Showing papers in "Critical Studies in Media Communication in 2009"
TL;DR: This paper examined the racialization of informational labor in machinima about Chinese player workers in the massively multiplayer online role playing game World of Warcraft and found that player workers are unnatural subjects in that they are unable to obtain avatarial self-possession.
Abstract: This article examines the racialization of informational labor in machinima about Chinese player workers in the massively multiplayer online role playing game World of Warcraft. Such fan-produced video content extends the representational space of the game and produces overtly racist narrative space to attach to a narrative that, while carefully avoiding explicit references to racism or racial conflict in our world, is premised upon a racial war in an imaginary world—the World of Azeroth. This profiling activity is part of a larger biometric turn initiated by digital culture's informationalization of the body and illustrates the problematics of informationalized capitalism. If late capitalism is characterized by the requirement for subjects to be possessive individuals, to make claims to citizenship based on ownership of property, then player workers are unnatural subjects in that they are unable to obtain avatarial self-possession. The painful paradox of this dynamic lies in the ways that it mirrors the ...
197 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined the recent infotainment-media scrutiny of Banks's weight gain and her publicity team's carefully scripted “so what!” retort and explored how the figure of Tyra Banks functions as a celebrity-exemplar of the post-feminist/post-racial U.S. culture.
Abstract: In the new millennium United States, race and gender are popularly understood, from legislation to television, as personal, individual, and mutable traits and not structural, institutional, and historic forces. The incredible popularity of African-American supermodel cum media mogul Tyra Banks reflects, creates, and perpetuates such post-racial and post-feminist ideologies. In this paper I examine the recent infotainment-media scrutiny of Banks's weight gain and her publicity team's carefully scripted “so what!” retort. I thus explore how the figure of Tyra Banks functions as a celebrity-exemplar of the post-feminist/post-racial U.S.
122 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a dual analysis of the discursive content and structural features of YouTube is presented, with a focus on the controversy of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) appearing on the popular video website, YouTube.
Abstract: In September of 2006, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) appeared on the popular video website, YouTube, posting eight of its television commercials. YouTube members responded with a variety of video posts and comments that challenged both the content and structure of the message offered by the ONDCP. Using this controversy as a focal point, this essay is a dual analysis of the discursive content and structural features of YouTube. The response from the YouTube community is characterized in terms of vernacular and outlaw discourse, following Sloop and Ono (1997). Through strategies of re-posting and parodying the original videos and discussions on comment boards between members, select YouTubers dispute the logic of prohibition in America's war on drugs, resisting the ONDCP message. However, the structural limitations of the medium of YouTube and the overwhelming use of YouTube for entertainment diminish the response. Ultimately, YouTube's dismissive and playful atmosphere does not prove t...
84 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the Food Network is a strategic site to examine how gender is used to bridge tension between the high and low cultures of culinary arts, domestic labor, television, and consumption.
Abstract: The ‘cooking mystique’ has long regulated the presentation of masculinity and femininity within kitchen culture. However, recent sociological research reveals shifts in how household tasks are allocated within the home—especially in the kitchen. if so, are masculinities and femininities presented in popular discourse around cooking also changing? This article highlights historical transformations in how the ‘instructional’ genre presents the connection between ‘doing gender’ and ‘doing dinner.’ Analysis shows that production, social, and ideological conventions used by the popular Food Network still present cooking as gendered work. However, Food Network stars—from Bobby Flay to Rachel Ray—are shifting the cooking mystique in ways that both challenge and uphold a binary between genders. I argue that the Food Network is a strategic site to examine how gender is used to bridge tension between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures of culinary arts, domestic labor, television, and consumption.
83 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine gender and sex practices in the online virtual environment Second Life and conclude that while sexual and gender norms may be resisted in cyberspace, these same norms can also be reproduced in ways that are retrograde.
Abstract: Cyberspace has often been regarded as a place where gender and sexual identities can be reformed in liberatory ways. Unfortunately, there is a good deal of online sexual and gender play that objectifies women and marginalizes queer identities. Therefore, we argue for an alternative critical approach to the study of gender and sexuality in cyberspace, one that views the agency of interactive media from the perspective of docility. In this article, we critically examine gender and sex practices in the online virtual environment Second Life. We conclude that while sexual and gender norms may be resisted in cyberspace, these same norms can also be reproduced in ways that are retrograde.
70 citations
TL;DR: A content analysis of all 25 episodes of the popular television series Jackass aired on MTV between 2000 and 2002 and of the two movies Jackass: The Movie (2002) and Jackass Number Two (2006) is presented in this paper.
