{"title":"‘We cracked a hole in this very white structure’: Indigenous journalism practices in mainstream Australian news organisations","authors":"Archie Thomas","doi":"10.1177/01634437241270952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241270952","url":null,"abstract":"A new wave of anti-racist politics is challenging the racialised dynamics of news media reporting. This paper explores the experiences of Indigenous journalists working in mainstream news media organisations in Australia in this changing context, and their strategies to navigate the racial political economy and news values of the industry. While many have observed the growing number of Indigenous journalists working in mainstream news, Indigenous journalists’ experiences and practices in these contexts have rarely been canvassed. I analyse 11 in-depth interviews with practicing journalists in Australia to explore how they have their mediated their positions. I suggest that Indigenous journalists engage in a specifically Indigenous journalistic practice, informed by connections to place, community and culture. This can be understood as a contested practice of Indigenous sovereignty. It also highlights the racialised presumptions of news values, including notions of objectivity, authority and balance.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"77 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141922212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The smart TV in low-income migrant households: Enabling digital inclusion through social and cultural media participation","authors":"Tanya Notley, Gokcen Karanfil, Abdul Aziz","doi":"10.1177/01634437241264489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241264489","url":null,"abstract":"This paper reports on an ethnographic study that examined smart TV use in low-income migrant households in Australia. We find that the smart TV is used by migrant families for diverse forms of social and cultural participation. In addition, we find that YouTube – which is often accessed using the smart TV – is reshaping family media practices. We argue that while digital inclusion scholarship has focussed on access to and use of mobile phones, laptops and computers, the smart TV, perhaps more than any other device in the home, enables digital inclusion through intergenerational media engagement. This paper presents insights for policymakers and offers a new area for investigation for digital inclusion and media scholars.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"44 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141800041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hallucinating a political future: Global press coverage of human and post-human abilities in ChatGPT applications","authors":"Aya Yadlin, Avi Marciano","doi":"10.1177/01634437241259892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241259892","url":null,"abstract":"In November 2022, the tech company OpenAI launched a groundbreaking chatbot model, ChatGPT. This unprecedented chatbot, characterized by an ease of use for lay internet users, gained immediate popularity and attracted extensive media attention. This article examines global press coverage of ChatGPT in peak reporting dates over the first full year of its existence. Based on a qualitative holistic narrative analysis, our findings point to two narrated scapes of political fear in the coverage of ChatGPT: The fear of the machine and the fear of the human. These attest to the collective imagining of an intensified future, where post-humanist interaction with political information is associated with exploitation, propaganda, and polarization of existing political rifts. We draw on the case study to articulate journalists’ role in signaling instability in the current political media ecosystem, and their construction of a techno-moral framework for society. We discuss an important blind-spot in journalists’ fulfilment of their normative role in fostering technology-informed citizens globally.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"72 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141350399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Engine for the imagination? Visual generative media and the issue of representation","authors":"Nataliia Laba","doi":"10.1177/01634437241259950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241259950","url":null,"abstract":"Visual generative media represent a novel technology with the potential to mediate public perceptions of political events, conflicts, and wars. Seeking to understand a visual culture in which algorithms become integrated into human processes of memory mediatization, this study addresses representation in AI-generated war imagery. It frames AI image generation as a socio-technical practice at the nexus of humans, machines, and visual culture, challenging Silicon Valley’s prevailing narrative of visual AI as “an engine for the imagination.” Through a case study of AI images generated in response to verbal prompts about Russia’s war against Ukraine, I examine the representational capabilities and limitations of the text-to-image generator Midjourney. The findings suggest homogeneity of visual themes that foreground destruction and fighters, while overlooking broader contextual and cultural aspects of the Russia-Ukraine war, thus generalizing the depiction of this war to that of any war. This study advances the research agenda on critical machine vision as a transdisciplinary challenge situated at the interface of media and cultural studies, computer science, and discourse-analytic approaches to visual communication.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141350842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Salute the strivers”: China’s Internet giant founders and the discursive construction of overwork","authors":"Yi Yang, Fang Jiao","doi":"10.1177/01634437241258397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241258397","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarly inquiry into labor issues in the digital industry has primarily centered on workers, with less attention devoted to employers, or entrepreneurs. Turning the scrutiny toward tech entrepreneurs, this article reports the results from a critical discourse analysis of how China’s Internet giant founders are participating in the construction of a long-hours culture through discourse practices. It uncovers that the default assumptions related to tech work, tech workers, and tech firms are carefully designed, taught, and cultivated by tech founders to sustain the exploitative and unsustainable mode of technical production. Situated at the historical juncture of China’s “great reversal” since late 2020, this research examines the dynamic and uneven triangular relationship among the state, entrepreneurs, and workers in technical production. It enriches the analysis of entrepreneurial discourse in the digital industry beyond the Euro-American context and reflects on entrepreneurs’ ambivalent power in late-developing nations.