Media Representations

Author(s):  
Ghazala Jamil

Chapter five is an attempt to further develop the discussion on discursive subalterneity of Muslims. Although media practices generally and Bollywood cinema specifically have been an arena for analysis pertaining to stereotyping of Muslims, I claim in this chapter that this analysis itself has got mired in stereotypical ways of seeing and analysing. Focusing on representation as a process of essentializing identity I connect this to Lefebvre’s ‘representation of space’ focusing on dominant discourses in news media and Bollywood cinema regarding Muslim localities. In second section of this chapter the role of news media in spawning the representation of Muslims and Muslim spaces as dens of criminal and terrorist activities. The reportage of various police action against Muslim publics and persons (such as the extra-judicial killings of terror suspects in Batla House) are discussed to discern the earlier noted trend of representation of space such that segregation is provided a discursive reinforcement.

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 552-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Hjorth ◽  
Kyoung-hwa Yonnie Kim

In news media of late, much has been touted about the agency of social and mobile media in the events of political uprising or at times of natural disasters and crisis management. While these events did not become events because of social media, the media did affect how we experienced the situation. This leads us to ask, Just how helpful are social mobile media in maintaining relationships in times of crisis management, and how, if at all, do they depart from previous media and methods? Drawing from case studies conducted with participants living in Tokyo at the time of the horrific events surrounding Japan’s earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011 (called 3.11), this article reflects on the role of new media in helping, if at all, people manage crisis and grief. The authors argue that while social media provide new channels for affective cultures in the form of mobile intimacy, they also extend on earlier media practices and rituals such as the postcard.


Author(s):  
Marko Đorđević

This work aims to question the main contradictions of the migrant crisis by media coverage. The sheer amount of images and discourses produced to service the everyday political jargons is met by a Marxist critique of the political economy behind the mass displacement. Close attention is given to the economic and geopolitical conjunctures that preceded the events of 2015 and the earlier history of labor power allocation. This lays the groundwork for a more specific context, i.e. the role of the Balkans in this crisis and the ideology of its media. The problems dealt with are: the coining of the term “The Balkan Route”, the economic and political conjuncture that determines the contemporary Serbian media sphere and the several key representations of the migrant crisis, primarily in social and news media. The conclusion summarizes the main points of the article. Critical assessments are made on potential field research possibilities that could further strengthen the arguments developed in the course of the text. Article received: December 7, 2018; Article accepted: January 23, 2019; Published online: April 15, 2019; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Đorđević, Marko. "A Marxist Analysis of Key Media Representations of the Migrant Crisis in Serbian Media." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 18 (2019): 141−149. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i18.291


Author(s):  
Julia Partheymüller

It is widely believed that the news media have a strong influence on defining what are the most important problems facing the country during election campaigns. Yet, recent research has pointed to several factors that may limit the mass media’s agenda-setting power. Linking news media content to rolling cross-section survey data, the chapter examines the role of three such limiting factors in the context of the 2009 and the 2013 German federal elections: (1) rapid memory decay on the part of voters, (2) advertising by the political parties, and (3) the fragmentation of the media landscape. The results show that the mass media may serve as a powerful agenda setter, but also demonstrate that the media’s influence is strictly limited by voters’ cognitive capacities and the structure of the campaign information environment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096701062199722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nivi Manchanda ◽  
Chris Rossdale

The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roei Davidson

Abstract This study considers cultural crowdfunding as a heterogeneous system that allows money and attention to flow from backers to founders of cultural projects in diverse cultural sectors and focuses on the nature of the standards governing it. It analyzes Kickstarter’s corporate blog since the platform’s launch and finds indications that social media practices are increasingly naturalized as integral to crowdfunding and that social media architectures are increasingly adopted by the crowdfunding platform. This, I argue, has a potential exclusionary effect. At the same time, the analysis finds evidence that Kickstarter is striving to develop an independent capacity to set aesthetic standards, which might moderate that effect and help constitute crowdfunding as an alternative decentralized arena for the funding of culture.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2110064
Author(s):  
Caroline Fisher ◽  
Sora Park ◽  
Jee Young Lee ◽  
Kate Holland ◽  
Emma John

