Showing papers in "Journal of Communication Inquiry in 2000"
TL;DR: The authors summarizes and analyzes the dilemma of alternative media as it has been theorized in selected statements in the literatures of mass communication and suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing alternative media that instead of leading to efforts to build mirror images of mainstream media organizations with all their limitations, makes possible greater and more meaningful participation in public debates about the nature and direction of American society.
Abstract: This article summarizes and analyzes the dilemma of alternative media as it has been theorized in selected statements in the literatures of mass communication. It locates the source of this dilemma in the theoretical assumptions about alternative media and their resulting inability to escape the seeming tradeoff between political effectiveness and organizational/cultural massification. It concludes by suggesting an alternative way of conceptualizing alternative media that instead of leading to efforts to build mirror images of mainstream media organizations with all their limitations, makes possible greater and more meaningful participation in public debates about the nature and direction of American society.
106 citations
TL;DR: Boy love (shoonen' ai) refers to the homoerotic attraction the male heroes in a genre of Japanese women's manga (comics) feel for each other as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Boy love (shoonen' ai) in Japanese does not refer to the love many young Japanese women feel for male teen idols, but instead refers to the homoerotic attraction the male heroes in a genre of Japanese women's manga (comics) feel for each other Commencing in the early 1970s, women's manga began to describe love stories between "beautiful boys," culminating in the mid-1980s in a genre termed YAOI (an acronym meaning "no climax, no point, no meaning") which, dispensing with the elaborate plots of the earlier comics, focused instead on sexual interactions between boys and young men The advent of the Internet has provided a new forum for women interested in boy-love fiction to publish their own and read each others' work This article briefly outlines the history of boy love in Japanese women's comics and attempts to describe and account for the recent expansion of this genre onto the Internet, where young Japanese women have produced a huge number of Web sites extolling the virtues of homosexual love between beautiful boys
63 citations
TL;DR: This paper proposed a model to examine media coverage of minorities as a mostly static process in which journalists continually produce the same news stories, and they found that the coverage of minority people was mostly static.
Abstract: Most previous research in communication has looked at media coverage of minorities as a mostly static process in which journalists continually produce the same news stories. This article proposes a...
44 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that critical audience should refocus its attention on how macrostructures of power pattern, constrain, and are often reproduced within audience interpretations of media texts, and present a model of audience ethnography based on Geertz's notion of thick description, and argues that this model can productively investigate the relationship between powerful social structures and the practice of media consumption in everyday life.
Abstract: In recent years, a backlash has been brewing against populist approaches to media and cultural studies that celebrate the ability of subcultural audiences to produce divergent or resistive readings of mass media texts. And rightly so. The decade of the 1980s produced a host of critical media studies that were marred, as Morley argues, by a facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and an undocumented claim that interpretive creativity constitutes a powerful form of political resistance. Building on this critique of cultural populism, this article argues that critical audience should refocus its attention on how macrostructures of power pattern, constrain, and are often reproduced within audience interpretations of media texts. In the end, the article presents a model of audience ethnography based on Geertz's notion of thick description, and argues that this model can productively investigate the relationship between powerful social structures and the practice of media consumption in everyday life.
41 citations
TL;DR: In this article, three paradigms of the politicization of camp subculture in the 1990s are analyzed: Stephen Elliot's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Des...
Abstract: Camp, as queer creation and manifestation, objects to the stigmatization that marks the unnatural, extraordinary, perverse, sick, inefficient, dangerous, and freakish. As political counterculture, it is much more than a mode of aestheticism or worship of the artifice. By celebrating its extravagance, carnival, stylized eroticism, masquerade, and colorful kitsch and mimicry, camp provides a different perspective that provokes heteronormative gender roles and codes of visibility and behavior. It practically challenges the dominant ideology produced by the affluent white, straight male elite and its powerful culture industry. Camp is manifested as an alternative aesthetic and ethic counterpraxis that undermines and reconsiders the epistemology intended by the bourgeoisie production and reproduction, presentation, and representation of its hegemony. Three paradigms of the politicization of camp subculture in the 1990s are analyzed in this article: Stephen Elliot's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Des...
24 citations
TL;DR: Based on insights collected during eight months of fieldwork recently conducted in rural southern Japan and the urban center of Kyoto, the authors explores how Western cultural texts are adopted, adapted, and interpreted within the Japanese popular cultural environment.
