Film as Identity Exploration: A Multimodal Analysis of Youth-Produced Films

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (9) ◽  
pp. 2352-2378
Author(s):  
Erica Rosenfeld Halverson
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Analytic Framework

Background/Context Researchers have begun to document and understand the work youth do as they compose in multiple media including video games, online virtual worlds, participatory fan cultural practices, and in the digital media arts. However, we lack mechanisms for analyzing the products, especially when it comes to understanding the relationship between storytelling and identity. Objective In this article, I bring together prior research on youth-produced media, social semiotic analysis frameworks for analyzing these products and the formal analysis of films to construct an analytic framework for understanding youth-produced films as spaces for identity construction and representation. Research design The research reported on in this article is the design and illustration of an analytic framework for understanding how youth construct and represent their identities through the films they make. The framework design begins with Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) work on the analysis of visual design as a set of semiotic resources for describing how we make meaning with multimodal texts. However, this work does little to depict how the specific tools of film both cinematic (e.g., editing, cinematography) and filmic (music, action) (Burn & Parker, 2003) are used to construct and communicate identities. Therefore, I turn to film theory to develop a coding scheme that can assist in the meaningful interpretation of the phases and transitions of youth-produced films. I then illustrate this framework in action by analyzing one youth-produced film, Rules of Engagement, as a multimodal product of identity. Conclusions/Recommendations This analysis demonstrates how films like Rules of Engagement display the construction of a viable social identity primarily through the interactions among filmic elements. Specifically it is in the transition spaces between phases of the film where youth actively insert their understanding of how to represent complex portraits of how they see themselves, how others see them, and how they fit into their communities. Analyzing the products of a rich, complex literacy practice is a critical way to make sense of how youth engage with issues of identity through the media they create. This is especially important for youth who feel marginalized in mainstream institutions and do not have opportunities to explore a positive sense of self in traditional institutional contexts. Understanding how the construction of multimodal representation supports identity development processes can help us to bring these new media literacy practices to youth who are most in need of alternative mechanisms for engaging in positive identity work.

scholarly journals ‘Emergent’ media and public communication: Understanding the changing mediascape

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Macnamara
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Communication Practice ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
The Public Sphere

Scholars and practitioners are widely agreed that media and public communication are undergoing significant change deserving of close attention and, along with widespread popular media discussion, a body of scholarly research on the changing 21st century mediascape is emerging. The term ‘new media’ is widely used in the literature to describe interactive online communication forms including blogs, social networks, photo and video sharing sites, microblogging, and virtual worlds enabled by what is referred to as Web 2.0. A number of studies cite so-called ‘new media’ as the ‘fourth media revolution’ and make effusive predictions concerning their effects ranging from the “end of journalism” to the transformation of the public sphere through the birth of e-democracy. This paper critically reviews changes taking place and provides an overview of implications for public communication. It challenges the term ‘new media’, arguing that it is inaccurate and unhistorical, and attempts to look beyond hype and ‘cyberbole’ that often distort discussion to identify substantive changes taking place. It argues these are located in social and cultural practices rather than technology and explores four foundational shifts which have significant implications for media and all areas of public communication practice including journalism, political communication, advertising, public relations and organisational communication.

Theories of the Digital Soundtrack

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Buhler
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Considerable Resistance

Chapter 9 considers the soundtrack in the age of digital media. It argues that the conception of digital and “new” media in terms of “convergence” has emphasized a shift in both aural and visual dimensions toward a general purpose rendering fixed on producing distinct feelings and sensations and away from a reproduction and screening of real events. This turn away from semiotic indexicality as a grounding for film has met considerable resistance, which has revealed the extent to which film theory remains bound to a conception of film as a recording of reality, however much film theory also understands film as a representation and so recognizes whatever reality it represents as inherently and necessarily constructed. This chapter concludes by sketching out some theoretical implications of the soundtrack in the context of digital media.

Priscilla Wordsworth’s Pocketbook Diaries and Interfaces of Subjectivity

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (300) ◽  
pp. 508-527
Author(s):  
Lindsey Eckert
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Book History ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Cultural Expectations ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Day By Day

Abstract Pocketbook diaries were one of the most pervasive platforms for autobiography in Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The relative standardization of the genre’s bibliographic and textual elements encouraged users to record their lives in discrete day-by-day blocks and their finances in neat columns. As culturally ubiquitous interfaces, pocketbooks had the potential to shape the records that users wrote in them as well as, this article argues, users themselves. I draw on the case study of Priscilla Wordsworth’s pocketbooks from the early 1800s, contextualizing them alongside other largely unknown female diarists from the period. I show that, in addition to the content of diary entries, the way Wordsworth and others interact with the material and cultural expectations of their pocketbooks reveals much about pocketbooks’ affordances and their potential to influence their users. This article suggests that the interfaces that people used might affect not only their interactions with a particular interface—such as a pocketbook—but also their sense of self. Employing theories of interface design often applied to digital media, this article offers connections between old and new media and within scholarship on media studies, book history, and material culture.

