who engage online with this news, outlining how it is used as a resource for navigating the politics of media representation, for making political meanings from celebrity culture, and for fulminating right-wing backlash to cultural institutions.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84190231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wireless telephone, materiality, and making of the national auditory in Turkey","authors":"Nazlı Özkan","doi":"10.1177/01634437231159540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231159540","url":null,"abstract":"This paper focuses on the radio’s novelty years in 1920s Turkey to examine how the functions of wireless technology as a material artifact are negotiated in ways that fashion a national auditory. Most studies on radio’s history prioritize sound, eliding people’s tinkering with the wireless as a technical object. Based on archival research and oral history interviews, I suggest that early radio as a material object required as much of its listeners’ attention as did the broadcast content. In young Turkey’s war-torn economy, the only affordable way to listen to radio was learning how to assemble a receiver. Few owners of manufactured radios also learnt how to fix frequent problems. To form a passive national auditory, the state monitored the cultivation of these technical skills by banning transmitter-construction while encouraging assembling/fixing receivers. In addition to the body’s visceral/affective capacities, then, nation-states also discipline technical skills while forming a national auditory.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75944244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dudes, boobs, and GameCubes: Video game advertising enters adolescence","authors":"Megan Condis, Jess Morrissette","doi":"10.1177/01634437231159533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231159533","url":null,"abstract":"When a product is marketed according to gender, it is often positioned as a way for consumers to enact that gender. In the following pages, we trace how video game advertising “grew up,” transitioning from a broader focus on family entertainment into a more specific focus on selling toys to young boys and finally evolving into what we call “lad ads,” or advertisements designed to appeal specifically to straight male adolescents by playing on expectations of masculine heteronormativity. The legacy of these lad ads has contributed significantly toward solidifying the connection between video games and masculinity.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80020628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Disablement in figure skating: Media, celebrity, spectacle","authors":"Adan Jerreat-Poole","doi":"10.1177/01634437231159528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231159528","url":null,"abstract":"Blood on the ice. Cheers when the injured athlete stands and limps off the field. Comebacks, backflips, and back injuries. Celebrity athletes are punished and rewarded for their abilities, including their ability to perform while injured or work through pain. Injuries, illness, disablement, and even death are not uncommon in celebrity culture broadly and the field of competitive sports more specifically. While critical disability studies often attends to disabled celebrities, less research and critical attention has been paid to the disablement of celebrity and the expectation and performance of injury or illness understood through the lens of ablenationalism. Focusing on international figure skating and the 2022 Winter Olympics, this paper offers a supercripping of athletic celebrity by interrogating how gender, race, age, and nationality impact a global audience’s view of vulnerability, risk, and harm. Analyzing media coverage of the event alongside popular discourse uncovers the impact of nationalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy on sports narratives and celebrity cultures of debilitation and disablement.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89402754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploring data journalism practices in Africa: data politics, media ecosystems and newsroom infrastructures","authors":"S. Chiumbu, Allen Munoriyarwa","doi":"10.1177/01634437231155341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231155341","url":null,"abstract":"Extant research on data journalism in Africa has focused on newsroom factors and the predilections of individual journalists as determinants of the uptake of data journalism on the continent. This article diverts from this literature by examining the slow uptake of data journalism in sub- Saharan Africa through the prisms of non-newsroom factors. Drawing on in-depth interviews with prominent investigative journalists sampled from several African countries, we argue that to understand the slow uptake of data journalism on the continent; there is a need to critique the role of data politics, which encompasses state, market and existing media ecosystems across the continent. Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond newsroom-centric factors that have dominated the contemporary understanding of data journalism practices. A broader, non-newsroom conceptualisation beyond individual journalistic predilections and newsroom resources provides productive clarity on data journalism’s slow uptake on the continent. These arguments are made through the conceptual prisms of materiality, performativity and reflexivity.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89601698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Analyzing caste in media production cultures: A case study from South India","authors":"Deepti Komalam","doi":"10.1177/01634437231159532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231159532","url":null,"abstract":"This paper sifts through the affective connotations and methodological issues that crop up during conversations about caste with dominant caste (savarna) women working in the Malayalam language film industry in Kerala, India, in the context of a heightened focus on gender in the post #MeToo era. Drawing on arguments from critical whiteness and critical race theories, it argues that caste ought to be viewed not just as an ontological entity but as an epistemological framework which shapes how knowledge about the world and selves are produced and transferred. It also explores the methodological challenges in broaching the topic of caste with women occupying powerful social locations and how in failing to explore caste in seemingly gender-focused studies, the researcher contributes to an epistemology of ignorance, rendering invisible a crucial power differential.