Abstract: Based on insights collected during eight months of fieldwork recently conducted in rural southern Japan and the urban center of Kyoto, this article explores how Western cultural texts are adopted, adapted, and interpreted within the Japanese popular cultural environment. It first examines the theoretical development of the concept of Western cultural influence—from discourses of cultural imperialism to more recent interpretations of culture as hybrid and ever changing—and its particular significance to Japanese culture. It then attempts to locate Western texts and Western imagery within the larger Japanese cultural, historical, and media environment into which such texts are exported and consumed.
20 citations
TL;DR: The first edition of Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook was an immediate bestseller in 1950, and remains the second culinary bestseller of all time as mentioned in this paper, and it symbolically connects the domestic practice of modern women's cookery to the birth of the United States and, in turn, to the postwar renewal of the nation.
Abstract: The first edition of Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook was an immediate best-seller in 1950, and remains the second culinary best-seller of all time. This article discusses the historical significance of the ideological discourse embedded within Betty Crocker. Using a framework derived from ritual studies, the author argues that the text reflects the cultural preoccupation with women's roles after the end of World War II. Through word and image, Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook symbolically connects the domestic practice of modern women's cookery to the birth of the United States and, in turn, to the postwar renewal of the nation. The postwar reversal of women's wartime gains in the workplace and in the public sphere can be contextualized as a ritual response to wartime destruction. The author argues that the cultural phenomenon later identified as the feminine mystique by Friedan can be seen as a ritual response to perceived crises of returning servicemen and postwar social upheavals. Through examination ...
19 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine real-world problems of public journalism using communitarian principles and examine the underlying concepts and analyze them in fundamental ways that are not addresse...
Abstract: Despite vehement criticism, more than 200 public journalism projects have been undertaken in the past five years. Whether this represents the beginning of a trend or just another passing fad, the sheer number of public journalism projects prompts the question, Why now? One answer may be that the current adoption of public journalism's philosophies is in part due to the concomitant development of communitarian ethics, a philosophy that offers the notion that the individual is dependent on the community. Public journalism was not viable until now because it lacked a strong, underlying ethical system that communitarianism has provided. This article shows how communitarian philosophy provides an underpinning for public journalism. Real-world problems of public journalism are examined using communitarian principles. The purpose is not to debate the arguments for and against specific practices of public journalism, but to examine the underlying concepts and analyze them in fundamental ways that are not addresse...
18 citations
TL;DR: The authors draw on Jurgen Habermas's discourse ethics work to build a case for the regulation of U.S. media, with particular attention to the newspaper, and focus on two facets of Haberm...
Abstract: This article draws on Jurgen Habermas's discourse ethics work to build a case for the regulation of U.S. media, with particular attention to the newspaper. The authors focus on two facets of Haberm...
18 citations
TL;DR: In the early 1990s, some gay men in the 1980s, catalyzed by antigay politics since the late 1970s and overwhelmed by the excessively apocalyptic and overdetermined representations of AIDS in popular media, deliberately embraced the role of sexual and medical pariah, celebrated social anxieties about their public danger as vectors of infection, and repudiated the sympathetically sentimentalizing images of AIDS victims as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Mainstream AIDS activists in the 1980s responded to demonizing and stigmatizing representations of the HIV infected by attempting to “normalize” people living with AIDS. However, some gay men in the 1980s and early 1990s, catalyzed by antigay politics since the late 1970s and overwhelmed by the excessively apocalyptic and overdetermined representations of AIDS in popular media, deliberately embraced the role of sexual and medical pariah, celebrated social anxieties about their public danger as vectors of infection, and repudiated the sympathetically sentimentalizing images of “AIDS victims.” Adopting the rhetoric of punk culture and its forms of self-representation—particularly the punk rock-derived “fanzine” or “'zine”—these “infected faggots” and “diseased pariahs” exposed and celebrated their HIV status and erotic adventurism. However, the writers, editors, and publishers of AIDS 'zines contended with the competing claims of performative self-representation, on one hand, and of a readership, on the oth...
18 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined the underground press newsworkers' visualization of their press as a communicative tool, and found that their relationship with the audience was dynamic and symbiotic, and that the relationship between the press and its audience was symbiotic.
