{"title":"Heterodox approaches to save the day: A framework for analysing data-related innovation in legacy media businesses","authors":"Hanna Jemmer, Indrek Ibrus","doi":"10.1177/01634437231155558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231155558","url":null,"abstract":"That legacy media organisations are struggling in this era of global platformisation and datafication is well established. Yet, the power of platforms as well as critiques of them could be seen as being framed and facilitated by the prevailing forms of neoclassical economics. This paper addresses how analysis and planning of data-driven innovation in legacy media organisations could benefit from the perspectives deriving from heterodox economics. Using approaches within heterodox economics as a foundation, we build on two novel conceptual frameworks – innovation commons and cross-innovation systems, where decentralisation of media markets and collaboration between agents on different levels are central. Further, three tools – open data, blockchains and agent-based modelling (ABM) – offer ways to operationalise these frameworks. Central to these tools are further democratisation and growing complexity, openness and dynamism that enable media organisations to identify paths towards data-driven innovation that could improve the competitiveness of the legacy media industry in the platform economy.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80441828","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":"Framing the Israel-Palestine conflict 2021: Investigation of CNN’s coverage from a peace journalism perspective","authors":"Sima Bhowmik, J. Fisher","doi":"10.1177/01634437231154766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231154766","url":null,"abstract":"This study uses textual analysis to examine CNN’s World News coverage of the 12-day conflict between Israel and Palestine in May 2021. We bring into conversation the influential factors that shape U.S. media coverage of other countries, as presented by Dorman and Farhang, and Galtung’s concept of war journalism in our analysis. Our findings show that CNN primarily took a war journalism approach to frame the conflict. However, calls for consideration of Palestinian human-rights from members of U.S. Congress led to coverage that aligned with a peace journalism framework. This finding illuminates the role of counter-discourse by elite social members in influencing the framing of conflict coverage in mainstream media. The study adds to our understanding of U.S. media coverage of ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine and the implications of war journalism versus peace journalism frames with regards to public discourse and understanding.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83791216","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}
Anne Kaun, Stine Lomborg, C. Pentzold, Doris Allhutter, Karolina Sztandar-Sztanderska
{"title":"Crosscurrents: Welfare","authors":"Anne Kaun, Stine Lomborg, C. Pentzold, Doris Allhutter, Karolina Sztandar-Sztanderska","doi":"10.1177/01634437231154777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231154777","url":null,"abstract":"In this crosscurrent contribution, we approach the notion of welfare through the lens of the data welfare state. We, further, suggest that datafied welfare can be fruitfully studied with the capabilities approach to better understand how ideas and values of data welfare intersect with and may allow for the ‘good’ life and human flourishing. The main aim is to highlight the deep-seated changes of the welfare state that emerge with the delegation of care and control tasks to algorithmic systems and the automation based on datafication practices. Welfare provision is undergoing major shifts that imply fundamentally rethinking the role of technology that supports and enhances welfare with the help of data.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86919931","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":"The wellbeing of ordinary people in factual television production","authors":"E. Coleman","doi":"10.1177/01634437231155347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231155347","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to explore the links between the structural organisation of the television industry and the wellbeing of the ordinary people who take part in its productions. Following a series of high-profile suicides, calls have been made for broadcasters to reconsider their duty of care. New regulations have been initiated in the UK, emphasising the need to risk-assess vulnerable contributors and provide them with psychological support. But these changes have been driven by moral outrage and media criticism rather than empirical research, and a lack of attention has been paid to understanding the views of the participants themselves. Based on in-depth interviews with a sample of 30 documentary contributors and producers, this article will seek to contextualise their experiences within the political economy of TV production, focussing on the impact of five recent developments in relation to working practices, jobs functions, narrative norms, marketing strategies, and the wider media ecology. My argument is that the wellbeing of contributors, producers, and the production environment are all intrinsically connected, and have been fundamentally reshaped by the neo-liberal reorganisation of the industry.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88866234","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":"Audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes: Denial mechanisms and acts of moral justification","authors":"Zhe Xu","doi":"10.1177/01634437231155339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231155339","url":null,"abstract":"The study of the audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes has received relatively little scholarly attention. This article begins to ameliorate this gap in knowledge by examining how Chinese audiences legitimise their unresponsiveness to mediated victims of global disasters. Drawing upon data from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants (N = 81), the study discusses the dominant regimes of justification which inform audience inactivity, the associated argumentation strategies and patterns of reasoning, and their sociocultural and ideological underpinnings. We find that decision-making about the moral justification for inactivity is influenced by state-propaganda media narratives, preferences for ideologies, perceptions of national identity and global responsibility, and geopolitical imaginations. These findings have implications for expanding the ontological horizons of distant suffering studies that are currently embedded in Western spatial and ideological dimensions, particularly in a world of crises spawned by globalisation and mediatisation.