Life Is But a Story: Female pleasure and agency in Beyoncé’s autobiographical film

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Patrick

While the rise of new media has led to a blurring of stars’ public personae and private, intimate lives, the musician, in particular, has long been expected to share their private, authentic self through their music. This is certainly the case with superstar Beyoncé, whose 2016 solo album Lemonade was widely received as a revealing portrait of her marriage to hip hop mogul Jay-Z. Yet Beyoncé has long been playing with the public–private divide as a key part of her star persona. Her decision to limit media interviews has allowed her to maintain unprecedented control of her star image; an image that is now corralled through the texts that she herself circulates via her music, videos and other media. One such notable, yet under-examined text is her 2013 autobiographical film Life Is But a Dream. Both the narrative and the production of the film serve to teach audiences how to read the rest of Beyoncé’s cultural work; as work that is fully controlled by her and intended for women. This pedagogical film disrupts common readings of her image and performances as being in the service of a male gaze, thus opening up new pleasures and potentials for female fans more broadly and Black female fans more specifically. Life Is But a Dream is thus a central, rather than a periphery text in Beyoncé’s star image, complementing and complicating the work she produces across other media formats.

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 268-288
Author(s):  
Dlan Ismail Mawlud ◽  
Hoshyar Mozafar Ali

The development of technology, information technology and various means of communication have a significant impact on public relations activity; especially in government institutions. Many government institutions have invested these means in their management system, in order to facilitate the goals of the institution, and ultimately the interaction between the internal and external public. In this theoretical research, I tried to explain the impact of the new media on public relations in the public administration, based on the views of specialists. The aim of the research is to know the use of the new media of public relations and how in the system of public administration, as well as, Explaining the role it plays in public relations activities of government institutions. Add to this, analyzing the way of how new media and public relations participate in the birth of e-government. In the results, it is clear that the new media has facilitated public relations between the public and other institutions, as it strengthened relations between them


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-207
Author(s):  
Kamen Kirilov

Globalization, commodity parity, consumer sovereignty, super competition and a broad variety of other factors, including the roll-out of the mass media, the emergence and rapid rise of the new media formats and platforms as well as the exchange of information provided by social networks pose new challenges for the advertising industry. Throughout its 150 years of history, since we have known it as a distinct occupation and practice, advertising shows adaptive sustainability quality and greatly enhance its capacity as features, forms, user approaches and distribution channels. Nevertheless, by its very nature, advertising retains the constant of an asymmetric pattern of communication in which, in nowadays environment, the success of effort is expressed in the formula of understanding others and the willingness they to understand us in return. In practice, beyond the abstract of this formula, the effort of advertisers in the process of creating and planning a certain campaign would be greatly facilitated by putting the basic principles of empathy theory. Numerous experiments and studies of this human ability establish working models to achieve effective contact both at the level of personal communication and in the cases of direct and indirect communication with huge quantity and variety of audiences with specific composition. Synthesized and brought to a universal level of application, the basic principle of empathy is the ability, rather cognitive than emotional, to understand and to feel the feelings of others. The achievements in this psychology field currently apply mainly to psychotherapy, clinical psychiatry, pedagogy and political rhetoric theories and ractices. Experience proves that empathic skills help the communicator for faster, easier, more effective and more properly understood and accordingly more efficient as a moderator. This article provokes a new paradigm for advertisers in communicating with the public - about the content, forms and planning of communication activities of the principles of empathy. The goal of the effort is clear - creating more effective communication and achieving a sustainablecompetitive advantage.


Journal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Ford

The Anthropology A-level has achieved a great deal despite its failure to be redeveloped as a qualification. In this article I discuss what this means and why this matters for anthropology education. I show how the Anthropology A level was just one component of a much wider movement to engage new audiences with anthropology. I demonstrate how the A-level brought biological and social anthropology into schools and colleges that had never offered the subject before. The A-level diversified the community of anthropology educators and increased links between local schools, colleges and university anthropology departments. The campaign to widen access to anthropology for students, teachers and the public continues to grow, regardless of the AQA decision.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Uren ◽  
Daniel Wright ◽  
James Scott ◽  
Yulan He ◽  
Hassan Saif

