Coming to Mind

Author(s):  
Paul Morris ◽  
Susanna Paasonen

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. Pornography aims to capture and mediate some of the intensity and immediacy of sex. This is particularly manifest in the framework of gay bareback pornography that both documents a sexual subculture and caters to a particular porn audience. Structured as a dialogue between a bareback porn producer and a media studies scholar, the essay combines practice-based insights with more conventional scholarly argumentation in a discussion on the modality of pornography, as well as on the transformations that digital media technologies have inflicted in its production and consumption. The chapter addresses the visceral force of pornography while paying particular attention on the centrality of sound in the mediation of intensity.

Author(s):  
Ned O'Gorman

Media technologies are at the heart of media studies in communication and critical cultural studies. They have been studied in too many ways to count and from a wide variety of perspectives. Yet fundamental questions about media technologies—their nature, their scope, their power, and their place within larger social, historical, and cultural processes—are often approached by communication and critical cultural scholars only indirectly. A survey of 20th- and 21st-century approaches to media technologies shows communication and critical cultural scholars working from, for, or against “deterministic” accounts of the relationship between media technologies and social life through “social constructivist” understandings to “networked” accounts where media technologies are seen embedding and embedded within socio-material structures, practices, and processes. Recent work on algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and platforms, together with their manifestations in the products and services of monopolistic corporations like Facebook and Google, has led to new concerns about the totalizing power of digital media over culture and society.


2015 ◽  
Vol 154 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Spurgeon ◽  
Maura Edmond

In 2002, Media International Australia published a special issue on Citizens' Media (no. 103). It profiled new academic work that was reinvigorating research into alternative and community-interest media. Contributions to that issue explored new possibilities for community media policy and argued that critical participatory media provided a crucial link between media studies and broader agendas in political theory and democratic debate. In this issue, we refresh this debate with a collection of articles from new and established researchers that consider the use of critical perspectives in participatory digital culture, which has flourished with the growth of consumer markets for digital media technologies.


Author(s):  
Pamela Wilson ◽  
Joanna Hearne ◽  
Amalia Córdova ◽  
Sabra Thorner

Indigenous media may be defined as forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and circulated by indigenous peoples around the globe as vehicles for communication, including cultural preservation, cultural and artistic expression, political self-determination, and cultural sovereignty. Indigenous media overlap with, and are on a spectrum with, other types of minority-produced media, and quite often they share a kinship regarding many philosophical and political motivations. Indigenous media studies allow us access to the micro-processes of what Roland Robertson has famously called “glocalization”—in this case, the interpenetration of global media technologies with hyperlocal needs, creatively adapted to work within and sustain the local culture rather than to replace it or homogenize it, as some globalization theorists have long feared. The scope of indigenous media studies, a growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship, is quite broad and extensive. We first present some core literature in the emerging field of indigenous media studies, followed by a handful of illustrative case studies. In the second main section, we provide focused attention on works dealing with some specific media genres: film and video production, radio and television broadcasting, and the emerging field of indigenous digital media. Next, we divide the field by geographic and cultural regions and areas, looking at significant work being done in and about indigenous media in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Europe (including Russia and the Arctic North), Africa, and Asia. This Oxford Bibliographies article is partnered with that of the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Native Americans,” and so we refer the reader to that article to avoid excessive duplication. In the spirit of much indigenous mediamaking, this was a collaborative production. The primary author, Pamela Wilson, wishes to thank her main collaborator, Joanna Hearne, who contributed expertise on North American indigenous media, particularly to the section on Indigenous Film and Video. Other significant contributors were Amalia Córdova on Latin America and Sabra Thorner on Australia.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


Author(s):  
Simon Keegan-Phipps ◽  
Lucy Wright

This chapter considers the role of social media (broadly conceived) in the learning experiences of folk musicians in the Anglophone West. The chapter draws on the findings of the Digital Folk project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and begins by summarizing and problematizing the nature of learning as a concept in the folk music context. It briefly explicates the instructive, appropriative, and locative impacts of digital media for folk music learning before exploring in detail two case studies of folk-oriented social media: (1) the phenomenon of abc notation as a transmissive media and (2) the Mudcat Café website as an example of the folk-oriented discussion forum. These case studies are shown to exemplify and illuminate the constructs of traditional transmission and vernacularism as significant influences on the social shaping and deployment of folk-related media technologies. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to understand the musical learning process as a culturally performative act and to recognize online learning mechanisms as sites for the (re)negotiation of musical, cultural, local, and personal identities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-192
Author(s):  
Constantinos Nicolaou ◽  
Maria Matsiola ◽  
Christina Karypidou ◽  
Anna Podara ◽  
Rigas Kotsakis ◽  
...  

