scholarly journals Hang with Me—Exploring Fandom, Brandom, and the Experiences and Motivations for Value Co-Creation in a Music Fan Community

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Jessica Edlom ◽  
Jenny Karlsson
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Interdisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Music Market

Abstract Active and co-creative audiences are sought, used, tracked and taken for granted in the quest for strong music brands. Fan communities are co-opted to build value for brands and used to foster communication in transmedia marketing campaigns. However, when focusing on audiences and fans’ digital media activities, digital traces and numbers, important questions of motivations, expectations, experiences, morals and power structures are often overlooked. Drawing on a digital ethnographic study and an interdisciplinary perspective, we investigate a fan community of the Swedish artist Robyn, both online and offline. The article contributes to the concepts of fandom and brandom and the notion of value. It also adds to the knowledge about the perspective of fans and fans’ motivations for taking part and co-creating value in a highly commercialised and strategised music market.

scholarly journals Towards nuanced universality: Developing a concept bible for public service online news production

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Jenni Hokka
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Online News ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
General Level ◽  
Audience Segmentation ◽  
News Production ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Social Media Platforms

With the advent of popular social media platforms, news journalism has been forced to re-evaluate its relation to its audience. This applies also for public service media that increasingly have to prove its utility through audience ratings. This ethnographic study explores a particular project, the development of ‘concept bible’ for the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE’s online news; it is an attempt to solve these challenges through new journalistic practices. The study introduces the concept of ‘nuanced universality’, which means that audience groups’ different kinds of needs are taken into account on news production in order to strengthen all people’s ability to be part of society. On a more general level, the article claims that despite its commercial origins, audience segmentation can be transformed into a method that helps revise public service media principles into practices suitable for the digital media environment.

scholarly journals School of Data and Shifting Forms of Political Subjectivity

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-67
Author(s):  
Valentin Dander ◽  
Felicitas Macgilchrist
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Open Data ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Document Analysis ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Skills Acquisition ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Educational Work ◽  
Data Literacy ◽  
Political Theories

AbstractDigital media are increasingly ‘data media’ and data media are involved in various forms of political activism. This chapter reconstructs political subjectivities around figurations of the ‘digital citizen’ within the field of (open) data activism. The authors draw on interviews, document analysis and concepts from modern and post-sovereign political theories of subjectivation to explore the transformative educational work of the Datenschule (School of Data) project, focusing on the intersection between open data and anti-discriminatory activism. The chapter suggests that although School of Data explicitly positions its work as supporting ‘skills’ acquisition (data literacy), indicating a modernist understanding of subjectivity, the project also generates an understanding of political subjectivation as a multiplicity of distributed transformative processes, entangling data literacy with power structures, data-related and organisational practices.

scholarly journals Mediatization, Spatial Coherence and Social Sustainability: The Role of Digital Media Networks in a Swedish Countryside Community

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Jansson
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Spatial Coherence ◽  
Social Sustainability ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Communicative Patterns ◽  
The Individual

What does the implementation of new communication networks mean for the spatial coherence and social sustainability of rural communities? This paper takes its key from Wittel’s discussion of network sociality, understood as the opposite of Gemeinschaft. Wittel’s argument may inform our understanding of how communicative patterns in rural communities are partly reembedded through ongoing media transitions. But it must also be problematized. Relating Wittel’s discussion to Halfacree’s model of spatial coherence and Urry’s notion of network capital, as well as to findings from an ethnographic study in a Swedish countryside community, a more complex view is presented. It is argued that global communication networks under rural conditions contribute to the integration and sustainability of the community, as much as to processes of expansion and differentiation. The results show that network sociality and community constitute interdependent concepts. Through their capacity of linking people to external realms of interest, while simultaneously reinforcing their sense of belonging in the local community, online media promote ontological security at the individual level, thus operating as a social stabilizer.

Ottomentality as Technology of Self

2021 ◽  
pp. 417-438
Author(s):  
Hasan Turgut ◽  
Neslihan Yayla
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
Extreme Right ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Mobile Games ◽  
Reproduction Process ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Day By Day

Extreme-right populist tendencies are getting stronger day by day. Although there are various factors that make the extreme-right populist tendencies stronger, the fact that cannot be ignored is that these tendencies must be reproduced discursively (history, culture, etc.) by the ruling power structures. Today, digital media and especially games are the primary areas where this reproduction process is most visible. Mobile games, in particular, turn into dominant cultural phenomena related to daily life beyond leisure, entertainment, and mind refreshing functions. Within this view, it is claimed that the mobile games based on the historical narratives in Turkey work as technology of self to contribute to the discourse of neo-Ottomanism. In order to test this claim, the three most downloaded mobile games (Game of Sultans, Magnificent Ottoman, and Age of Ottomans) in the Appstore and Android markets are selected as examples, and the aesthetic production realized through the structural elements of the game will be analyzed.

scholarly journals Canon wars: A semiotic and ethnographic study of a Wikipedia talk page debate concerning the canon of Star Wars

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Star Wars ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Media Objects ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The One

This article examines how Wikipedia editors who are also members of fan communities attempt to assemble articles on the ‘canon’ (i.e. the aspects of a fictional universe that are held as official by fans) of media objects of interest. Derived largely from an ethnographic study and semiotic analysis of the Wikipedia article ‘Star Wars canon’ and its accompanying ‘talk page’, this article argues the following: first, an article’s talk page often serves as its ‘heteroglossic preconscious’, functioning as a space in which fan editors can debate conflicting versions of canon. Once a definition is agreed on, the article itself is edited to reflect the consensus, and in the process becomes a monoglossic representation of the ‘One True Canon’ in the eyes of Wikipedia fan editors. Second, authority plays a major role in the creation of articles on canon, with the sayings of the author (who is often seen in the light of a quasi-deity) being revered. Authority, however, can be shared and even subsumed by institutions, leading to disagreements as to whom the final authority really is. Third and finally, the opinions of these authors are heavily cited on talk pages to allow editors to participate in the aforementioned authority of the author, ‘win’ talk page debates, and thereby establish a Wikipedia article that details the ‘One True Canon’.

