New-Media-Based Attention Implosion and Television Publicness in the Era of Internet-TV Convergence

Author(s):  
Francis L. F. Lee

This chapter discusses how television captures and organizes the attention of the mass public in the age of media convergence. It is argued that media proliferation and technological convergence have led to a fragmented audience. Paradoxically, audience fragmentation also provides the condition for the powerful return of collective attention in the case of new-media-based attention implosion. This chapter uses the case of the extraordinary (online) popularity of television drama character Brother Laughing in Hong Kong to illustrate the phenomenon of new-media-based attention implosion and the dynamics behind it. The analysis shows that attention implosion is generated by audience members’ time-space shifting practices and key individuals’ organizational efforts, both facilitated by the new media. It led to the formation of an interpretive public surrounding the fictional character. Implications of the phenomenon on our understanding of the relationship between television, social life, and collective public attention are discussed.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Barnidge ◽  
Trevor Diehl ◽  
Lindsey A Sherrill ◽  
Jiehua Zhang

Abstract Scholarship on audience fragmentation typically takes one of two approaches: The micro-level analysis of individuals’ selective exposure to partisan news, or the macro-level analysis of audience overlap. To bridge the gap between these levels of analysis, we introduce the concept of attention centrality as a set of macro-to-micro measures that characterize how individual news media selection is situated within networks of public attention. Relying on an online panel survey conducted in the United States (N = 1,493), we examine the relationship between three indicators of respondents’ attention centrality (closeness, betweenness, and reach) and the partisan valence of their news selections. The study finds different patterns of results for the three indicators of attention centrality, indicating that partisan news media are not uniformly isolated to the periphery of public attention. Results are discussed in light of conversations about selective exposure and audience overlap in the United States and around the world.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.


Author(s):  
Bahram Alamdary Badlou

We report a rare case of unrepaired Tetralogy_Pantalogy of Fallot (TOF_POF) in a 20 years old Persian girl Mrs Zeynab S., who presented with cyanotic finger tops appearance, ongoing chronic thrombolytic destruction processes, and remarkable thrombocytopenia [1,2], heart ventricular septal defect (VSD), and might atrial septal defect (ASD), anxiety, sleep disorders, nightmares, and limited social life. Additionally, the relationship between underlying mechanisms, possible treatments of the thrombocytopenia, erythrocytosis, and unrepaired cardiovascular leakages remains unknown.


Author(s):  
Crispin Thurlow

This chapter focuses on sex/uality in the context of so-called new media and, specifically, digital discourse: technologically mediated linguistic or communicative practices, and mediatized representations of these practices. To help think through the relationship among sex, discourse, and (new) media, the discussion focuses on sexting and two instances of sexting “scandals” in the news. Against this backdrop, the chapter sets out four persistent binaries that typically shape public and academic writing about sex/uality and especially digital sex/uality: new-old, mediation-mediatization, private/real-public/fake, and personal-political. These either-or approaches are problematic, because they no longer account for the practical realities and lived experiences of both sex and media. Scholars interested in digital sex/uality are advised to adopt a “both-and” approach in which media (i.e., digital technologies and The Media) both create pleasurable, potentially liberating opportunities to use our bodies (sexually or otherwise) and simultaneously thwart us, shame us, or shut us down. In this sense, there is nothing that is really “new” after all.


Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-364
Author(s):  
Cristiana Senigaglia

AbstractAlthough Max Weber does not specifically analyze the topic of esteem, his investigation of the Protestant ethic offers interesting insights into it. The change in mentality it engendered essentially contributed to enhancing the meaning and importance of esteem in modern society. In his analysis, Weber ascertains that esteem was fundamental to being accepted and integrated into the social life of congregations. Nevertheless, he also highlights that esteem was supported by a form of self-esteem which was not simply derived from a good social reputation, but also achieved through a deep and continual self-analysis as well as a strict discipline in the ethical conduct of life. The present analysis reconstructs the different aspects of the relationship between social and self-esteem and analyzes the consequences of that relationship by focusing on the exemplary case of the politician’s personality and ethic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110302
Author(s):  
Asha Best ◽  
Margaret M Ramírez

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?


Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Elaine Kahn

There has been a paradigm shift in global communications since the death many years ago of prominent Canadians Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The correspondence between the two friends, from 1968 to 1980, presciently touched on our contemporary wired global village and the challenges it presents to personal privacy and to freedom of expression. I examine the relationship between the two men, as laid out in their letters and, to a lesser extent, in secondary sources, highlighting matters of privacy and media. Privacy hovers over the correspondence, even when it is not the stated topic. McLuhan, who is credited with the term “global village”, discussed with Trudeau the effect of new media on people’s notions of tribe and identity and privacy. Proving a direct influence from one man to the other, in either direction, is not possible, but there is much to play with. The gap is, as McLuhan often said, “where the action is”.


2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL JOYCE

AbstractThis article considers the relationship of international law and the media through the prism of human rights. In the first section the international regulation of the media is examined and visions of good, bad, and new media emerge. In the second section, the enquiry is reversed and the article explores the ways in which the media is shaping international legal forms and processes in the field of human rights. This is termed the ‘mediatization of international law’. Yet despite hopes for new media and the Internet to transform international law, the theoretical work of Jodi Dean warns of the danger to democracy of commodification through the spread of ‘communicative capitalism’.


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