In this article, the quality of media studies education through effective teaching utilizing audiovisual media technologies and audiovisual content (audiovisual media communications) to budding journalists as adult learners (18 years and older) is researched, with results primarily intended for application in radio lessons at all educational levels and disciplines (including adult education). Nowadays, audiovisual media communications play an important role in the modern and visual-centric way of our life, while they require all of us to possess multiple-multimodal skills to have a successful professional practice and career, and especially those who study media studies, such as tomorrow’s new journalists. Data were collected after three interactive teachings with emphasis on educational effectiveness in technology-enhanced learning, through a specially designed written questionnaire with a qualitative and quantitative form (evaluation form), as case study experiments that applied qualitative action research with quasi-experiments. The results (a) confirmed (i) the theory of audiovisual media in education, as well as (ii) the genealogical characteristics and habits of budding journalists as highlighted in basic generational theory, something which appears to be in agreement with findings of previous studies and research; and (b) showed that (i) teaching methodology and educational techniques aimed primarily at adult learners in adult education kept the interest and attention of the budding journalists through the use of such specific educational communication tools as audiovisual media technologies, as well as (ii) sound/audio media, as audiovisual content may hold a significant part in a lecture.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482199864
Author(s):  
Kathrin Friedrich ◽  
A S Aurora Hoel

Interventional digital media applications such as robotic surgery, remote-controlled vehicles or wearable tracking devices pose a challenge to media research methodologically as well as conceptually. How do we go about analyzing operational media, where human and non-human agencies intertwine in seemingly inscrutable ways? This article introduces the method of o perational analysis to systematically observe and critically analyze such situated, interventional and multilayered entanglements. Against the background of ongoing efforts to develop operational models for understanding digital media, the method of operational analysis conceptually ascribes to media technologies a real efficacy by approaching them as adaptive mediators. As an operational middle-range approach, it allows to integrate theoretical discussions with considerations of the situatedness, directedness, and task-orientation of operational media. The article presents an analytical toolbox for observing and analyzing digital media operations while simultaneously testing it on a particular application in robotic radiosurgery.


Author(s):  
Pedro Lázaro-Rodríguez

A study of digital news on public libraries is presented through media mapping and a thematic and consumption analysis based on Facebook interactions. A total of 7,629 digital news items published in 2019 have been considered. The media mapping includes the evolution of the volume of news publications, the most prominent media outlets and journalists, and the sections in which most news items are published. For the thematic and consumption analysis, the top 250 news items with the highest number of Facebook interactions are considered, defining 15 thematic categories. The most published topics include: new libraries and spaces, collections, and libraries from a historical perspective. The topics that generate the most interactions are the value of libraries (social, human, and cultural capital), libraries from other countries, and new libraries and spaces. The value and originality of the current study lie in the measurement of the consumption of news and digital media through Facebook interactions. The methods used and results obtained also provide new knowledge for the disciplines of Communication and Media Studies by developing the idea of media mapping for its application to other topics and media in future work, as well as for Librarianship, particularly the information obtained on public libraries. Resumen Se presenta un estudio de noticias digitales sobre bibliotecas públicas en España mediante un mapeo de medios y un análisis temático y de consumo basado en las interacciones en Facebook. Se han considerado 7.629 noticias publicadas en 2019. El mapeo de medios incluye la evolución del volumen de la publicación de noticias, los medios y periodistas más prominentes, y las secciones en las que más se publica. Para el análisis temático y de consumo se consideran las 250 noticias con mayores interacciones en Facebook definiendo 15 categorías temáticas. Los temas sobre los que más se publica son: nuevas bibliotecas y espacios, la colección y las bibliotecas desde la perspectiva de su historia. Los que más interacciones y consumo generan son: el valor de las bibliotecas (capital social, humano y cultural), bibliotecas de otros países y las nuevas bibliotecas y espacios. El valor y la originalidad del estudio consisten en considerar las interacciones en Facebook como medida del consumo de noticias y medios digitales. Los métodos y resultados alcanzados aportan además nuevo conocimiento para dos disciplinas: la comunicación y los medios de comunicación, por el desarrollo de la idea del mapeo de medios que puede aplicarse a otros temas y medios en futuros trabajos; y para la biblioteconomía y la documentación, por la información alcanzada sobre las bibliotecas públicas.


Author(s):  
Thomas Apperley ◽  
Kyle Moore

Haptic media studies emphasize the centrality of touch in the experience of digital media. This article considers how the haptic effect created by relationship between touch, gesture and spatial practice in Pokémon GO cements new possibilities for ambient play and co-presence. The app effectively draws on the genealogies of Nintendo’s handheld Pokémon games, but through the shift to smartphone devices the app creates new forms of ambient play, co-presence and communication that are realized through the publicness of the touch, gesture and comportment which make up the haptic effect of the app. By making the smartphones camera an integral part the game, Pokémon GO suggests the wider relevance of the communicability of feeling and gesture by extending ambient play and co-presence into social media, allowing players to (re)-experience the feeling and touch of Pokémon GO through affective resonance. This suggests that the tactility and touch of the haptic affect are embedded in a matrix of embodied experiences that are revealed through how photography and social media become sites for extending and ambient play.


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