The walking dead and killing state: Zombification and the normalization of police violence

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 506-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis Linnemann ◽  
Tyler Wall ◽  
Edward Green
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Media ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Walking Dead

In May 2012, police shot Rudy Eugene, a black man of Haitian decent, dead as he ‘ate the face’ of a homeless man on a deserted Miami causeway. Because of the strange gruesomeness of the attack and other similar violent acts, some in the media declared that a terrifying pandemic—the ‘zombie apocalypse’—had arrived. While this particular case may be yet another instance of mediated panic, we suggest cries of ‘zombies’ and ‘cannibals’ should not be dismissed as simply sensationalistic, irresponsible journalism. Rather, we see this case as a powerful example of the cultural production of a spectral sort of monstrosity that obscures and justifies police violence and state killing. As such, we argue that all of the contemporary ‘zombie talk’, usefully reveals how the logics of security, state violence and punitive disposability are imagined and reproduced as livable parts of late-capitalism.

Monster Stories/Storied Monsters

2019 ◽  
pp. 195-214
Author(s):  
Adam Charles Hart
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Walking Dead

This final chapter continues the discussion of monsters by engaging with the writings of Robin Wood, who theorized monsters as fundamentally ambivalent figures who allow us to envision alternatives to the restrictive social order. It then realigns Wood’s terms to show how the recent horror genre has been structured around questions not simply of monstrosity, but of asserting or maintaining humanity—and recognizing the humanity of others—in the face of monstrosity and other inconceivable horrors. This is the explicit theme of The Walking Dead TV series, as is emphasized in its first video game adaptation, The Walking Dead: The Game (2012), but is there at the beginnings of the modern genre in the 1960s with a film like Night of the Living Dead (1968). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how understandings of “monstrosity” and “humanity” are redefined around questions of morality with two high-profile, integrated horror films, Get Out (2017) and The Shape of Water (2017).

Spatial Storytelling in the Transmedial Storyworld of The Walking Dead Franchises

Tekstualia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (58) ◽  
pp. 35-54
Author(s):  
Mirko Lino
Keyword(s):  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
Media System ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Cultural Artefact ◽  
Working Together ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Media Narratives ◽  
Integrated Media ◽  
Walking Dead

Zombies are conceivable as cultural artefact that follow and embody the evolution of media narratives. They have migrated from the margins of a media system (the niche of the horror cinema genre) to the center of media convergence practices, which could be summarized in the crossmedia dissemination of its key features and the construction of a transmedia storytelling for its fi ctions. Crossmedia dissemination and transmedia storytelling seem to have become two of the most dominant logical elements of contemporary entertainment; they indicate the power of the narrative to spill over the media boundaries in order to arrange a story through media ubiquity and a network of integrated media. To demonstrate this affi rmation, the following analysis will focus on the transformation both cultural, medial and formal of zombie fi ction, by considering as a case study the infamous comic novel (2003–) and TV serial The Walking Dead (2010–). The analysis will also be carried out into the ways they engage the spectator within a storyworld sustained by different media sharing and working together to consolidate a narrative system via fi ctional and – as we shall see – „real” spatialities.

scholarly journals Media Freedom and the Escalation of State Violence

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110202
Author(s):  
Sabine C Carey ◽  
Belén González ◽  
Neil J Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Media Freedom ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Political Costs ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Media ◽  
Information Advantage ◽  
The Government

When governments face severe political violence, they regularly respond with violence. Yet not all governments escalate repression under such circumstances. We argue that to understand the escalation of state violence, we need to pay attention to the potential costs leaders might face in doing so. We expect that the decision to escalate state violence is conditional on being faced with heightened threats and on possessing an information advantage that mitigates the expected cost of increasing state violence. In an environment where media freedom is constrained, leaders can deny or reframe an escalation of violations and so expect to reduce potential domestic and international costs attached to that decision. Using a global dataset from 1981 to 2006, we show that state violence is likely to escalate in response to increasing violent threats to the state when media freedom is curtailed – but not when the media are free from state intervention. A media environment that the government knows is free to sound the alarm is associated with higher political costs of repression and effectively reduces the risk of escalating state violence, even in the face of mounting armed threats.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

scholarly journals The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110213
Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy ◽  
Annika Pinch ◽  
Shruti Sannon ◽  
Megan Sawey
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ecological Model ◽  
Creative Economy ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Professional Success ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Media ◽  
Depth Interviews

While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of online visibility—likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares—have been indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers’ pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators on a range of social media platforms—Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter—we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with—and departures from—the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, with a focus on the guiding logic of platform capitalism.