Abstract: This article examines, through a detailed study of editorials and statements of purpose published in American underground newspapers, the underground press newsworkers' visualization of their press as a communicative tool. This model departs from more traditional models of communicative interaction developed by communication scholars to describe the relationship between the press and its public. For the underground press newsworkers, their relationship with the audience was dynamic and symbiotic.
TL;DR: Using cultural studies as a framework, the authors explores the fascination that entertainment producers have with the role the media play in our lives through an analysis of the much heralded film, The Truman Show.
Abstract: The media's impact on our lives in the past half decade has become a popular thematic centerpiece for feature films and television programs. Using cultural studies as a framework, this article explores the fascination that entertainment producers have with the role the media play in our lives through an analysis of the much heralded film, The Truman Show. Critics and moviegoers have congratulated the producers of films like The Truman Show for taking a critical look at the power of the media. The author contends, however, that they have not earned our plaudits. Films like Truman are created by entertainment companies as a means to exploit, and at the same time dissipate, our desire to engage in genuine media criticism. In the end, the power of the media is affirmed rather than challenged. In the spirit of Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, these films and television programs co-opt our enchantment (and disenchantment) with the media and sell it back to us.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used four underground community radio stations as a case study to explore the emergence of alternative radio and examine the processes of its transformation and disintegration, and made the case that the factors that cause the transformation of radio are the intervention of the state, the invasion of economic market from outside, and the lack of community identity from within.
Abstract: This article draws on the various perspectives of alternative radio and provides an example of how an alternative radio section emerges from a society (in this case, Taiwan) and the impact it has. This article uses four underground community radio stations as a case study to explore the emergence of alternative radio and to examine the processes of its transformation and disintegration. The original empirical research reported in this article is mainly based on the fieldwork data collected by a variety of methods between June and August 1998. It examines the aims, organization, financing and the outputs of radio stations; eventually, the case is made that the factors that cause the transformation of alternative radio are the intervention of the state, the invasion of economic market from outside, and the lack of community identity from within.
TL;DR: In this article, the continual reemergence of social disruption and cultural critique in the twentieth century, critically examining how this history provides insight into Jenny Holzer's and Krzysztof Wodiczko's use of alternative media in their critical public art.
Abstract: In this article, I chart the continual reemergence of social disruption and cultural critique in the twentieth century, critically examining how this history provides insight into Jenny Holzer's and Krzysztof Wodiczko's use of alternative media in their critical public art. This analysis points to the historical reemergence of a desire to comment on urban life vis-a-vis media practices in a way that allows us to reimagine alternative uses of media. I argue that Holzer and Wodiczko are part of an important cultural tradition, yet a combination of revanchist urban programs and the failure of mainstream media to facilitate democratic participation provide a significant contemporary context for Holzer's and Wodiczko's alternative media practices.
TL;DR: The authors analyzes the cultural formations from which 1950s big money quiz shows emerge using Bourdieu's notion of the field, focusing on three key sites that articulate issues of knowledge and education related to 1950s television: (1) the public debates about education in the cold war United States, (2) broadcast network policies geared toward the production of knowledge The authors.
Abstract: This article analyzes the cultural formations from which 1950s big money quiz shows emerge. Using Bourdieu's notion of the field, the analysis focuses on three key sites that articulate issues of knowledge and education related to 1950s television: (1) the public debates about education in the cold war United States, (2) broadcast network policies geared toward the production of knowledge and education, and (3) big money quiz shows and their public reception. The author argues that the specific social and cultural conditions in 1950s America, especially the debates surrounding education and the need for the television industry to produce enlightenment programming, created television programs that reaffirmed traditional versions of authority and selectively endorsed elite culture and a narrow definition of national identity under white, upper-class leadership.
TL;DR: The World of Lily Wong, a long-running comic strip in Hong Kong, documented the final 100 days of British colonial rule leading up to the transition to Chinese sovereignty as discussed by the authors. But it was not suitable for children.
Abstract: The World of Lily Wong, a long-running comic strip in Hong Kong, documented the final 100 days of British colonial rule leading up to the transition to Chinese sovereignty. For an anxious audience,...
TL;DR: The authors examines the sociologial significance of the concepts of voice, dialect, and accent, using as a case study local area commercial and nonprofit radio stations in the northwest of England.