Abstract: This article presents a content analysis of all 25 episodes of the popular television series Jackass aired on MTV between 2000 and 2002 and of the two movies Jackass: The Movie (2002) and Jackass Number Two (2006). Starting with a brief discussion of white male backlash and representations of masculinity in crisis, we move on to show that the text of Jackass seems to reaffirm hegemonic masculinity while still maintaining an ambiguous position vis-a-vis the ideals of machismo and hyper-virility. This, at first hand, may appear as a paradox. Our argument, however, is that if one reads Jackass from outside of, what Judith Butler calls, “the heterosexual matrix,” things do not appear that paradoxical at all. Seeing that gender subjectivities are not essentially fixed or naturally given, Jackass can instead be read in terms of the symbolic struggle between different forms of masculinity within a dialectical process of change throughout history.
36 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that a quantitative increase in visibility of same-sex parents and their children in mainstream U.S. news stories and photographs published from 2004 through 2005 does not translate to unmitigated progress, rather, homophobic, (hetero)sexist, and heteronormative constructions are repeated, overall putting forth the site, and the literal sight, of a heterosexual child as a synecdoche and social test for gay familial life.
Abstract: This essay argues for the hegemonic function of verbal and visual mass mediated representations of gay families and identifies particular rhetorical strategies of those representations. Specifically, a quantitative increase in visibility of same-sex parents and their children in mainstream U.S. news stories and photographs published from 2004 through 2005 does not translate to unmitigated progress. Rather, homophobic, (hetero)sexist, and heteronormative constructions are repeated, overall putting forth the site, and the literal sight, of a heterosexual child as a synecdoche and social test for gay familial life. This study fills a gap in research on representations of homosexuality in mass media and has implications for the gay and lesbian movement in today's current socio-political climate.
34 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the media coverage of QN/SF's more spectacular actions, uniformly portrayed in mainstream and gay media as defiant acts of gay and lesbian visibility, undermined QN's attempts to build a broader, multi-issue social justice coalition.
Abstract: This paper fleshes out the rhetorical structure of Queer Nation/San Francisco (QN/SF), a direct action group lauded for challenging the terms of gay and lesbian visibility politics but seen as failing to sustain that challenge. It juxtaposes representations of QN/SF—from regional mainstream and gay press accounts, QN/SF's internal organizational archives, and interviews with former QN/SF members—to parse out the competing interests that shaped QN/SF's discursive strategies and to chart what coalesced in the media spotlight as QN/SF's primary objective. Drawing on comparative analyses of these representations, this paper argues that press coverage of QN/SF's more spectacular actions, uniformly portrayed in mainstream and gay media as defiant acts of gay and lesbian visibility, undermined QN/SF's attempts to build a broader, multi-issue social justice coalition. While QN/SF's demise cannot be wholly explained by its treatment in the regional mainstream and gay press, this paper reopens the public record of ...
33 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that the discourses surrounding the steroids era are best understood through the lens of nostalgia, which seeks resolution between the contradictory elements of American identity, and argued that sports coverage of Mark McGwire's role as both savior and pariah of baseball evidences tensions surrounding the rhetorics of progress and American exceptionalism.
Abstract: Baseball has been a reservoir for nostalgic narratives of equality, fair play, and the American dream. However, the recent steroids scandals unearth contradictions within these narratives, highlighting anxieties concerning baseball's past and the steroid era related to our notions of fair play and a Puritan work ethic. We argue that the sports coverage of Mark McGwire's role as both savior and pariah of baseball evidences tensions surrounding the rhetorics of progress and American exceptionalism. This article suggests that the discourses surrounding the steroids era are best understood though the lens of nostalgia, which seeks resolution between the contradictory elements of American identity.
31 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the rise of consumer nationalism in China through an in-depth analysis of two recent controversial Japanese ad campaigns and argues that Japanese producers shoulder a particular burden of history as expressed in consumer nationalism, which is a combination of the production and reproduction of Japanese imperial history, the construction of Chinese identity, the expression of dissatisfaction toward the Chinese government and consumerist ethos in the context of globalization.
Abstract: This paper examines the rise of consumer nationalism in China through an in-depth analysis of two recent controversial Japanese ad campaigns. I situate the analysis in the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of contemporary China. I argue that Japanese producers shoulder a particular burden of history as expressed in consumer nationalism, which is a combination of the production and reproduction of Japanese imperial history, the construction of Chinese identity, the expression of dissatisfaction toward the Chinese government and consumerist ethos in the context of globalization. The Internet has become a crucial space that organizes Chinese consumer nationalism and enables consumers to feel a sense of empowerment when they express complaints with the controversial ads. Consumer nationalism in China can also be understood as what Benedict Anderson (1991) calls an “imagined community” that attempts to unite the Chinese in a problematic way.