Social isolation has become a growing issue, particularly among older citizens. The ‘digital divide’ has been identified as one of the contributing factors leaving many older citizens behind. While increasing digital literacy among seniors has been identified as one of the remedies, less attention has been paid to the role of news media on the wellbeing and connectedness of older people. Through the lens of the uses and gratifications theory, this article reports on the findings of a survey of 562 news consumers aged 50 years and above who live in Canberra, the capital city of Australia. The analysis highlights the important role of news in reducing feelings of social isolation, particularly for those who spend more time alone and older people with cognitive impairment. Older participants who had difficulty concentrating and learning new tasks were also more dependent on news. We suggest this is due to the habitual, predictable and concise nature of news. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of news in the wellbeing of older people and point to the need for policymakers and those in the aged care sector to ensure access to news for older citizens to improve the quality of life.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205015792098482
Author(s):  
Linus Andersson ◽  
Ebba Sundin

This article addresses the phenomenon of mobile bystanders who use their smartphones to film or take photographs at accident scenes, instead of offering their help to people in need or to assist medical units. This phenomenon has been extensively discussed in Swedish news media in recent years since it has been described as a growing problem for first responders, such as paramedics, police, and firefighters. This article aims to identify theoretical perspectives that are relevant for analyzing mobile media practices and discuss the ethical implications of these perspectives. Our purpose is twofold: we want to develop a theoretical framework for critically approaching mobile media practices, and we want to contribute to discussions concerning well-being in a time marked by mediatization and digitalization. In this pursuit, we combine theory from social psychology about how people behave at traumatic scenes with discussions about witnessing in and through media, as developed in media and communication studies. Both perspectives offer various implications for normative inquiry, and in our discussion, we argue that mobile bystanders must be considered simultaneously as transgressors of social norms and as emphatic witnesses behaving in accordance with the digital media age. The article ends with a discussion regarding the implications for further research.


Author(s):  
Lisa Bode

On July 14, 2019, a 3-minute 36-second video titled “Keanu Reeves Stops A ROBBERY!” was released on YouTube visual effects (VFX) channel, Corridor. The video’s click-bait title ensured it was quickly shared by users across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Comments on the video suggest that the vast majority of viewers categorised it as fiction. What seemed less universally recognised, though, was that the performer in the clip was not Keanu Reeves himself. It was voice actor and stuntman Reuben Langdon, and his face was digitally replaced with that of Reeves, through the use of an AI generated deepfake, an open access application, Faceswap, and compositing in Adobe After Effects. This article uses Corridor’s deepfake Keanu video (hereafter shorted to CDFK) as a case study which allows the fleshing out of an, as yet, under-researched area of deepfakes: the role of framing contexts in shaping how viewers evaluate, categorise, make sense of and discuss these images. This research draws on visual effects scholarship, celebrity studies, cognitive film studies, social media theory, digital rhetoric, and discourse analysis. It is intended to serve as a starting point of a larger study that will eventually map types of online manipulated media creation on a continuum from the professional to the vernacular, across different platforms, and attending to their aesthetic, ethical, cultural and reception dimensions. The focus on context (platform, creator channel, and comments) also reveals the emergence of an industrial and aesthetic category of visual effects, which I call here “platform VFX,” a key term that provides us with more nuanced frames for illuminating and analysing a range of manipulated media practices as VFX software becomes ever more accessible and lends itself to more vernacular uses, such as we see with various face swap apps


2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110298
Author(s):  
Ida Willig

Media agencies have become one of the key actors in the contemporary media industry: by channelling marketing budgets to some media and some platforms and not to others, media agencies play an important role in creating the digital media infrastructure and laying the tracks of the public sphere. Yet we know very little about these commercial middlemen between advertisers and audiences, what they do, and how we should understand their role in the digital media ecology. This article discusses the role of media agencies in relation to platformization with a focus on the news media sector. Based on interviews, publicly available material and trade journals, the article depicts an industry deeply engaged in digitizing, tracking and commodifying media audiences, while at the same time aware of ethical challenges of the digital media infrastructure. This leads to a call for more political attention and critical research on the democratic implications of the new value chains between platforms, advertisers, audiences, media agencies and news media as well as the many tech companies providing derived digital services and products.


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