The Platformization of Culture: Webtoon Platforms and Media Ecology in Korea and Beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Heekyoung Cho
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Serial Production ◽  
Digital Platform ◽  
Cultural Medium ◽  
Art Production ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article examines the webtoon (wept'un)—a term coined in Korea to refer to webcomics—which is arguably the most pervasive and powerful form of digital serial production in twenty-first-century Korea. Webtoons have developed by utilizing various potentials that the digital platform offers, such as open solicitation, (partial) free web/mobile distribution, profit from advertisement and page viewing, and transmedia production. As a new cultural medium, the webtoon is thus inseparable from its platform and organically tied to its distinctive platform ecology, which is different from the ecosystems that other (global) mega-platforms create. Engaging with the insights from recent studies of platforms and utilizing empirical media analysis, I argue that Korean webtoon platforms demonstrate the continuing and intensifying dependency of art on platforms—a process that I call “the platformization of culture”—and that this specific type of platformization is reinforced by what I call “the artist incubating system.” The case of webtoon platforms reveals a number of telling aspects of media ecosystems for art production in the digital age—aspects that are spreading and expanding to various fields of art.

“Is an Archive Enough?”: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-165
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Fest
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Rachel Blau Duplessis ◽  
Film And Video

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis's various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis's work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext's phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.

Media, Public Scholarship and Religious Controversy: Notes from Trump’s America

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-166
Author(s):  
Stewart M. Hoover
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Building ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Scholarship ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
Special Challenge ◽  
Media And Religion ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract The persistence of religion in the twenty-first century has renewed the importance of scholarships devoted to it. At the same time, the digital age has re-positioned and recentered the affordances of mediated circulations around "the religious." This increasing presence and significance of media and religion suggests that substantive scholarships of religion must necessarily articulate media as well. Religious controversies therefore present a special challenge and a special opportunity to scholarships of media and religion. New ways of doing scholarship, and doing so publicly, present themselves. All scholarships of mediated religion must necessarily be public, so scholarship is articulated into these circulations, and at the same time can build on and benefit from knowledge-building that occurs outside the formal boundaries of the academy. This paper explores emerging theories of digital mediation and proposes a circulation-focused understanding of the role, place, and potentials of scholarships today.

Jazz Resurgent

2021 ◽  
pp. 507-524
Author(s):  
Ted Gioia
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Emerging Technologies ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Opposite Trend ◽  
Green Book ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Lady Gaga ◽  
Musical Excellence

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, many pundits announced the “death of jazz,” yet recent years have shown the exact opposite trend. Jazz has returned to popular culture, whether one looks to rising stars such as Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings, or to popular artists (Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar) who draw heavily on jazz influences. At the same time, jazz started showing up in hit movies such as La La Land, Green Book, and Whiplash, where it was mythologized as a touchstone of musical excellence and artistry. All these trends served to reinvigorate a jazz tradition that many had written off as moribund, creating a powerful convergence of historic styles and new commercial styles. This chapter also explores the jazz vocal scene of recent decades, and its contribution to this broadening of the genre’s appeal. Other artists discussed include Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, and Bobby McFerrin. The chapter concludes with an assessment of jazz’s relationship with the emerging technologies of the digital age.

scholarly journals Hiding Traces of Status Seeking: Contradictory Tagging Strategies on Instagram

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512093731
Author(s):  
Floor Fiers
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Random Sample ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Status Seeking ◽  
Twenty First Century

The prevailing presence of social media in the twenty-first century has changed processes of self-presentation. This study questions how Instagram users employ the platform’s tagging features to claim and seek status. Content analysis on a random sample of 787 posts carrying the hashtag “instagood” revealed that they utilize the tagging affordances to make their audience aware of their capital. In addition to displaying their capital through tags, however, users employ hashtags and account tags to increase their visibility on the platform. Interestingly, analysis shows the prevalence of attempts to conceal these obvious paratextual status-seeking strategies. Over half of the Instagram posts in the sample showed traces of the creators taking active steps to hide their use of like-hunter hashtags, through which users explicitly ask other Instagrammers for likes and follows. This finding builds upon Marwick’s concept of aspirational production: The perfecting of one’s online presentation does not only happen by producing a high-status image, but also by concealing the “inauthentic” nature of this production. Furthermore, the fact that traces of obvious status seeking can be found online implies that the lines between Goffman’s front- and backstage are blurred in the digital age.

The Norwegian National Library: Poised on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-131
Author(s):  
Jon Bing
Keyword(s):  
Digital Library ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Digital Form ◽  
National Library ◽  
University Library ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Information Providers ◽  
Extended Notion

The article celebrates the reopening of the National Library of Norway in its refurbished Oslo building in the centenary year of Norway's independence. It describes the evolution of the Library and its separation from Oslo University Library. The deposit function of the Library is centred on its Mo i Rana branch, which now stores material in digital form as well as in traditional formats. The author considers the place of the Library in the wider Norwegian library scene, where the National Library can play a coordinating role. The Norwegian Digital Library, for example, involves other libraries, information providers and system vendors, as well as the National Library. In the digital age, what the National Librarian of Norway describes as the ‘extended notion of texts’ means that society is documented not only by conventional texts, but by sound and images, broadcasts and performances. Preserving these ‘texts’ and making them available to a wide range of users is a challenge of the twenty-first century that the National Library is happy to accept.

THE WORLD IN THE DIGITAL AGE: POLITICS, LAW, AND ECONOMICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksey Mamychev ◽  
Daria Petrova ◽  
Yana Gaivoronskaya ◽  
Olga Miroshnichenko ◽  
Yulia Karimova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Law And Economics ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Digital Economy ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Legal Policy ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century

The monograph covers various areas of influence of digitalization on the legal, economic and political system of society. Fundamental, sectoral, and interdisciplinary aspects of the transformation of law in the digital age are considered. Special attention is paid to the interaction of law, politics and the digital economy, which is reflected in the legal policy of modern Russia. The content of the work allows us to show the multidimensional nature of digitalization. The monograph will be useful for legal scholars, legal practitioners, students and postgraduates studying in the field of "Jurisprudence", as well as all those interested in the digital transformation of society, law and the state.

Media ecology in the twenty-first century

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric McLuhan
Keyword(s):  
Media Ecology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
The West ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Active Intervention ◽  
The Media ◽  
New Form ◽  
Twenty First Century

With an introduction by Andrew McLuhanIn this address, Eric McLuhan discusses the origins and importance of taking an ecological approach to studying media. In regard to the current media environment, he argues that the West is currently experiencing a new renaissance, and a new form of nomadism. The address concludes with a call for education geared towards active intervention in the media environment.

scholarly journals Shelving Books?: Representations of the Library in Contemporary Texts

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27
Author(s):  
Margaret-Anne Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Material Space ◽  
National Literatures

Established for over two decades, archive studies have often conflated the archive and the library, leading to the theoretical neglect of the latter. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, critical and historical works on the library have been on the increase. At the same time, a body of fictional texts offers a very specific representation of the library in the digital age. The literary libraries discussed here – a sample published post-2000, drawn from seven national literatures and representing various genres – champion the codex and construct the library as an affective, nostalgic material space. Acknowledging the ubiquity of digitization whilst nonetheless eschewing a simplistic material/ digital binary, they rework familiar tropes such as the universal library, the library destroyed, and the library as a symbol or repository of cultural memory. Finally, these are spaces of (gendered) familial psychic dramas, tracing oedipal conflicts, family romances and troubled transgenerational legacies.

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