Purpose – This paper aims to address the following challenge: the push to widen participation in public consultation suggests social media as an additional mechanism through which to engage the public. Bioenergy companies need to build their capacity to communicate in these new media and to monitor the attitudes of the public and opposition organizations towards energy development projects. Design/methodology/approach – This short paper outlines the planning issues bioenergy developments face and the main methods of communication used in the public consultation process in the UK. The potential role of social media in communication with stakeholders is identified. The capacity of sentiment analysis to mine opinions from social media is summarised and illustrated using a sample of tweets containing the term “bioenergy”. Findings – Social media have the potential to improve information flows between stakeholders and developers. Sentiment analysis is a viable methodology, which bioenergy companies should be using to measure public opinion in the consultation process. Preliminary analysis shows promising results. Research limitations/implications – Analysis is preliminary and based on a small dataset. It is intended only to illustrate the potential of sentiment analysis and not to draw general conclusions about the bioenergy sector. Social implications – Social media have the potential to open access to the consultation process and help bioenergy companies to make use of waste for energy developments. Originality/value – Opinion mining, though established in marketing and political analysis, is not yet systematically applied as a planning consultation tool. This is a missed opportunity.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (14) ◽  
pp. 4695
Author(s):  
Francisco E. Cabrera ◽  
Pablo Sánchez-Núñez ◽  
Gustavo Vaccaro ◽  
José Ignacio Peláez ◽  
Javier Escudero

The visual design elements and principles (VDEPs) can trigger behavioural changes and emotions in the viewer, but their effects on brain activity are not clearly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationships between brain activity and colour (cold/warm), light (dark/bright), movement (fast/slow), and balance (symmetrical/asymmetrical) VDEPs. We used the public DEAP dataset with the electroencephalogram signals of 32 participants recorded while watching music videos. The characteristic VDEPs for each second of the videos were manually tagged for by a team of two visual communication experts. Results show that variations in the light/value, rhythm/movement, and balance in the music video sequences produce a statistically significant effect over the mean absolute power of the Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma EEG bands (p < 0.05). Furthermore, we trained a Convolutional Neural Network that successfully predicts the VDEP of a video fragment solely by the EEG signal of the viewer with an accuracy ranging from 0.7447 for Colour VDEP to 0.9685 for Movement VDEP. Our work shows evidence that VDEPs affect brain activity in a variety of distinguishable ways and that a deep learning classifier can infer visual VDEP properties of the videos from EEG activity.


Popular Music ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Mitchell

In his article ‘Rock music and politics in Italy’, Umberto Fiori deploys the example of an open-air concert by Genesis in Tirrenia in the province of Pisa, promoted in the summer of 1982 by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as part of its annual Feste dell'Unita, as a summary example of de-politicisation of the consumption and production of rock music in Italy, and the institutionalisation of the oppositional, dissenting aspects of rock music that had previously been so potent there throughout the 1970s. To Fiori, the Genesis concert representedan unmistakeable step forward in the slow process of the ‘normalisation’ of the relationship between rock and politics in Italy. Explosive material until a few years before, rock music in the 1980s seems to have returned to being a commodity like any other, even in Italy. The songs are once again simply songs, the public is the public. The musicians are only interested in their work, and the organisers make their expected profits. If they happen to be a political party, so much the better: they can also profit in terms of public image and perhaps even votes. … Italy now learnt how to institutionalise deviation and transgression. An ‘acceptable’ gap was re-established between fiction and reality, desire and action, and music and political practice. (Fiori 1984, pp. 261–2)


Author(s):  
Pete Bennett ◽  
Julian McDougall

This volume re-imagines the study of English and media in a way that decentralises the text (e.g. romantic poetry or film noir) or media formats/platforms (e.g. broadcast media/new media). Instead, the authors work across boundaries in meaningful thematic contexts that reflect the ways in which people engage with reading, watching, making, and listening in their textual lives. In so doing, the volume recasts both subjects as combined in a more reflexive, critical space for the study of our everyday social and cultural interactions. Across the chapters, the authors present applicable learning and teaching strategies that weave together art works, films, social practices, creativity, 'viral' media, theater, TV, social media, videogames, and literature. The culmination of this range of strategies is a reclaimed 'blue skies' approach to progressive textual education, free from constraining shackles of outdated ideas about textual categories and value that have hitherto alienated generations of students and both English and media from themselves.


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