Innovationsmotor Medientechnik – Von der Schreibmaschine zur «Mittleren Datentechnik» bei der Siemag Feinmechanische Werke (1950 bis 1969)

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-117
Author(s):  
Christian Henrich-Franke
Keyword(s):  
Data Processing ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
Family Enterprise ◽  
The Us ◽  
Innovative Products ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Media ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract The second half of the 20th century is commonly considered to be a time in which German companies lost their innovative strength, while promising new technologies presented an enormous potential for innovation in the US. The fact that German companies were quite successful in the production of medium data technology and had considerable influence on the development of electronic data processing was neglected by business and media historians alike until now. The article analyses the Siemag Feinmechanische Werke (Eiserfeld) as one of the most important producers of the predecessors to said medium data technologies in the 1950s and 1960s. Two transformation processes regarding the media – from mechanic to semiconductor and from semiconductor to all-electronic technology – are highlighted in particular. It poses the question of how and why a middling family enterprise such as Siemag was able to rise to being the leading provider for medium data processing office computers despite lacking expertise in the field of electrical engineering while also facing difficult location conditions. The article shows that Siemag successfully turned from its roots in heavy industry towards the production of innovative high technology devices. This development stems from the company’s strategic decisions. As long as their products were not mass-produced, a medium-sized family business like Siemag could hold its own on the market through clever decision-making which relied on flexible specialization, targeted license and patent cooperation as well as innovative products, even in the face of adverse conditions. Only in the second half of the 1960s, as profit margins dropped due to increasing sales figures and office machines had finally transformed into office computers, Siemag was forced to enter cooperation with Philips in order to broaden its spectrum and merge the production site in Eiserfeld into a larger business complex.

Protesting During a Pandemic: Narratives on Risk Taking and Motivation to Participating in the 2020 March on Washington

2021 ◽  
pp. 001112872199933
Author(s):  
Jennifer Cobbina ◽  
Ashleigh LaCourse ◽  
Erika J. Brooke ◽  
Soma Chaudhuri
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Media ◽  
March On Washington

The study elucidates the interplay of COVID-19 and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests to assess motivation and risk taking for protest participation. We draw on protesters’ accounts to examine how police violence influenced the participants decision making to participate in the 2020 March on Washington during a pandemic that exacerbated the risks already in place from protesting the police. We found that protesters’ social position and commitment to the cause provided motivations, along with a zeal to do more especially among White protesters. For Black participants, the images in the media resonated with their own experiences of structural racism from police.

Challenges MNCs Face in Emerging Markets: The Nestlé Experience

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-231
Author(s):  
V.S. Pai
Keyword(s):  
Monosodium Glutamate ◽  
Control Process ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Product Recall ◽  
Quality Control Process ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Media ◽  
World Class ◽  
Lab Test

Maggi was the most popular instant noodles brand in India, which children in particular loved to snack on. The brand had a dominant position until suddenly in mid-2015 it got engulfed in controversy. Several state food regulators found that Maggi contained monosodium glutamate as well as lead well above the prescribed limits. Both these substances were harmful especially for children. When Nestlé India was confronted with lab test results it stuck to its position that they had a world class quality control process in place and that their products were safe for consumption. Finally, the national food regulator FSSAI, ordered a ban on the sale of Maggi including product recall. Consequently, several state governments imposed temporary ban on the sale of Maggi noodles in their respective states. The future of the company suddenly looked very bleak. Nestlé India was slow to respond to this fast unfolding crisis. Further, their responses were very brief and not adequately culture-sensitive. This led to the feeling in several quarters that the company was probably guilty of wrongdoing. To set right things Nestlé's worldwide CEO flew into India to douse the flames of the controversy and draw up an appropriate strategy to bail out the brand. He address the media, put in place a new CEO for Nestlé India and set brand Maggi on the path of recovery. However, Nestlé India was still facing a number of critical issues. What should be done to win over the trust of its customers? How should it recover market share lost to competitors both old rivals and new entrants? What strategy should it develop to succeed with the new products, especially hot heads, launched along with the comeback strategy? Should it change its approach to dealing with government health officials to prevent confrontations in future? How should it shorten the response time and make it effective in the face of a media backed public outcry in future?

Accountability and the Media

2014 ◽  
Vol 652 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-221
Author(s):  
Anton Harber
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Access ◽  
Political Interference ◽  
The Face ◽  
Public Broadcaster ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Poor Management

Two decades of contestation over the nature and extent of transformation in the South African news media have left a sector different in substantive ways from the apartheid inheritance but still patchy in its capacity to fill the democratic ideal. Change came fast to a newly open broadcasting sector, but has faltered in recent years, particularly in a public broadcaster troubled by political interference and poor management. The potential of online media to provide much greater media access has been hindered by the cost of bandwidth. Community media has grown but struggled to survive financially. Print media has been aggressive in investigative exposé, but financial cutbacks have damaged routine daily coverage. In the face of this, the government has turned its attention to the print sector, demanding greater—but vaguely defined—transformation and threatened legislation. This has met strong resistance.

scholarly journals BEING AN ETHICAL LEADER DURING THE APOCALYPSE: LESSONS FROM THE WALKING DEAD TO FACE THE COVID-19 CRISIS

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oihab Allal-Chérif ◽  
María Guijarro-García ◽  
José Carlos Ballester-Miquel ◽  
Agustín Carrilero-Castillo
Keyword(s):  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Ethical Leader ◽  
Walking Dead
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document