30 citations
TL;DR: The authors found that news on Iraq War dissent was largely vocalized by public antiwar protestors and active military/war veterans, who presented new counterframes to the original war story, which earlier research showed had been framed by the Bush administration.
Abstract: This research sought to determine how the U.S. news media reported on public dissent in the U.S./Iraq War campaign in the months surrounding the Congressional midterm elections of 2006. In total, 89 news stories of antiwar coverage from 11 national news sources were analyzed using mixed research methods. The study found that news on Iraq War dissent was largely vocalized by public antiwar protestors and active military/war veterans. These war critics presented new counterframes to the original war story, which earlier research showed had been framed by the Bush administration. Counterframes collectively characterized the war story as “illegal,” “immoral,” and “based on lies.” These public-driven messages also replaced the elite sourcing (of earlier coverage) with the views of non-elites, that is, ordinary citizens. Such counterframes emerged primarily through journalist-selected news quotes about the Iraq War that amplified themes of White House accountability.
TL;DR: The dominant metaphor used to describe and situate MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role playing games (e.g. Ultima Online, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc.), has been "new world" and "new frontier".
Abstract: The dominant metaphor used to describe and situate MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role playing games (e.g. Ultima Online, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc.), has been “new world” and “new frontier.” By deploying this powerful imagery, game developers, players, the popular media, and academic researchers draw explicit connections between the technology of MMORPGs and the European encounter with the Americas and the western expansion of the United States. Although providing a compelling and often recognizable explanation of the innovations and opportunities of this new technology, the use of this terminology comes with a considerable price, one that had been demonstrated and examined by scholars of the Internet, cyberspace, and virtual reality over a decade ago. This essay explores the impact and significance of the terms “new world” and “frontier” as they have been deployed to explain and describe MMORPGs.
TL;DR: This article argued that if we are to make full use of the opportunities presented to us by new technologies, we must move beyond the discourse of corporate liberalism and return to the philosophical debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century.
Abstract: The rise of the critical blogosphere has challenged the authority of the mainstream media while sparking discussion concerning the proper relationship between news production and popular democracy in an Internet Age. All too often, however, this discussion is framed as a stark tension between aristocratic defenders of Old Media professionalism and democratic proponents of New Media egalitarianism. Lost in this framing is the tacit agreement, by both sides, that a solution must be found within the constraints of a corporate liberal media structure. This essay argues that if we are to make full use of the opportunities presented to us by new technologies, we must move beyond the discourse of corporate liberalism. Toward this end, I return to the philosophical debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. Based both on their shared principles and their points of departure, I argue that any productive discussion about democratic media reform must begin...
TL;DR: The 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew extensive criticism for its misleading portrayal of the FBI's investigation of three murdered civil rights activists in 1964 as discussed by the authors, and its subsequent controversy illustrates how provocatively forgetful texts can simultaneously prompt media attention to political activism and deflect attention from contemporary racial injustice.
Abstract: The 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew extensive criticism for its misleading portrayal of the FBI's investigation of three murdered civil rights activists in 1964. As critics noted, the film ignored the role of Black activists who struggled for racial justice even as it graphically depicted the violence that activists and other Blacks faced during the civil rights era. This movie's selective depiction of events surrounding the activists’ deaths constituted the film as a site of cinematic amnesia, a form of public remembrance that provokes controversy over how events ought to be remembered. An analysis of the film and its ensuing controversy illustrates how provocatively forgetful texts can simultaneously prompt media attention to political activism and deflect attention from contemporary racial injustice.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the relation between news images and cultural performances, those everyday embodied modes of expressive enactment by which individuals meaningfully and collectively create their worlds, and explore those sites, relations, and practices in which the decoding of news images obtain.
Abstract: This article considers the relation between news images—images captured, selected, written about, printed, and distributed in the course of the news process—and cultural performances—those everyday embodied modes of expressive enactment by which individuals meaningfully and collectively create their worlds. While scholarship on media from a ritual perspective has contributed a great deal to understandings of the cultural dimensions of the production of news images, it remains focused on the sites and practices of encoding. This article calls upon the concept of performance to explore those sites, relations, and practices in which the decoding of news images obtain. After a review and critique of the literature on news as ritual and a definitional overview of the performance concept, it considers two cases which explore the ways news images of September 11, 2001 became lived images through specific cultural performances.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the role of the news media in enforcing different forms of accountability, such as political, professional, and legal, in crisis situations, and show that frame contestation and public debate that occurs through news media, supported by critical actors in the public sphere, play an important role in activating political accountability.
