Trine Stauning Willert and Gerasimus Katsan (eds.), Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture. Lanham: Lexington Books, Pp. 276.

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-293
Author(s):  
Eleni Yannakakis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
The Past

Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422198976
Author(s):  
Darsana Vijay ◽  
Alex Gekker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Political Actor ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Political Contention ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Potential Strategy

TikTok is commonly known as a playful, silly platform where teenagers share 15-second videos of crazy stunts or act out funny snippets from popular culture. In the past few years, it has experienced exponential growth and popularity, unseating Facebook as the most downloaded app. Interestingly, recent news coverage notes the emergence of TikTok as a political actor in the Indian context. They raise concerns over the abundance of divisive content, hate speech, and the lack of platform accountability in countering these issues. In this article, we analyze how politics is performed on TikTok and how the platform’s design shapes such expressions and their circulation. What does the playful architecture of TikTok mean to the nature of its political discourse and participation? To answer this, we review existing academic work on play, media, and political participation and then examine the case of Sabarimala through the double lens of ludic engagement and platform-specific features. The efficacy of play as a productive heuristic to study political contention on social media platforms is demonstrated. Finally, we turn to ludo-literacy as a potential strategy that can reveal the structures that order playful political participation and can initiate alternative modes of playing politics.

scholarly journals Nostalgic transmediation: A not-so-final fantasy? Ichigo’s Sheet Music online platform as an object network of creative practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-193
Author(s):  
Ruth Barratt-Peacock ◽  
Sophia Staite
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Online Platform ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Music Transcription ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Nature

Using the music of the Final Fantasy game series as our case study, we follow the music through processes of transmediation in two very different contexts: the Netflix series Dad of Light and music transcription forum Ichigo’s Sheet Music. We argue that these examples reveal transmediation acting as a process of ‘emptying’, allowing the music to carry its nostalgic cargo of affect into new relationships and contexts. This study’s theoretical combination of transmediation with Bainbridge’s object networks of social practice frame challenges normative definitions of nostalgia. The phenomenon of ‘emptying’ we identify reveals a function of popular culture nostalgia that differs from the dominant understanding as a triggering of generalized emotional longing for (or the desire to return to) the past. Instead, this article uncovers a nostalgia that is defined by personal and communal creative engagement and highlights the active and social nature of transmediated popular culture nostalgia.

Gaining a Past, Losing a Future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

2012 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Allen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Web 3.0 ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
The Web

This article explore how, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the internet became historicised, meaning that its public existence is now explicitly framed through a narrative that locates the current internet in relation to a past internet. Up until this time, in popular culture, the internet had been understood mainly as the future-in-the-present, as if it had no past. The internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O'Reilly's creative marketing of that label. Web 2.0, in this sense not a technology or practice but the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, created for us a second version of the web, different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. This historicising moment aligned the past and future in ways suitable to those who might control or manage the present. And while Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the ‘future’, it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality.

scholarly journals Pamięć w kulturze teraźniejszości

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 121-141
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Tarkowska
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Media ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Social Time ◽  
Media And Communication

One of the most substantial interdisciplinary topics in the study of contemporary culture is change in social time, which is expressed in the compression of time (and space) and changing relationships between the past, present, and future. Research and analysis situate the present in an exceptional position in contemporary culture, providing us with the term ‘culture of the present.’ At the same time, however, we are dealing with a phenomenon labeled the ‘explosion of memory’—an astounding multidirectional and multifaceted rise in interest in the past. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate the structures and mechanisms of collective memory, as well as how the past is defined in contemporary culture, from the perspective of time as a social and cultural phenomenon. Questions should be asked regarding the mechanisms that unite the dominance of the present in culture with a rising interest in the past. The perspective of social time reveals that the ‘culture of the present,’ the current dominating forms of memory intensification, and the heightened awareness of the past, are influenced by the same or similar factors. These include new media and communication technologies, as well as consumption and popular culture, which change the structure of time, condense the time horizon, alter the manner in which the past is experienced, and modify the mechanisms of collective memory.

Excavating the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn Malley
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Study ◽  
Homeland Security ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Adaptive Responses ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The U.S

Well-known in popular culture for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist is also a rich though often unacknowledged figure for constructing ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds’ in science fiction. But more than a well-spring for scenarios, SF’s archaeological imaginary is also a hermeneutic tool for excavating the ideological motivations of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of popular though critically neglected North American SF film and television texts–spanning the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future treats archaeology as a trope for exploring the popular archaeological imagination and the uses to which it is being put by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to contemporary geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS.

Nostalgia and the Remains of Everyday Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 78-111
Author(s):  
Maya Nadkarni
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Political System ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
International Discourse ◽  
State Socialist

This chapter argues that the various attempts to distance the past became the condition of Hungary for its return in the form of nostalgia for socialist mass and popular culture. It discusses the remains of socialism from anachronistic monuments and devalued historical narratives to the detritus of an everyday life now on the brink of vanishing, such as candy bars and soda pop. Despite appearances, this nostalgia did not represent a wistful desire to return to the previous era nor simply to the gleeful impulse to laugh at state socialist kitsch found years earlier. The chapter explains the detachment of fond communal memories of certain objects from the political system that produced them. It points out the ironic invocation of the international discourse of cultural heritage that legitimate the trash of the previous era and enabled Hungarians to redefine themselves as both savvy capitalist consumers and cultured democratic citizens.

Politics of Memory and Cinematography in Modern Russia: the October Revolution and the Civil War

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Egor M. Isaev
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The State ◽  
October Revolution ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
The Past

Abstract This article discusses the representation of the era of the October Revolution and the Civil War in contemporary Russian popular cinema. It describes the modern tools used by the state to create new images of the past and to reconstruct history in Russian popular culture. It also considers how Russian society has reacted to this official discourse.

scholarly journals Rock critics as 'Mouldy Modernists'

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Becky Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
The Past ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Contemporary rock criticism appears to be firmly tied to the past. The specialist music press valorise rock music of the 1960s and 1970s, and new emerging artists are championed for their ‘retro’ sounding music by journalists who compare the sound of these new artists with those included in the established ‘canon’ of rock music. This article examines the narrative tropes of authenticity and nostalgia that frame the retrospective focus of this contemporary rock writing, and most significantly, the maintenance of the rock canon within contemporary popular culture. The article concludes by suggesting that while contemporary rock criticism is predominately characterised by nostalgia, this nostalgia is not simply a passive romanticism of the past. Rather, this nostalgia fuels a process of active recontextualisation within contemporary popular culture.

Academic critique and the need for an open mind (a response to Kristiansen)

Antiquity ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (316) ◽  
pp. 490-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelius Holtorf
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Las Vegas ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Archaeological Heritage ◽  
The Past ◽  
Open Mind

In two recent books, From Stonehenge to Las Vegas – Archaeology as popular culture (AltaMira 2005) and Archaeology is a brand! The meaning of archaeology in popular culture (Archaeopress 2007), Cornelius Holtorf wants us to readdress the focus of archaeology from being predominantly a study of the past to becoming a study of its use in popular culture in the present. While I am in general sympathy with the attempt to analyse the role of archaeology in modern popular culture – and his 2007 book especially provides some good examples of that – I am deeply sceptical of Holtorf's theoretical and political programme for archaeology. It represents a dangerous attempt to deconstruct archaeology as a historical discipline in order to allow modern market forces to take over the archaeological heritage and the consumption of the past as popular culture.

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