Anime tourism in Italy: Travelling to the locations of the Studio Ghibli films

Film-induced tourism, intended as travelling to places where films and TV series have been shot or set, has been extensively studied in the last two decades in several disciplinary fields. For example, the term ‘media pilgrimage’ emerged in media sociology to highlight the sacred dimension these practices may assume, while fan studies have focused on the narrative of affection built upon specific places. Calling forth the relationship between film and landscape, these phenomena have been also explored in the light of film semiotics and media geography. In the past decade, the representation of landscape and the construction of the sense of place in animation benefited from increased scholarly attention; however, the links between tourism and animation still appear under-explored. Japanese animation, because of its prominent use of real locations as the basis for the building of its worlds and the tendency of its fanbases to take action (even in the form of animation-oriented tourism), is an especially promising field, in this respect. In the last fifteen years, a debate on ‘content(s) tourism’ has involved the Japanese government as well as academic scholarship, referring to a wide variety of contents, from novels to films and TV series, anime, manga, and games. The article presents a case study: a discussion of the experience of anime tourists who visited the Italian locations featured in the films by the world-famous animator and director Miyazaki Hayao, especially in Castle in the Sky (1986) and Porco Rosso (1992). The experiences of anime tourists were collected from images and texts shared through the social network Twitter.

Inequality and Day-to-Day Encounters with Media

Disabled people have a complex relationship with media as content consumers, activist organizers, and technological innovators. This chapter highlights the underexplored theoretical connections between disability and media sociology and suggests how disability can inform and improve the sociological study of media. The authors draw on various cultural theories and concepts to emphasize how inequalities are perpetuated in disabled individuals’ day-to-day-media encounters. First, the chapter reviews media “access work,” or the paid and voluntary efforts of individuals who labor to make media technologies accessible, and how this work has historically been devalued and rendered invisible. Next, the chapter discusses social media and online communities as powerful resources for generating and sharing knowledge among people with disabilities, while contending with major structural limitations to their participation. Lastly, the chapter explores mass media and the tensions inherent in disability media representation both on- and off-screen. The discussion concludes with suggested areas for future research at the intersections of disability and media sociology that take seriously the mediated work of disabled individuals, employ explicitly anti-ableist approaches, and recognize the need for cultural accessibility.

Visualizing Demographic Representation in ASA Sections: The Case of Race/Ethnicity and Gender in CITAMS

The American Sociological Association (ASA) and its sections have taken on new efforts at increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in recent years. In 2020-21, the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section’s DEI Committee conducted a survey of section elected officials and award winners (n=42). This visualization reports the results of survey participants’ self-identified demographic group memberships across section offices and awards, and compares them to section- and ASA-wide baselines. By doing so, the visualization offers an example of how sections can assess the racial and gender representation of their section leadership and award recipients relative to demographics of the section and ASA as a whole.

A World in Flux. Introduction

The present state of the world is in flux. Globally, communities and individuals are experiencing tremendous change, instability, transition, mobility, and uncertainty. Amidst this tenuous future, how are artists, designers, and educators responding? How can we prepare and strengthen our future through pragmatic or theoretical means? What is the role of design, the designer, and design education in such pronounced states of flux? It is with this desire to examine, question, and propose new insights into the current global state of flux that we present our journal. The authors consider the contemporary landscape from diverse perspectives and offer speculations and insights in pedagogy, student development, design education, entrepreneurship, economics, design systems, globalization/localization, sustainability, commercial media, sociology, and design practice/ industry

The Concept of Moral Ecology in Media Sociology Research

This project provides an explication of moral ecology, tracing its roots from 19th-century scientific approaches to its 20th-century critical-cultural focus, and introducing its latest moral-psychology incarnation for future media research. While the rich media ecology scholarship has focused primarily on the realm of effects, emerging applications of the moral ecology concept are shifting that focus onto the sociological processes and organizational structures involved in the formation of moral dispositions and standards. This project promotes an argument for why moral ecology should be considered an essential focus of media sociology research in general and media ethics scholarship in particular. Such a focus spotlights the organizational-level factors that serve to help or hinder the ability of media workers to act virtuously and uphold professional norms.

Taking Conservative News Seriously

This introductory chapter advocates for a newly concerted interdisciplinary research agenda focused on right-wing or conservative news. It provides a brief history of right-wing media and conservative news in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. It suggests that scholars of history, rhetoric, political communication, journalism studies, and media sociology ought to converge around the study of historical and contemporary “conservative news cultures,” defined as the consistent practices or patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among the sites of production, circulation, and consumption of conservative news. It notes that journalism studies scholars have a unique role to play in developing the burgeoning subfield of conservative news studies, and suggests that foregrounding conservative news will contribute to long-standing themes in journalism and political communication research, including shifting conceptions of journalistic professionalism, the cultural authority and legitimacy of the press, and the history of political polarization.

Human-aided artificial intelligence: Or, how to run large computations in human brains? Toward a media sociology of machine learning

Today, artificial intelligence (AI), especially machine learning, is structurally dependent on human participation. Technologies such as deep learning (DL) leverage networked media infrastructures and human-machine interaction designs to harness users to provide training and verification data. The emergence of DL is therefore based on a fundamental socio-technological transformation of the relationship between humans and machines. Rather than simulating human intelligence, DL-based AIs capture human cognitive abilities, so they are hybrid human-machine apparatuses. From a perspective of media philosophy and social-theoretical critique, I differentiate five types of “media technologies of capture” in AI apparatuses and analyze them as forms of power relations between humans and machines. Finally, I argue that the current hype about AI implies a relational and distributed understanding of (human/artificial) intelligence, which I categorize under the term “cybernetic AI.” This form of AI manifests in socio-technological apparatuses that involve new modes of subjectivation, social control, and digital labor.

Escaping the news desert: Nonprofit news and open-system journalism organizations

This case study examines the social institutional influence on how a nonprofit community newspaper conducts newswork. Utilizing both in-depth interviews and participant observation, the data illustrate how the government, the audience, donors and advertising impact news construction processes. The results are analyzed through both management and media sociology theories. Finally, the authors elucidate how nonprofit news organizations can optimally operate as an open-system (or organism), allowing for all peripheral social institutions to impact newswork without losing any autonomy over the journalism.

Covering Protests on Twitter: The Influences on Journalists’ Social Media Portrayals of Left- and Right-Leaning Demonstrations in Brazil

This study uses a media sociology approach to untangle how multiple influences shape the way journalists cover left- and right-leaning protests on social media. Several studies have investigated how reporters portray social movements, finding that news marginalizes protestors by focusing on spectacle and violent tactics to the detriment of their ideas. In this study, we turn to journalists’ Twitter accounts to analyze if these patterns are transferred to social media, as predicted by the literature on normalization of new affordances. Through a mixed methodology matching survey and social media data from 466 Brazilian journalists who tweeted about protests in 2013 and 2015, results revealed individual attitudes predicted coverage, indicating that social media was a space for personal, not professional, expression. Contrary to the literature, findings show that social media portrayals were more legitimizing during the left-leaning demonstrations than during the right-leaning elite-driven one. As a result, marginalizing patterns of protest coverage were challenged, not replicated, on Twitter. These findings suggest a limitation of the theory of normalization to explain how global journalists use social media.