“Maid to maiden”: The false promise of English for the daughters of domestic workers in post-colonial Kolkata

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (262) ◽  
pp. 67-95
Author(s):  
Anindita Chatterjee ◽  
Anne Schluter
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
English Language ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Observation Data ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
British Council

AbstractDrawing from a larger ethnographic study, the current article examines, through interactional sociolinguistics, interview and observation data related to English-language tutorials between two employers and their domestic workers’ daughters in two households in Kolkata. The post-colonial, South Asian context represents a site in which such scholarship has been underrepresented (see Mills and Mullany’s 2011 Language, gender and feminism). The focus of analysis is two-fold: it evaluates the existing power structures between participants, and it assesses the degree to which widespread Indian discourses about the upward mobility of English (see Graddol’s 2010 “English Next India”, published online by the British Council) are relevant to the current setting. In terms of power structures, legitimated domination (see Grillo’s 1989 Dominant languages) of the employer over her domestic worker emerges as a salient theme; however, affective attachment (adapted from Hardt’s 1999 article “Affective labor”, published in Boundary; McDowell and Dyson’s 2011 article “The other side of the knowledge economy: ‘Reproductive’ employment and affective labours in Oxford”, published in Environment and Planning) and reciprocal dependencies help to both reinforce and diminish the severity of the power asymmetry. With respect to the applicability of popular Indian discourses that equate English-language proficiency with upward mobility, the study finds little evidence of their relevance to the current context in which the subordinate positioning of gender intersects with social class to compound its constraining influence.

scholarly journals Reflecting and acting on datafication – CryptoParties as an example of re-active data activism

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1060-1073 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Kannengießer
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Active Data

CryptoParties are events in which people meet to pass on their knowledge or to learn about encrypting online communication and digital media technologies or safe Internet browsing. While some people offer help in realizing these practices, others attend with their laptops, tablets and smartphones to learn how to encrypt. CryptoParties are organized by different people in different locations. The article presents results of an exploratory ethnographic study, in which public CryptoParties in Germany were analysed. The study shows that people participating in CryptoParties reflect on and criticize current processes of datafication. Moreover, they aim at shaping datafication by encrypting their online communication and digital media technologies. Therefore, CryptoParties are discussed as examples of re-active data activism in this article. Applying a critical perspective hierarchies and inequalities at these events are revealed.

Lion and Lambs

2013 ◽  
pp. 396-416
Author(s):  
Carol Donelan ◽  
Ronald Rodman
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Musical Scores ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
Music Market

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. With the advent of the Twilight Saga, the teen vampire subgenre has sunk its teeth into the blockbuster film franchise. Its migration into big-budget corporate cinema prompts a negotiation between the Hollywood film industry and the D-quadrant audience of young women and girls. The industry, for its part, has agreed to adopt a protective rather than predatory stance, offering young female viewers a PG-13 fantasy rather than exposing them to representations of sexual violence that “go too far,” are too threatening or age-inappropriate. At the same time, the industry not only acknowledges the existence of female desire, but represents its darker, uncanny dimensions. Newly composed musical scores play a major role in facilitating the experience of the uncanny for viewers without overshooting their tastes and sensibilities. The pop music in the films serves to initiate the audience into the adult music market.

Is the Multiracial Congregation an Answer to the Problem of Race? Comparative Perspectives from South Africa and the USA

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gladys Ganiel
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Racial Reconciliation ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Multiracial Congregations ◽  
The Usa ◽  
American Research ◽  
Cross National

AbstractThis paper uses a comparative perspective to analyze how multiracial congregations may contribute to racial reconciliation in South Africa. Drawing on the large-scale study of multiracial congregations in the USA by Emerson et al., it examines how they help transform antagonistic identities and make religious contributions to wider reconciliation processes. It compares the American research to an ethnographic study of a congregation in Cape Town, identifying cross-national patterns and South African distinctives, such as discourses about restitution, AIDS, inequality and women. The extent that multiracial congregations can contribute to reconciliation in South Africa is linked to the content of their worship and discourses, but especially to their ability to dismantle racially aligned power structures.

scholarly journals Care work by convocation: Activist packages on streets to pedagogical packages in schools

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-52
Author(s):  
Stephen T. Sadlier
Keyword(s):  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Learning Spaces ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Teacher Activism ◽  
Critical Literacies ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Village

This portrait of activist education, drawn from a larger ethnographic study into critical literacies and teacher activism in Oaxaca, Mexico in the wake of a teacher-driven social movement, showcases the celebrating of a popular, contentious national hero, Benito Juárez. In Mexico’s poorest region, where teacher mobilization on the streets and learning strategies in schools intersect, resistance to authoritarianism and instructional compliance with officialdom often overlap. Although critical multicultural approaches advocate for teaching to reduce the achievement gap or to critique extant power structures and practices, this article locates the repositioning of a mainstream historical personage as a pedagogical package, an allegory for justice and equality. Deploying the hero as a pedagogical package, the activist teachers established democratic education, altering formal timetables and curricular maps and humanizing the formal learning spaces in school in the aftermath of intensified conflict. Celebrating a popular hero on his birthday in school is a convocation for community members, parents, teachers and students to gather. The contentious relationships between teachers and the village community softened, particularly among men, and classroom learning and street-level mobilization formed part of a continuum of teacher practice.

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