Viral Shakespeare

This Element offers a first-person phenomenological history of watching productions of Shakespeare during the pandemic year of 2020. The first section of the Element explores how Shakespeare 'went viral' during the first lockdown of 2020 and considers how the archival recordings of Shakespeare productions made freely available by theatres across Europe and North America impacted on modes of spectatorship and viewing practices, with a particular focus on the effect of binge-watching Hamlet in lockdown. The Element's second section documents two made-for-digital productions of Shakespeare by Oxford-based Creation Theatre and Northern Irish Big Telly, two companies who became leaders in digital theatre during the pandemic. It investigates how their productions of The Tempest and Macbeth modelled new platform-specific ways of engaging with audiences and creating communities of viewing at a time when, in the UK, government policies were excluding most non-building-based theatre companies and freelancers from pandemic relief packages.

Telewizja w sieci nowych mediów

Television in the Network of New Media New media have had a considerable influence on television and the viewing practices of consumers. Social media services made it possible for everyone not only to express their opinion on shows, but also, on an increasing scale, to watch them via mobile applications. To describe these processes the author introduces the concept of the ‘connectivity of television,’ developed based on the ANT theory as proposed by Bruno Latour. According to that theory, describing television as a network incorporating both human and non-human actors is an accurate representation of the modern TV entangled with new media. Additionally, it allows to depart from hierarchical definitions of television (such as John Fiske’s three orders of text) and a strict division between the broadcaster and the audience.

Reregistering Media and Remediating a Register

Chapter three continues to analyze how Fassis understood moral literacy through an oral storytelling register of rhymed prose revamped for civic education via television: هدرة الميزان‎ hadra lmizān. From the late 2000s to 2016, a group of Moroccan cultural producers repurposed a rhymed prose form of darīja associated with grandmothers and street performers to convey “modern” Moroccan civic values. Most often this involved promoting equality for women. In doing so, they sought to make a linguistic register, rhymed prose, into a mediator of Moroccanness, shaping viewers’ perceptions of civic engagement through a nostalgic medium primed with equality content. Both Fassis and state media producers calibrated the channel shift as doing the same Moroccanness work: preserving or “revitalizing” a “traditional” form that connected Moroccans morally. And yet they understood it in different ways because of implicit and explicit media ideologies about how to relate to registers in specific mediums. This chapter challenges media professionals’ assumptions that the positive associations with this storytelling register, when linked with “modern” content and values, would be sufficient as a mechanism for shaping morality perspectives of Fassis. Instead, the viewing practices were more important for the register uptake, or lack thereof.

“You can be John Malkovich”: Celebrity, Absurdity, and Convention in Being John Malkovich

Throughout Being John Malkovich, reflexive narrational strategies, diegetic absurdities, and fantastical plot points seek to disrupt the expectations and viewing practices associated with the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema—yet Jonze and Kaufman’s film does not abandon these conventions. Being John Malkovich (like all of Jonze’s films to date) is not comfortably categorized as “arthouse” or “experimental.” Rather, Jonze’s work employs the conventions of the dominant Hollywood norm in concert with eccentric plot devices and irony at various moments in order to subvert audience expectation, which results in an “offbeat” tone or aesthetic. Wilkins argues that the most absurd, or eccentric, narrative elements of Being John Malkovich—its ironic focus on celebrity and the ludicrous Malkovich portal—are precisely the mechanisms that enable an essentially unresolvable existential conundrum to be shaped into the conventionally linear narrative structure. Yet these utterly bizarre narrative inclusions also function as diversions; they aim to distract from or make humorous the very existential concerns they narrativize.

Introduction

This chapter explores the nature of the science fiction (SF) pulp magazine in the 1910s–1940 period, with a special emphasis on the influence of the most influential editor of the period, Hugo Gernsback. It outlines how the subjects and aims of SF in this period paralleled the larger modernist agenda that was also shaping the development of film, with a special emphasis on the visual impact of early film and early film-viewing practices. The chapter especially emphasizes how cinema’s emphasis on “attractions” or “astonishments,” as film historian Tom Gunning labels them, finds a corollary in the new genre of SF’s concern with “wonders.”

On Watching Screendance

In this provocation, I ask what is it to watch screendance, what is at stake, and what comes into play? I suggest that in identifying works as examples of “dance on screen”, we enter into a complex history of aesthetic innovations, marketing criteria, funding systems, and intellectual debates. I compare the viewing practices of film, television and the internet, and consider how different screen formats shape experiences of teaching and research. I reflect upon the ethics of participation in online debates, and suggest that the modes and stakes of watching are as important as the dance itself.

Binge-watching Serialized Video Content: A Transdisciplinary Review

Binge watching serialized video content is a phenomenon that has triggered interest from diverse research fields. Despite the progress researchers have made across different areas, a grounded conceptualization and definition of binge watching is still lacking. In this article, we conduct a transdisciplinary literature review to identify continuity and viewer autonomy as the two fundamental attributes underlying binge watching. Then, using these attributes as conceptual anchors, we offer a convergent definition and categorize the existing binge-watching definitions in the literature. The results of this categorization reveal that the vast majority of the definitions used in the literature fail to distinguish binge watching from other viewing practices such as casual viewing, single-episode appointments, and marathon appointments. We discuss the implications and, to move the binge-watching research forward, conclude with recommendations and an agenda for future research.

Seriality: Development and disruption in the contemporary medial and cultural environment

This article aims to problematise two main tendencies that can be discerned in recent scholarship concerning seriality and how the new era of bountiful production and consumption of serialised narratives relates to seriality as we have known it in previous eras. At stake here are matters of continuity and/or disruption in the changing landscape of media storytelling. I define the two tendencies, respectively, as denied continuity – since it argues for a radical break between contemporary and earlier serial televisual forms – and disregarded disruption – with reference to the apparent blindness of academia with respect to the disruption of seriality brought about by new technology and culturally enabled viewing practices.