Religion and Culture Intersected in 2M’s Mediated Discourse: Toruq Alarifeen Program as a Case Study

Early studies focused mainly on demystifying Sufism, but little has been said about its mediated broadcasting to the Moroccan audience. This article explores the ways Moroccan public media channels the Sufi dichotomies. Specifically, I investigate the binary oppositions of cultural rites versus Sufi esoteric practices through a reflexive thematic analysis. A purposeful inspection of Turouq Alarefeen’s TV program is gauged to identify the manifestation of Sufi and cultural aspects in this TV show as a sample for this study. Three themes are selected to contextualize the discussion: language absurdity, esotericism versus exotericism, and glorification of the shaykhs. The qualitative methodology seems to serve my research better as it is convenient for the nature of the subject matter. I have worked on the most recent ten program episodes as samples representing mainly an ongoing Sufi TV show. The main findings reveal how the Media reproduce the mystery of Sufism and the fact that coverage tends to amalgamate cultural dimensions of popular Islam with Sufi esoteric scopes.

TV Show Popularity Analysis Using Data Mining

Evaluating and updating TV programs using data mining. Guessing the popularity of the TV show is an exciting activity with a growing interest in people in TV dramas. A simple guess of a trending TV game based on individual ratings can be made. Simple predictions of trending TV shows based on individual ratings can be made based on the target audience (Age, Year of Release, Rotten Tomatoes, etc.). Keywords: TV Show, Data Mining, Popularity Analysis, Data Visualization, IMDB Dataset

The American 'House of Cards' – A View from a Cultural, Political and Translation-Related Perspective

The present article offers an introduction to the relationship between the entertainment and translation industry, arguing that dubbings and subtitles are by-products of the entertainment industry, directly contributing to the success of the show. It also deals with the translator’s competence, offering examples of translation challenges from the (in)famous American TV show, House of Cards, connected to terms and expressions pertaining to general knowledge of the world and of the United States. The Introduction offers an insight into audiovisual translation and its successful branches and explains binge-watching and binge-translation as well, also including several scholars’ analyses of the TV show. The Methodological Background describes how a collection of term bases came into being starting from the original English script and several Romanian subtitles of the episodes of official (DVD-release and Netflix) and amateur (freely available online) versions. This is followed by thirty examples in two sets, discussing the translation of terms belonging to general knowledge and US geopolitics in particular. The Conclusions section discusses the terms of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ translator irrespective of their qualifications, focusing instead on ‘quality assurance’, a rather subjective term. Certain corpus-based findings are also highlighted connected to the possibilities of relying on generalization, explicitation or calque referring to general culture and US politics focusing on the intelligibility of politicotainment, a term recently coined by Riegert.

Frequency of Adjectives in Male and Female Speech in the Contemporary Television Drama Series "Homeland"

The paper addresses issues related to language and gender, and discusses research on the frequency of adjectives in language of male and female characters in a TV drama series “Homeland”. The empirical part of the study uses as its theoretical background the classic works in the field (Lakoff 1975; Butler 1990; Meyerhoff 2006), which identify gender specific language features and define factors that determine male-female language differences. The research was conducted manually, with minor help of electronic tools, on a personally created language corpus consisting of dialogue lines from the TV show. The results clearly show that the frequency of adjectives in female speech is higher than in male speech in the studied corpus

TV Show Dramaturgy as an Analogue of the Audiovisual Syntax

The dramaturgy of a television work as structure-forming for the format basis of a television periodical is examined. The purpose of the study is to explain the fundamental features of a TV program as an integral artistic phenomenon, embodied in many variations based on a single format model. The task is to clarify the problem of the effective functioning of syntactic rules in the absence of basic linguistic units, which is characteristic of the audiovisual language of screen shows, that has been actualized by domestic and Western media researchers. A general thesis is put forward about the polymodality of an audiovisual work as a single text, the unfolding of which occurs according to pre-established schemes that regulate the effect of individual elements on the viewer's perception. The dramatic approach is considered in the discourse of the global iconic turn from the verbal culture to the visual culture, there are multi-branch attempts to identify possible basic units of the new combinatorial sign system. Syntactic constructions, defined as a chain of episodes, show signs of fragmentation, mosaicism, intertextuality, and other criteria of postmodern aesthetics. The dualism of screen attractions as aggressively influencing instruments and verbal narrative, their mutual influence and dramatic significance are emphasized. The concepts of syntactic uniformity, the constancy of the syntactic structure chosen for a given format, without the possibility of breaking it in variations of editions are considered.

Ethics and Technology: An Analysis of Rick and Morty

In this article, we argue that the animated TV-show Rick and Morty depicts several important and relevant themes about the impact of technology in contemporary societies. By using certain concepts and ideas from the philosophy of technology, especially from thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Jacques Derrida, Neil Postman, and George Ritzer, we investigate how this show brings to the fore certain ontological and ethical assumptions and problems that stem from the advance of technology. We shall use the term technopolitical thinking to refer to these core assumptions and principles which are inherent in contemporary technological societies. By providing various examples from certain episodes and scenes of the show, we shall illustrate how this animated series can provide a basis for a more extensive discussion.

Ask me anything: Joanne O’Meara

Joanne O’Meara is professor of physics at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She has a PhD in medical physics, and has done postdoctoral research at Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her outreach activities frequently include shows for schoolchildren and short segments on physics for the TV show Daily Planet.

Commodifying Tragedy

By focusing on the representation of violence against Native American women in Craig Johnson’s "The Cold Dish" and the television show "Longmire," this article demonstrates how these cultural productions perpetuate settler-colonial power relations. Although Longmire is one of the more progressive shows thanks to its development of Native American characters and storylines, the settler-colonial status quo is affirmed in four main ways. Not only do the novel and TV show redeploy the racist stock characters of the Magical Indian and the White Savior, but the TV show especially also reiterates a version of the stereotypical Vanishing American narrative inherited from the Western genre. Furthermore, both cultural productions heavily pathologize the Cheyenne community, depriving them of agency. Finally, the novel and show both transform pain, suffering, and grief into transferable commodities. This allows them to disinvest the pain and tragedy suffered by the Native American characters in order to reinvest this tragic potential in white characters, which serves to reinforce the white characters’ heroism. The commodification of tragic potential and emphasis on its sentimentalization help obscure the settler-colonial origins and systemic perpetuation of violence against Native American women. In sum, this analysis shows that the deeply ingrained and normalized settler-colonial ideology inherent to representational strategies limit the progressive potential of even the most benevolent and well-meaning white cultural productions.

The 1990s, Fulcrum of Change: Politics and Culture

In his campaign for president in 1992, Bill Clinton did something surprising: he advocated for gay rights. After winning the presidency, however, he was unable to integrate gay soldiers into the military as he had promised to do. Congress instead created a program known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which forced gay soldiers back into the closet. Congress also passed, and President Clinton signed, the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevented the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages and allowed states to continue to deny marriage rights to same-sex couples. In 1997 television star Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian both in person and in character on her TV show Ellen, becoming one of the most prominent out-of-the-closet gay people in the US.