Abstract: This article examines the role of the news media in enforcing different forms of accountability, such as political, professional, and legal, in crisis situations. It is argued that demands for accountability cannot be regarded as merely procedural, since these demands often depend on how social actors define events, how they assign blame to wrongdoing, and how they attribute responsibilities for perceived problems. Taking into consideration a case of extreme urban violence that was broadcast live during four hours—the hijacking of the 174 Bus line in Rio de Janeiro on 12 June 2000—this study evinces that frame contestation and public debate that occurs through news media, supported by critical actors in the public sphere, play an important role in activating political accountability. The findings show the conflicting role of the news media in societies where democracy is being constructed, as they may support accountability mechanisms that become mere facades as well as civic demands for democratic innova...
TL;DR: The authors argued that postmodern Blackface is a mediating response to assimilation and Whiteness in the film La Haine (Hate), and that it contributes to the evolving rhetorical and cultural interrogation of post-assimilatory identity.
Abstract: Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film La Haine (Hate) is recognized as a key component of the cinema des banlieues genre that arose during the late 1980s in France. By addressing the representational logic of the film's critique of economic and racial tensions in the marginalized cites ringing Paris, this essay tracks how it mediates the construction of postmodern identity. In particular, this analysis positions La Haine as a text that appropriates what I call “postmodern Blackface” as a tropological application of identity that explores the liminality of Whiteness and the performance of postassimilatory difference. Reading Kassovitz's role in relation to his main character, Vinz, encourages close reading of the film as a rich text for cultural critique. This essay first articulates postmodern Blackface as a mediating response to assimilation and Whiteness before considering how La Haine contributes to the evolving rhetorical and cultural interrogation of postassimilatory identity.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the Cuban broadcasting industry's prominent position in the 1940s and 1950s Latin American media landscape by analyzing the transformations of Havana-based radio and television and the media exchanges between Cuba, the U.S., and Latin America.
Abstract: This essay examines the Cuban broadcasting industry's prominent position in the 1940s and 1950s Latin American media landscape by analyzing the transformations of Havana-based radio and television and the media exchanges between Cuba, the U.S., and Latin America. The author pays special attention to the ways in which the concentration of creative talent in Havana, in addition to industrial, legal, economic, and cultural factors, fostered the growth of Cuba's commercial broadcasting. In addition, the essay traces Havana media connections across the region and conflictive economic, industrial, and political moments that provoked the migration of Cuban media professionals to various Latin American countries before the 1959 Cuban revolution. The project argues that during the 1940s and 1950s Havana was one of the most important commercial broadcasting centers in the region, which facilitated the incorporation of Cuban exiles into the Latin American and U.S. Spanish-language media workforce during the 1960s an...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that several trends (stemming from the discursive systems of film and advertising), have converged to foster a strange and troubling semiotic convention in contemporary cinema, which they call techno-scopophilia.
Abstract: In this essay, I argue that several trends (stemming from the discursive systems of film and advertising), have converged to foster a strange and troubling semiotic convention in contemporary cinema—what I call techno-scopophilia. The visual sign system of techno-scopophilia emerges from the mythologies of gender and science/technology, particularly as commodities in advertising. These trends have produced a new voyeuristic gaze in many feature films, but in addition to the sexualized body, technology is also an object of fantasy and pleasure. In a series of successful films over the last decade (Tomb Raider, Terminator 3, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Italian Job, Entrapment, etc.), the body is inscribed with technology; technology is inscribed with sexuality. The mythic/ideological implications of these semiotic codes involve the representation of sexualized, machine-like women and the fetishizing of commodities in film. By semiotically merging technological commodities with human characteristics, these films...
TL;DR: The authors consider how longings for heroic voice that characterize contemporary sports culture are addressed through intertextual disembodiments and re-embodiments of voice that constitute the ideological commitments, passions, and distresses of sport.
Abstract: Through the example of the documentary film Ali Rap, this essay considers how longings for heroic voice that characterize contemporary sports culture are addressed through intertextual disembodiments and re-embodiments of voice that constitute the ideological commitments, passions, and distresses of sport. Voice, I argue, is vital to structuring moral fantasies in mediated sports culture, especially the idea that athlete-heroes can timelessly return to intervene in current political crises. Renderings of voice in artistic, prophetic, and spectral imagery are considered for their capacity to appropriate heroic images for political and moral needs.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate how and on what basis the boundary between originals and copies gets drawn within the framework of intellectual property law, and explore Harry Potter-related doubles that were featured in the 2000 trademark and copyright infringement case, Scholastic, Inc., J. K. Rowling, and Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P. v. Nancy Stouffer.
