Twenty-First Century Challenges: Digital Fandom, Social Media and Fantasy Video Games

2017 ◽  
pp. 246-264
Author(s):  
David Tan
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 189
Author(s):  
Shaimma El Naggar

<p>Over the past few decades, televangelism has emerged as one important media phenomenon, inter alia, among Muslim communities. As a phenomenon, televangelism is interesting in many respects; it is a manifestation of the phenomenon of "info-tainment" as televangelists integrate entertainment features such as sound effects and music in their sermons. It is also a manifestation of the rise of the celebrity culture as televangelists have become 'media celebrities' with thousands of hundreds of fans and followers on social media networks.</p><p> </p><p>Thematically, this study is divided into two main sections. First. I delineate the characteristics of televangelism as a novel form of religious expression in which televangelists adopt a modern style and use colloquial language; and in which televangelists present religion as a source of individual change. I have argued that these features seem to have granted televangelists popularity particularly among Muslim youth who view televangelism as a new form of religious expression that is modern in appearance and relevant to their everyday lives.</p><p>The study has further highlighted the importance of digital media technologies in popularizing televangelists' programmes and sermons. Drawing on two case studies of popular televangelists, namely Amr Khaled and Hamza Yusuf, the study has shown that televangelists draw on a plethora of digital media tools to extend the visibility of their programmes including websites and social media networks. The study has found that televangelists' fans play an important role in popularizing televangelists' programmes. Moreover, the study relates televangelism to the rise of digital Islam. The study has argued that digitization and the increase of literacy rates have changed the structure of religious authority in the twenty first century, giving rise to new voices that are competing for authority. </p><p>Having provided an explanatory framework for the phenomenon of televangelism, the study moves in the second section to critique televangelism as an 'info-tainment' phenomenon.</p>Drawing on Carrette and King's <em>Selling Spirituality, </em>one issue that the study raises is the extent to which televangelism fits into the modern form of 'spiritualities'. Rather than being a critical reflection of the consumer culture, modern spiritualities seem to 'smooth out' resistance to the hegemony of capitalism and consumerism. I have proposed that it is through a content-related analysis of televangelists' sermons that one can get a nuanced understanding of how the discourses of particular televangelists can possibly relate to dominant (capitalist) ideologies, how structures of power are represented in their discourses and what their texts may reveal about the socio-historical contexts of Muslims in the twenty first century.


The Race Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 113-137
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle

This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revealing the Orientalist assumptions embedded in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games (1958). These founding fathers’ discussions of play as a liberating “magic circle” have been endlessly cited, excerpted, and romanticized, most recently by popular and academic rhetoric extolling video games as the cure for a “broken” and alienating twenty-first-century reality. Unsurprisingly, contemporary scholars have regarded the patronizing and exotifying references to Japan and China which crop up nearly from the very first pages of these tomes as embarrassing but irrelevant signs of the times. Recontextualizing these early chapters within the longer and rarely read remainders of both monographs, however, reveals that those initial ludic schemas were in fact the raison d’être for an elaborate ethnocentric sociology that rationalized the cognitive and cultural inferiority of nonwhites by ranking them according to the “primitivity” of their play. Showing how these theorists legitimized their taxonomies by naturalizing fantasies of a ritualized, stagnant East and an innovative, rational West, this chapter demonstrates that Orientalist discourse was not tangential but essential to the seemingly global theories of play that form the basis of modern game studies.


2018 ◽  
pp. 207-214
Author(s):  
Susan Zieger

The conclusion reviews the five central components through which the book has posited connections between nineteenth- and twenty-first century habits of media consumption. It shows how “addiction” still serves as a descriptive metaphor for the consumption of information, now networked and constantly refreshing itself; how the fantasy of infinite mental retention still governs fantasies of mastering information overload; how playback has only continued to conflate memory with information storage, resulting in programmable subjects and information as a super-commodity; how digital media reproduction and circulation ironically still creates the aura of mass live events; and finally, how the media consumer’s dilemma of establishing authenticity has only become more aggravated in an era of self-branding on social media.


2020 ◽  
pp. 356-369
Author(s):  
Simon Reader

The eighteenth-century German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg developed a utopian style of note-taking that anticipated the fantasy of democratically organized information promulgated by social media in the twenty-first century. In his “waste-books” (a term drawn from accounting) Lichtenberg made a virtue of the unfinished, promoting the use of the notebook as a tool directed to purposes other than publication: first, as an accumulation of informational wealth (“pennyworths); second, as an incubator for future possibilities over which he exercised no control (“seeds”); and, third, as a space where the micro trades places with the macro (“keyholes”). Lichtenberg elected to live in manuscript, relinquishing his witty retorts, aphoristic reflections, or ideas for whole books entirely to posterity. He kept marginal notations as a way of honing an individual style that was simultaneously divorced from social exchange with the living.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey St. Onge

This chapter outlines an approach to teaching media literacy from the perspective of cultural studies. It argues that this perspective is especially well-equipped to meet the challenges and demands of media literacy in the twenty-first century, and as such would be of use to scholars in multiple disciplines. Briefly, the course examines the various ways that media shape public culture by analyzing histories of propaganda, public relations, and news framing. In addition, students consider the role of social media in their lives through a focus on the variety of ways in which media shape messages. The chapter describes the logic of the course, key readings, and primary assignments geared toward synthesis of media concepts, democracy, and culture.


2015 ◽  
pp. 2151-2175
Author(s):  
Julie A. Delello ◽  
Rochell R. McWhorter

This chapter examines how next-generation visual social platforms motivate students to capture authentic evidence of their learning and achievements, publish digital artifacts, and share content across visual social media. Educators are facing the immediate task of integrating social media into their current practice to meet the needs of the twenty-first century learner. Using a case study, this chapter highlights through empirical work how nascent visual social media platforms such as Pinterest are being utilized in the college classroom and concludes with projections on ways visual networking platforms will transform traditional models of education.


Author(s):  
Julie A. Delello ◽  
Rochell R. McWhorter

This chapter examines how next-generation visual social platforms motivate students to capture authentic evidence of their learning and achievements, publish digital artifacts, and share content across visual social media. Educators are facing the immediate task of integrating social media into their current practice to meet the needs of the twenty-first century learner. Using a case study, this chapter highlights through empirical work how nascent visual social media platforms such as Pinterest are being utilized in the college classroom and concludes with projections on ways visual networking platforms will transform traditional models of education.


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