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"3 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141363498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is television reformable? The ‘reformist tendency’ in inequality research in the cultural and creative industries","authors":"Jack Newsinger, Helen Kennedy, Rowan Aust","doi":"10.1177/01634437241254331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241254331","url":null,"abstract":"This article engages with research on UK Television (UKTV) and the wider cultural and creative industries by interrogating the role of academic research in industrial and social change. We argue that a ‘reformist tendency’ implicitly structures much creative industries research. This reformist tendency takes a critical approach to the problem of inequality, identifying it and making it visible, and at times developing strategies which attempt to enhance and promote greater equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). Academic research seeking to reform the media and creative industries increasingly works in collaboration with – often relatively powerful – social actors within these industries. However, the creative industries in general and UKTV in particular, have shown a remarkable resistance to reform and remain characterised by persistent inequalities in terms of class, race, gender and disability. This article explores this problem aiming to provoke debate into the role of academic-industry collaboration in the failure of creative industries EDI. It argues that academics should adopt a more reflexive and selective approach to collaboration.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"55 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141112817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflecting on cultural labour in the time of AI","authors":"Hye-Kyung Lee","doi":"10.1177/01634437241254320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241254320","url":null,"abstract":"With generative AI disrupting human monopoly of creativity, there is an urgent need to freshly rearticulate cultural labour as a marker of human creativity. I suggest we critically revisit the existing perspectives of cultural labour in cultural policy discussion (unproductive, creative and precarious labour) to reflect on their limitations and implications for our understanding of AI’s challenges. Based on this, I argue that we should expand the discussion of precarious labour to elaborate the emerging ‘creative precarity’. In particular, I will explore its key dimensions – the increasing uncertainty in terms of cultural workers’ creative roles, rights and identity, and audience responses – and their policy implications. At the core of potential policy response to and our research into creative precarity, there are fundamental questions of how we redefine cultural work in the time of AI, what new meanings we can attach to cultural labour, what constitutes the human-ness in human creativity and why it crucially matters.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"76 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141123584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fans speak for whom? Imagined ‘official’, internalised hegemony and self-censorship","authors":"Sae Shimauchi","doi":"10.1177/01634437241249175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241249175","url":null,"abstract":"This study elucidates the concept of ‘official’, frequently used as a counterpart to fans in pop culture fandom using the case of Thai Boys Love drama fandom in Japan. It is necessary to examine the relationship between fandom and hegemony without assuming the potential of participatory culture and fandom as a counterculture. Therefore, this study focuses on how fans construct norms based on the concept of ‘official’ and internalise this power. Furthermore, it explores the meanings and respective boundaries of ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ as constructed by fans. The results of the participation observations and interviews as an acafan revealed that the unofficial fan club, mass media and other entities were ‘officialised’ and the boundary between ‘official’ and unofficial was challenged by both fandom and the ‘official’ side. The mass media plays the role of the owner of cultural content and provider of norms, and fans expect each other to follow them through the constructed and ambiguous concept of ‘official’. The hegemony of ‘official’ is constructed by the voluntary consent of fans, and internalising these hegemonies leads to self-censorship and self-regulation. Blind overconfidence in fan-created ‘official’ may reinforce these structures and undermine the freedom and independence of fans.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":" 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140999306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chinese media production and fandom between queerbaiting and “survival instincts”","authors":"Xiqing Zheng","doi":"10.1177/01634437241241964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241241964","url":null,"abstract":"Using the term “queerbaiting,” I describe a set of media industry tactics that suggest queer relationships between fictional characters (or real-life celebrities) by intentional hints and jokes to attract audiences. Such tactics are used to encourage online participation by fans of female danmei (literary writings describing homoerotic relationships among male characters, generally written by female authors for a female-dominated audience) in China. By analyzing this strategy, I examine the intersection between three different cultural forces in the Chinese mediascape: the censorship of queer themes, the media industry’s attempts to profit from popular danmei stories, and fans who participate in online data labor. The heteronormative cultural environment in China turned so-called “queerbaiting” practices into a socially accepted and commercially profitable mental game denied of a physical outlet. The de-homoeroticized danmei media adaptations and the fandoms surrounding them show how the media industry and fans interact, negotiate and cooperate for their own interests.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":" 837","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140682236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Miglė Bareikytė, M. Makhortykh, Alexander Martin, Taras Nazaruk, Yarden Skop
{"title":"How should platforms be archived? On sustainable use practices of a Telegram Archive to study Russia’s war against Ukraine","authors":"Miglė Bareikytė, M. Makhortykh, Alexander Martin, Taras Nazaruk, Yarden Skop","doi":"10.1177/01634437241245915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241245915","url":null,"abstract":"After Russia’s war against Ukraine destroyed people’s ability to move and communicate freely in Ukraine, many Ukrainians turned to social media and messenger apps, especially Telegram, to produce and share information. The vast amount of this digital data is privatized, ephemeral, and difficult to utilize for research, raising urgent questions about its sustainable accessibility and usability. In this article, we explore a specific aspect of digital archive sustainability – the use of digital archives to preserve platform data related to Russia’s war against Ukraine – by focusing on data integrity, usability, and ethics. Our research is based on a case study of an interdisciplinary Data Sprint, “Russia’s War in Ukraine,” organized in collaboration with a Telegram Archive, in which academics and practitioners investigated qualitative approaches to studying a war on Telegram. In the article, we explore the possibilities and drawbacks of sustainable use of the Telegram Archive for qualitative approaches – semantic, visual, spatial, and link analysis – to working with large amounts of data. We argue that the sustainability of digital archives depends not only on their use, based on consistently stored and accessible data, but also the ethical aspects of their use for diverse research needs.","PeriodicalId":427430,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"14 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140722286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}