Between Cultural Studies and Critical Sociology

1998 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jones
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Critical Sociology ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This essay reviews John Hartley's Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture. The significance of this text is that it provides one of the most developed engagements with the public sphere literatures from an author within cultural studies. The article necessarily addresses the considerable weaknesses in Hartley's understanding of the public sphere case. However, the aim is not to dismiss Popular Reality out of hand. Rather, the critique highlights the methodological and ethical differences between analyses based in cultural studies and ‘critical sociology’. Hartley does partially recognise the significance of recent feminist critiques to the much-needed critical reconstruction of the public sphere thesis. The article acknowledges this insight and then moves to a discussion of the ways in which a reconstructed conception of the public sphere thesis might not only be of value to media studies but also to a settlement between cultural studies and ‘critical sociology’.

Chick Noir: Surveilling Femininity and the Affects of Loss in Gone Girl

Noir Affect ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 197-221
Author(s):  
Pamela Thoma
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Young Women ◽  
First Century ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Surveillance Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
A Site

This chapter explores a surprising shift that has occurred in postfeminist popular culture and more specifically “chick culture” in the wake of the global economic crisis. Chick noir forms itself in opposition to those two standbys of twenty-first-century U.S culture, chick lit and the chick flick. If these latter genres perform a humorous remodelling of romance as the “happy object” around which young women should orient self-making or self-improvement projects for the promise of a good life and future feelings of happiness, chick noir has emerged across popular culture to chronicle widespread economic hardship and social decline under neoliberalism. Chick noir narratives are driven by negative affect and deal in the dark side of relationships, domesticity, and the public sphere for women. The chapter takes Gone Girl as its focus. This chapter pays particular attention to ways in which both texts shine a light on modern surveillance culture to explore the textual production of empathy and coercion and the ways in which these texts imagine femininity as a site of surveillance. What emerges is a form of noir affect that dramatizes the absolute lack of a stable or noncontradictory space for the contemporary female subject.

Vengeance Culture Online

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Public ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Behavior

Vengeance. Payback. Retribution. Just deserts. Evening up the score. Punishment. If there is an ever-replicating and recurring Internet meme, it is one of revenge. Intimate photos are shared online post-relationship and end up picked up by for-profit pornographic websites. Privy information is leaked into private (narrow-cast) or semi-public or public spaces (broadcast) with massive amplifications of messages into the public sphere. Violent attacks and beat-downs are videotaped and shared on video sharing sites. Flash or cyber mobs are brought together to clean-out stores and to exact vengeance on particular businesses. Information and Communication Technology (ICT), with its nexus of pseudo-anonymity, fast dissemination of information, long-term persistence of data, and mass reach, provides multiple affordances for the exacting of vengeance. The popular culture of anonymous hacktivism and cyber-vigilantism further contribute to the sense of the Internet as an ungoverned and extralegal place. Finally, a general imprudence has meant the easy activation of Internet mobs and individuals to harm-causing rumor-sharing and behavior against others—sparked by doubtful claims or loose storytelling. ICT has enabled the spillover of real-world antipathies and dark emotions into virtual spaces, which then slosh back into the real world. This chapter examines the research in the area of vengeance and how such very human impetuses manifest online. Further, this chapter examines the design features of various ICT platforms and socio-technical spaces that may support vengeance-based communications and actions and proposes ways to mitigate some of these dark affordances.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Stereotypes ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Entertainment Culture

This book has explored the foundation and infiltration of racial stereotypes into the American entertainment culture. It has rejected the notion that African Americans should be used as scapegoats for the continuance of black stereotypes in popular culture, arguing that entertainment culture in the United States was largely founded and developed on negative racial imagery created and inserted into the public sphere by whites. While acknowledging that the African American community holds some responsibility for the continual proliferation of racist and sexist stereotypes in the mass media, the book contends that accountability must be placed within a larger cultural and historical context. This epilogue reflects on the continued proliferation of black stereotypes in popular culture, suggesting that it simply represents a continuation of an entertainment tradition that was created intentionally to express the antiblack, prowhite ideology of America's culture. Furthermore, the perceived inferiority of blackness was actively promoted through society's folk culture.

The Public Sphere and Popular Culture

London ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 164-218
Author(s):  
Robert O. Bucholz ◽  
Joseph P. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere
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