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ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue.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.

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.

scholarly journals Animal Oppression and Solidarity: Examining Representations of Animals and Their Allies in Twenty-First Century Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-109
Author(s):  
Tayler Zavitz ◽  
Corie Kielbiski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
First Century ◽  
Complex Media ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Human World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature And Film

Popular media, both literature and film, provide a location in which animal suffering, resistance and solidarity are finally visible. An examination of Bong Joon-ho’s award-winning film Okja (2017) and Karen Joy Fowler’s New York Timesbest-selling novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) reveals complex media representations of animals that highlight the significance of twenty-first century media in depicting the animal in the human world.

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.

What is IT? Ambient dread and modern paranoia in It (2017), It Follows (2014) and It Comes at Night (2017)

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Mass Shootings ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Law ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Stranger Danger

This article finds its impetus in the curious convergence of three twenty-first-century horror films around the ambiguous ‘It’ foregrounded by their titles: Andrés Muschietti’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 It Follows and Trey Edward Shults’s 2017 It Comes at Night. In each of these films, the titular ‘it’ is difficult or impossible to pin down; it can assume the form of anyone (or, in the case of Shults’s film, infect anyone) and appear anywhere; it cannot be reasoned with, explained or swayed from its course; and conventional sources of protection – the law, and particularly the family – all come up short when confronting it. In this way, the ambiguous ‘its’ of these three films can be seen as crystallizations of a twenty-first-century zeitgeist in which monstrosity seems particularly difficult to locate and defuse. In the age of terrorism, mass shootings and ‘stranger danger’, climate change, and global pandemics, these films suggest that contemporary anxieties cluster around the ambiguous nature of modern threats.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document