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82797450","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":"Why so serious? Studying humor on the right","authors":"AJ Bauer","doi":"10.1177/01634437231154779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231154779","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reviews two new books examining different aspects of right-wing humor, “The Souls of White Jokes” (Stanford University Press, 2022) by Raúl Pérez and “That’s Not Funny” (University of California Press, 2022) by Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx. It puts these works into conversation with a longer tendency within right-wing studies to focus on media content and motivations within a negative affective range. By focusing on the positive emotions associated with white supremacy and right-wing media, these books mark an important turning point away from reductionist accounts of the “reactionary mind” and toward a fuller understanding of the complex and contingent motivations of conservatives.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80583444","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":"Chatting with the dead: The hermeneutics of thanabots","authors":"Leah Henrickson","doi":"10.1177/01634437221147626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221147626","url":null,"abstract":"In 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle released a feature article about a man who chose to resurrect his deceased fiancée by training a chatbot system built on OpenAI’s GPT language models on her old digital messages. He then had emotional conversations with this chatbot, which appeared to accurately mimic the deceased’s writing style. This case study raises questions about the communicative influences of thanabots: chatbots trained on data of the dead. While thanabots are clearly not living conversational partners, the rhetoric, everyday experiences, and emotions associated with these system have very real implications for living users. This paper applies a lifeworld perspective to consider the hermeneutics of thanabots. It shows that thanabots exist in a long lineage of efforts to communicate with the dead, but acknowledges that thanatechnologies must be more thoroughly studied for better understanding of what it means to die in a digital age.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77874886","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}
Emily Keightley, Eva Cheuk Yin Li, Simone Natale, Aswin Punathambekar
{"title":"Editorial: encounters with Western media theory","authors":"Emily Keightley, Eva Cheuk Yin Li, Simone Natale, Aswin Punathambekar","doi":"10.1177/01634437221149821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221149821","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning in 2020, the Crosscurrents section of this journal featured 10 provocative essays on the theme of “Encounters in Western Media Theory.” These essays stemmed from scholars’ engagements with various canonical texts in media, cultural, and communication studies that took the Anglophone Global North as a taken-for-granted site for making sweeping theoretical claims. In this editorial, we reflect on the critiques and arguments that scholars have developed to move past debates about “internationalizing” and “de-westernizing” the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Taken together, the essays published in this themed section grapple with the shifting terrain of academic knowledge production and the potential for redefining practices of reading, citation, and teaching.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85707117","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":"Alt-right and authoritarian memetic alliances: global mediations of hate within the rising Farsi manosphere on Iranian social media","authors":"Sama Khosravi Ooryad","doi":"10.1177/01634437221147633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221147633","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the rising Farsi ‘manosphere’ of Iran and the case of online misogynistic, anti-feminist and anti-queer mobilisations across social media platforms and messaging applications. It focuses on memes and memetic figures that are circulated on Iranian social media and proposes the term ‘memetic alliances’ to convey complicated and unforeseen mutations of today’s internet meme culture and online hate culture. Moreover, it unpacks the increasing convergences of seemingly conflicting online and political contexts. Drawing on digital ethnographic fieldwork on selected platforms as well as visual and conceptual analyses of memes, the article theorises that online figurations of hate have memeto-(micro)political qualities that allow for their propagation across numerous contexts. Furthermore, the case of Iran’s emergent Farsi manosphere is arguably not a totalitarian exception unique to the Middle East but is reconfiguring and standing in alliance with the global rise of the right and its online culture wars.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81687429","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":"Asian sporting masculinities in figure skating: media representations of Nathan Chen and Yuzuru Hanyu as rivals","authors":"Michelle H. S. Ho, Wesley Lim","doi":"10.1177/01634437221140522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221140522","url":null,"abstract":"In sport and sport media, figure skating is often perceived as ‘feminine’ and male skaters frequently occupy an ambiguous position, especially for Asian (American) athletes in a historically White-dominated sport. Based on discourse analysis, this article compares how English- and Japanese-language news narratives represent elite male figure skaters Nathan Chen and Yuzuru Hanyu, who are close rivals and skate for the United States and Japan respectively. We demonstrate how English-language media reinforce (U.S.) nationalism by portraying ‘Quad King’ Chen as hypermasculine for his athleticism and ‘Ice Prince’ Hanyu as feminized for his exceptional artistry. Despite being pitted against each other, we argue that in Japanese media narratives, their convivial rivalry and sportsmanship reveal what we call ‘Asian sporting masculinities’, alternative constructions of masculinities complicating monolithic stable understandings of masculinity in or congruous with the West. This study advances critical media and cultural studies by rethinking masculinities in Asian sporting bodies.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80646706","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}