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88485380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Public service media and race relations in postcolonial Britain: BBC and immigrant programming, 1965–1988","authors":"J. Giese, Diwas Bisht, Aswin Punathambekar","doi":"10.1177/01634437231155563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231155563","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how British Asians negotiated the politics of race in the formative years of British broadcasting from the 1960s to the 1980s. Marked by significant changes within the BBC and British society at large, this period saw the first institutional initiatives oriented towards Caribbean and Asian communities. Drawing on primary research materials from the BBC Written Archives, we analyse the Immigrant Programmes Unit and the Immigrant Programme Advisory Committees as sites where ideas of race, ethnicity and citizenship were continually debated and worked out. We argue that the BBC functioned as a profoundly asymmetrical contact zone in which British Asians’ efforts to counter assimilationist ideas and programmes were stymied by senior managers working with deeply ingrained ideas of cultural, ethnic and racial differences. Immigrants would be accommodated, but in ways that would not challenge the viewing habits of the majority or imagine solidarities across racial, ethnic and national lines.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88843652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to train your algorithm: The struggle for public control over private audience commodities on Tiktok","authors":"Corinne Jones","doi":"10.1177/01634437231159555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231159555","url":null,"abstract":"Social media users are increasingly aware of the politics of their viewing habits, and they attempt to express these politics through interactions with proprietary algorithms. Combining theories about audience commodities with scholarship about “algorithmic imaginaries,” I define “algorithmically imagined audiences” as a kind of algorithmic imaginary, and I analyze 103 TikTok videos to explore how people attempt to politically engage with algorithms to position themselves within audiences. Although algorithms and audiences are proprietary, TikTokers believe they can reassert public control over audience commodities to engage in counterpublic world-making and to re-position themselves within imagined communities. While these practices are impactful, they have conceptual and practical limits; these same tactics are used to reprivatize audience commodities and to reinscribe the neoliberal capitalist underpinnings. This article raises questions for future researchers about the opportunities and limits of sociotechnical beliefs.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75735346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital subscribers: Between freedom and constraint","authors":"Guillermo Echauri","doi":"10.1177/01634437231159554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231159554","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the features, affordances, and limitations that emerge when purchasing and using digital subscriptions, particularly streaming entertainment services. Using a qualitative approach through 15 in-depth interviews with European subscribers of digital services such as Netflix or Spotify Premium, the research inquired into the users’ personal experience with digital subscriptions. The results show two scenarios: in one, subscribers enjoy the flexibility and freedom offered with the digital subscription services to customize their media consumption and entertainment preferences; on the other, digital subscriptions limit and restrict the activity of their subscribers, for example, by fragmenting audiovisual content on different platforms.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82548860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Danmu video as the resemiotised: An attitudinal analysis of Home Visit","authors":"Yi Jing, Qingxin Xu","doi":"10.1177/01634437231158514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231158514","url":null,"abstract":"Danmu has been gaining increasing popularity in Chinese video-sharing platforms where users can project their comments directly onto the original video. Its popularity resonates with the general trend where user-generated content plays an increasingly important role. This article investigates possible meaning-making shifts produced by danmu from the perspective of resemiotisation. By deploying the Appraisal framework, particularly the attitude system, this study examines the attitudinal meanings expressed in a video and its danmu version. Comparisons between the two sets of attitudinal meanings reveal two patterns of meaning-making shifts. One is a shift in perspective, that is from whose perspective a certain scenario is presented. The other is a shift in the characterisation of one participant in the video. These findings raise our awareness of the possible manipulation of meaning afforded by danmu, which allows viewers to contribute directly to the meaning making of the danmu video. Danmu’s enablement of viewers’ co-production greatly extends the meaning and the meaning potential that could be afforded by the original video, which calls for a reconsideration of the purpose of video sharing, and the relationship between the original producer and viewers.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91262490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}