Abstract: This article examines the sociologial significance of the concepts of voice, dialect, and accent, using as a case study local area commercial and nonprofit radio stations in the northwest of England. The article argues that whereas much of local and regional radio is dominated by a form of working-class voice, this tends to be homogenized and has little relationship to the reality of distinct spatially located communities. However, taking the case of a small scale, restricted service license Afro-Caribbean station in the Moss Side and Hulme inner-city area of Manchester, the author argues that radio can serve the socio-cultural needs of specific and identifiable communities. He elaborates this argument by looking at soca-calypso music, which was a key feature of the station's broadcasting, and adopts Barthes's concept of “grain of voice” as well as the ideas of Appadurai, Gilroy, Bhabha, and Hall in the cultural diaspora and new ethnicities research. The article concludes that similar cultural strategies ...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the NewsHour has rejected the ideal of freedom for one of excellence, an excellence that implicitly supports the assumptions of broadcasting's corporate liberal heritage.
Abstract: The rhetoric surrounding the creation of American public television promised a new system that would provide the American people with an excellence and free dom never before offered on television. This study critiques public television’s primary news program, theNewsHour, in light of the rhetorical promise and sociopolitical limitations surrounding American public television. It concludes that the NewsHour has rejected the ideal of freedom for one of excellence, an excellence that implicitly supports the assumptions of broadcasting’s corporate liberal heritage. In 1967, a powerful coalition of politicians, broadcasters, educators, and otherwise influential citizens announced the coming of a new day in American television. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was to be the first major step in reversing the long slide American broadcasting had taken down the slippery slope of commercialism (see Burke 1972a, 1972b). The rhetoric of the past year had been grand: a new, widely implemented, federally funded “public” service television was being born, and many hoped that the new service would in no uncertain terms revolutionize American television and, with it, American culture and democracy. More than thirty years have passed since the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). In those years, U.S. public service television has seen its share of in-fighting, political struggles, and program modifications (Avery and Pepper 1979; Engelman 1996). Most recently, a Republican-controlled Congress has threatened the very existence of the service, questioning both the cultural value of public television and its claim to federal tax dollars. It appears, for the mean time, that PBS and the CPB will survive the latest attack from the political right, as they did similar assaults from both the Nixon and Reagan administrations (Lashley 1992).
TL;DR: In this paper, an analysis of themes of gender, religion, and nationalism in discourse produced by participants in an electronic discussion group was conducted to show that the expansion of the imagination under capitalism is inextricably coupled with the centralization of subjectivity.
Abstract: The role of the imagination as a collective property in today's global economy has received much attention. The thesis that modern subjectivity, produced by processes of consumption and constructed in a global cultural economy, is coupled with the expansion of our collective imagination demands qualification. In this article, the author engages in an analysis of themes of gender, religion, and nationalism in discourse produced by participants in an electronic discussion group, to show that the expansion of the imagination under capitalism is inextricably coupled with the centralization of subjectivity. Moreover, this centralization cannot be discussed without reference to corporate interests that mediate it.
TL;DR: The authors examines the tension between illusion and allusion that resides in the film's aestheticized interpretation of the title figures and the milieu in which they lived. But they also argue that the film understates at least some of the class-oriented politics through which punks engaged and critiqued the commodification of culture.
Abstract: This article takes several approaches in analyzing Alex Cox's 1986 independent film, Sid & Nancy. It first examines the tension between illusion and allusion that resides in the film's aestheticized interpretation of the title figures and the milieu in which they lived. While hewing to many of the facts about Sid and Nancy, the film also engages in mythologization of them and the early punk era of which they were a part. Second, the author applies a critique of the society of the spectacle to both the punk era and Cox's presentation of it; in this respect, the film understates at least some of the class-oriented politics through which punks engaged and critiqued the commodification of culture. Third, it unpacks the ambivalent politics of the film with respect to the right-wing Thatcher/Reagan ascendencies that were already in motion by the time of the film's release in 1986.
TL;DR: This article examines the rhetoric advertisements employ to persuade customers that the Internet is a hostile anticommunity through which only well-protected individuals can navigate safely.
Abstract: As Congress continues to struggle to create effective means for governing the Internet, some software companies have sidestepped civic processes and taken the debate into the commercial sphere. To sell their software security products, computer companies recast Internet security strictly as private, not public, concerns, in a way that generates as much fear as the ads claim to eliminate. This article examines the rhetoric advertisements employ to persuade customers that the Internet is a hostile anticommunity through which only well-protected individuals can navigate safely.