The cultural industry of parent-blame

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Reality Television ◽  
Family Intervention ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
New Labour ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Industry ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Television Programme ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter examines how discourses of parental deficit became mobilised and circulated by media producers and across political and public debate in the first years of the twenty-first century. It also shows how these discourses recycle existing figures of parent-blame and manufacture new ones in a televisual form. It considers the rise of a lucrative cultural industry of parent-blame, driven by the media and taken up strategically in subsequent policy debates about family intervention, that hit its peak at the mid-point of the New Labour government's political tenure, and describes the new vocabularies of meritocracy and aspiration that formed the backbone of the New Labour project. Citing the case of Supernanny, a reality television programme that promised to transform the lives of families struggling with parenting, the chapter shows how the media economy of popular parent pedagogy brought the television spectacle of ‘families in crisis’ into the nation's living rooms.

Contemporary Ghosts

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
Murray Leeder
Keyword(s):  
Reality Television ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Western Media

This chapter tracks the dominant trends of the twenty-first-century ghost. It argues that Sadako, the techno-onryō from Ringu (1998), has proved a model that would spread in countless ways, cementing the idea of the media ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue. It also discusses the availability of the ghost not only to popular media like reality television and to middlebrow horror films such as those of Blumhouse Pictures, but also to ‘legitimate’ art, like Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2007) and works by films like film auteurs like ApichatpongWeerasethakul, Guillermo del Toro and Guy Maddin. It proposes that many of these works provide their own critical commentary on the ghost story itself.

Human Rights and 21st Century Challenges

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
World Population ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Relative Share ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century

The world faces significant and interrelated challenges in the twenty-first century which threaten human rights in a number of ways. This book examines the relationship between human rights and three of the largest challenges of the twenty-first century: conflict and security, environment, and poverty. Technological advances in fighting wars have led to the introduction of new weapons which threaten to transform the very nature of conflict. In addition, states confront threats to security which arise from a new set of international actors not clearly defined and which operate globally. Climate change, with its potentially catastrophic impacts, features a combination of characteristics which are novel for humanity. The problem is caused by the sum of innumerable individual actions across the globe and over time, and similarly involves risks that are geographically and temporally diffuse. In recent decades, the challenges involved in addressing global and national poverty have also changed. For example, the relative share of the poor in the world population has decreased significantly while the relative share of the poor who live in countries with significant domestic capacity has increased strongly. Overcoming these global and interlocking threats constitutes this century’s core political and moral task. This book examines how these challenges may be addressed using a human rights framework. It considers how these challenges threaten human rights and seeks to reassess our understanding of human rights in the light of these challenges. The analysis considers both foundational and applied questions. The approach is multidisciplinary and contributors include some of the most prominent lawyers, philosophers, and political theorists in the debate. The authors not only include leading academics but also those who have played important roles in shaping the policy debates on these questions. Each Part includes contributions by those who have served as Special Rapporteurs within the United Nations human rights system on the challenges under consideration.

Unknown Publics

2018 ◽  
pp. 207-214
Author(s):  
Susan Zieger
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Information Storage ◽  
First Century ◽  
Media Consumption ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century

The conclusion reviews the five central components through which the book has posited connections between nineteenth- and twenty-first century habits of media consumption. It shows how “addiction” still serves as a descriptive metaphor for the consumption of information, now networked and constantly refreshing itself; how the fantasy of infinite mental retention still governs fantasies of mastering information overload; how playback has only continued to conflate memory with information storage, resulting in programmable subjects and information as a super-commodity; how digital media reproduction and circulation ironically still creates the aura of mass live events; and finally, how the media consumer’s dilemma of establishing authenticity has only become more aggravated in an era of self-branding on social media.

Christian Prigent's Mimological Machine: Le Monde est marrant and La Vie moderne

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Peter Poiana
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Vocal Imitation ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century

Christian Prigent views his writing as an effort to expose the 'parler faux' of ambient discourses and condemn the impoverishment of language and ideas by the media industry, in particular. Prigent's later texts work on the principle that the acceleration, intensification and gratification that characterize an image-driven society result in the disempowerment of its citizens. Prigent responds with a critical poetics that this study endeavours to describe with reference to two texts: Le Monde est marrant (2008) and La Vie moderne (2012). These texts devise techniques of vocal imitation (which, adopting Gérard Genette's neologism, we call mimological) as a means of addressing those techniques by which the media industry creates credulous and consumption-ready subjects. This critical poetics constitutes a system, it is argued, because it deploys a limited set of combinations as a way of figuring an aberration of an existing system. Prigent's mimetic system demonstrates how poetry offers a means of grasping the harsh realities of the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals “Destabilized Perception”

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-326
Author(s):  
Rob Coley
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Audiovisual Media ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Media ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Aesthetic

The formerly dissident status of the essay film has, in recent years, been exchanged for a great deal of favorable attention both inside and outside academia. In the more overly moralistic commentary on the form, the contemporary essay film is submitted as a tactical response to a surfeit of audiovisual media, to an era in which most of us have become both consumers and producers of a digital deluge. The work of Adam Curtis is notably absent from these ongoing debates. Yet Curtis is far from an underground figure—he has been making essayistic films for the BBC for more than twenty years and was the first to produce work directly for the iPlayer platform. Using archival images to examine the present, his films produce counterintuitive connections and abrupt collisions that supplant the authority of narrative causality for a precarious network of associations and linkages. This article treats Curtis’s recent body of work diagnostically. It argues that, quite apart from any promise of escape or deliverance, the aesthetic form of his work actively inhabits the rhythms and vectors of contemporary media. For Curtis, the media-technological conditions of the twenty-first century provoke a crisis that is both political and epistemological, one in which sensemaking can no longer claim to take place at a distance from the infrastructure that mediates such processes but is instead thoroughly and inescapably immanent to it, a situation that prevents contact with the outside. His films are about what he calls “destabilized perception,” but importantly they are also a function of this condition, one that in turn demands a shift in how we conceive the essay film in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals The legacy of al-Farabi and Abay in the media rhetoric of the twenty-first century

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-74
Author(s):  
Л.И. Абдуллина ◽  
С.Т. Касенов
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century

Feeding Detroit’s Rise

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Kinney
Keyword(s):  
Creative Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Media Portrayals ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The City ◽  
Whole Foods

In the fifth chapter, the book examines the story of Detroit on the rise—the ultimate conclusion of most of the disparate narratives surrounding the city. The fascination with Detroit in the twenty-first century is due not to its ruin but to the evidence of Detroit as possible. This chapter looks explicitly at the narrative of the rise of a “new Detroit.” This rise is best seen in media portrayals of as the city’s “hungry” creative class, the billion-dollar investment of Dan Gilbert, and the media frenzy around the opening of a Whole Foods Market in Detroit and the company’s use of that store as a national platform against “racism and elitism.”

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