New Media and the Dalit Counter-public Sphere

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arvind Kumar Thakur
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Internet Activism ◽  
Web Forums ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Caste Groups ◽  
Technological Affordances

The recent surge of online mobilization among Dalits, who belong to India’s most oppressed caste groups, signals a remarkable trend in Internet activism and political engagement. Analyzing Dalit mobilization online, this article argues that technological affordances and distinct cultural practices associated with digital media have enabled certain sections of Dalits to resist the dominant caste narrative, thereby contributing to mobilization against caste-based discrimination. However, multiple “counter-narratives” within the subaltern digital sphere and hybrid media systems have placed limitations on unified action, signaling the need to address mediated factional positions and caste Hindu narratives online in efforts to strengthen the Dalit social movement. This article forwards the argument by examining the expansion of web forums organized by Dalits, with a closer focus on a nationwide online agitation that drew reference to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.

On the Internet, Everyone Knows You're a Dog.A Review Essay

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-1007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilana Gershon
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Internet Research ◽  
Phone Call ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Virtual Spaces

Ethnographers of new media face a challenge nowadays because they write about technologies people love to discuss and about which journalists love to write. They often find themselves writing against myths about digital media users that other digital media scholars, journalists, and even people interviewed hold in common. In the first decade of Internet research, skeptical scholars often wrote against assumptions about how social practices in virtual spaces differed from offline practices (see Dibbell 1998; Turkle 1995; Stone 1996). They were critiquing many of the premises that accompany an understanding of the virtual as “spaces or placesapart fromthe rest of social life” (Miller, Slater, and Suchman 2004: 77) in which people were supposedly experimenting with new forms of sociality and identity. While these debates continue to haunt more recent ethnographies of virtual worlds (see Boellstorff 2008; Nardi 2010; Taylor 2006), critical scholars of new media are now also addressing commonly held assumptions about the Internet when its use is explicitly understoodnotto be part of a sociality distinct from offline life. Indeed, the Internet now is taken to be a collection of interfaces for gathering information and conversing with other people—web-based communication can be as integrated into daily life as a phone call or reading a book (for an ethnographic study, see Gershon 2010). This transition from taking the Internet to be virtual to seeing the Internet as a collection of channels of communication has brought with it a new set of widespread presuppositions that ethnography is particularly adept at critiquing.

Digital and Technical Developments in the Amblyopia Therapy

2020 ◽  
Vol 237 (10) ◽  
pp. 1172-1176
Author(s):  
Charlotte Schramm ◽  
Yaroslava Wenner
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Technical Progress ◽  
Therapy Monitoring ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Technical Developments ◽  
The Future

AbstractThe digital media becomes more and more common in our everyday lives. So it is not surprising that technical progress is also leaving its mark on amblyopia therapy. New media and technologies can be used both in the actual amblyopia therapy or therapy monitoring. In particular in this review shutter glasses, therapy monitoring and analysis using microsensors and newer video programs for amblyopia therapy are presented and critically discussed. Currently, these cannot yet replace classic amblyopia therapy. They represent interesting options that will occupy us even more in the future.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

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....

Making the Most of the Internet for Failure Analysis

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan J. Bodoh
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Failure Analysis ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Optimization Theory ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Digital Medium ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
Digital Production ◽  
Computer Monitors ◽  
And Storage

Abstract The growth of the Internet over the past four years provides the failure analyst with a new media for communicating his results. The new digital media offers significant advantages over analog publication of results. Digital production, distribution and storage of failure analysis results reduces copying costs and paper storage, and enhances the ability to search through old analyses. When published digitally, results reach the customer within minutes of finishing the report. Furthermore, images on the computer screen can be of significantly higher quality than images reproduced on paper. The advantages of the digital medium come at a price, however. Research has shown that employees can become less productive when replacing their analog methodologies with digital methodologies. Today's feature-filled software encourages "futzing," one cause of the productivity reduction. In addition, the quality of the images and ability to search the text can be compromised if the software or the analyst does not understand this digital medium. This paper describes a system that offers complete digital production, distribution and storage of failure analysis reports on the Internet. By design, this system reduces the futzing factor, enhances the ability to search the reports, and optimizes images for display on computer monitors. Because photographic images are so important to failure analysis, some digital image optimization theory is reviewed.

Stories from Ultrasonographic Abyss

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matylda Szewczyk
Keyword(s):  
Prenatal Care ◽  
New Media ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Prenatal Ultrasound ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Medical Imagery ◽  
The Future ◽  
Different Cultures

The article presents a reflection on the experience of prenatal ultrasound and on the nature of cultural beings, it creates. It exploits chosen ethnographic and cultural descriptions of prenatal ultrasounds in different cultures, as well as documentary and artistic reflections on medical imagery and new media technologies. It discusses different ways of defining the role of ultrasound in prenatal care and the cultural contexts build around it. Although the prenatal ultrasounds often function in the space of enormous tensions (although they are also supposed to give pleasure), it seems they will accompany us further in the future. It is worthwhile to find some new ways of describing them and to invent new cultural practices to deal with them.

An Author as Literature. (Visual) Autofiction of Dorota Masłowska

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Michalak
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
The Creation

Using the promotional meeting of Dorota Masłowska’s book "More than you can eat" (16 April 2015 in the Bar Studio, Warsaw), as a case study, the article examines the role author plays in it and try to show how the author itself can become the literature. As a result of the transformation of cultural practices associated with the new media, the author’s figure has gained much greater visibility which consequently changed its meaning. In the article, Masłowska’s artistic strategy is compared to visual autofiction in conceptual art and interpreted through the role of the performance and visual representations in the creation of the image or author’s brand.

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