Abstract: This essay begins by investigating how and on what basis the boundary between originals and copies gets drawn within the framework of intellectual property law. It does so by exploring Harry Potter-related doubles that were featured in the 2000 trademark and copyright infringement case, Scholastic, Inc., J. K. Rowling, and Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P. v. Nancy Stouffer. The paper then moves on to consider how, within the context of the case, the boundary line dividing “originals” from “copies” grows increasingly indeterminate, so much so that it becomes untenable to speak of either category at all. It thus investigates what happens when the figure of the simulacrum, which troubles bright-line distinctions between originals and copies, enters into the legal realm. Theoretically, the simulacrum would seem to pose a challenge to intellectual property law's jurisprudential foundations, given how it blurs what should count as an “original” or a “derivative” work. This paper shows that while this may...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a synthetic world, Arden, which has been designed and constructed for use in macroeconomic experiments, and detail the basis of the Arden economy, the resources and production technologies involved, the game structures that will entice players to make use of them, and the monetary and fiscal policy tools available for regulating the virtual market.
Abstract: A synthetic world is a computer-generated Earth-like environment that is accessible online to hundreds or thousands of people on a persistent basis. Due to the genuine human interactions that are cultivated in these environments, this technology may stand to offer much as a social science research tool. In this paper we describe a synthetic world, Arden, which has been designed and constructed for use in macroeconomic experiments. We detail the basis of the Arden economy, the resources and production technologies involved, the game structures that will entice players to make use of them, and the monetary and fiscal policy tools available for regulating the virtual market. The paper concludes with a description of example experiments that could be conducted, as well as a review of key principles and practical considerations to keep in mind when employing this new research tool.
TL;DR: The Laramie Project and Two Towns of Jasper were TV movies created in response to two hate crimes and were distributed as educational texts, with lesson plans and teaching guides, to K-12 classrooms across the U.S as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The Laramie Project and Two Towns of Jasper were TV movies created in response to two hate crimes. These movies were distributed as educational texts, with lesson plans and teaching guides, to K-12 classrooms across the U.S. This essay locates the discursive and institutional characteristics that allowed the movies to be labeled as educational texts, fit for classroom use, and evaluates the way these movies were deployed as pedagogic tools through an analysis of the educational guides that accompanied the movies. The guides make clear how the movies were deployed as a form of political education or citizen-production. While the guides state their intent to be the inculcation of critical citizens, they do so through a strategy of sentimental education that prioritizes feelings and relations proper to existing neoliberal structures. In this sentimental commitment to U.S. neoliberalism, with all of its entanglements in systems of racial, gender, and sexual discrimination, the guides fail their professed crit...
TL;DR: There is a strong tendency among many scholars of cyberspace to offer it up as a new utopia as discussed by the authors, and online communities have often been celebrated as spaces that allow for an unbound human experience, spac...
Abstract: There is a strong tendency among many scholars of cyberspace to offer it up as a new utopia. Online communities have often been celebrated as spaces that allow for an unbound human experience, spac...
TL;DR: The authors argue that Lee deliberately strips the film of its dramatic import to highlight the surface quality of the martial contact enacted in it, and apply a Deleuze-Guattari conceptual vocabulary to the dialogue and action sequences, arguing that Lee constructs his characters as rhizomatic "bodies without organs" in an effort to articulate a non-narrative, motional cosmos corresponding to Bergsonian duree.
Abstract: Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari's description of the rhizome, this essay works toward defining an aesthetic framework for understanding the Hong Kong action film, specifically Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. In it, I argue that Lee deliberately strips the film of its dramatic import to highlight the surface quality of the martial contact enacted in it. To explore this performance of his mystical-seeming philosophy of martial arts, I apply a Deleuze–Guattarian conceptual vocabulary to the film's dialogue and action sequences, arguing that Lee constructs his characters as rhizomatic “bodies without organs” in an effort to articulate a non-narrative, motional cosmos corresponding to Bergsonian duree.
TL;DR: This article surveyed the field of knowledge about digital games, focusing particularly on issues of labor, bodies, space/time, economics, and the use of metaphor, and engaged the articles in this symposium as reviewers.
Abstract: Surveying the field of knowledge about digital games, we engage the articles in this symposium as reviewers, focusing particularly on issues of labor, bodies, space/time, economics, and the use of metaphor.