Truthfulness and Affect via Digital Mediation in Audiovisual Storytelling

This chapter investigates different ways in which the film techniques of digitally mediated images—such as found footage, diegetic camera, and computer screen—achieve story truthfulness and affective engagement in the viewer’s narrative interpretation process. The pursuit of truthful storytelling is to demonstrate objective facts, while mediated images in film are predominantly subjective. The chapter starts by reviewing the perennial paradox of two seemingly mutually exclusive narrative functions and then tackles the paradox by proposing a multi-leveled framework, synthesizing semiotic conceptualization and cognitive research findings. It also analyzes the various forms of digital mediated images in films over the last two decades and sheds light on how the functions of truthfulness and affective engagement can be closely intertwined rather than in conflict.

Sports as a lens: The contours of local and national belonging in post-handover Hong Kong

Through the lens of sport, this article explores the trajectories of local and national belonging in various forms and degrees, which, in turn, bespeak the evolving Hong Kong–China relationship in the larger socio-political context of post-handover Hong Kong. With an eye to cross-border sports competitions (e.g., the Hong Kong-China football rivalry), sport-related events (e.g. gala performance and sports demonstrations by Chinese Olympic gold medalists in Hong Kong) as well as their media representation and repercussion, this article examines the multifarious articulations of local and national identifications registered in the athletes’ and the spectators’ performing bodies, their mediated images and embodiments. The ultimate goal of this article is to tease out the body and identity politics embedded in the production, mediatization and narrativization of local-national relations in an array of official and non-official discourses disclosed through sports practice and viewership partaken in different scenarios.

Sex and Spectacle in Seventeen Magazine: A Feminist Myth Analysis

This paper interrogates the semiotic processes by which semiological codes operate to construct female sexuality in a top-circulating fashion and beauty magazine targeted to adolescents. While a number of studies have found the representations of femininity and sexuality in teen media to be restrictive, unrealistic and conservative, this paper fills a gap in the literature by presenting a close analysis of the strategies by which sexuality is constructed. Given that there is a documented difference between the real-world exigencies of girls’ sexual lives and the representation of sexuality in teen media, this paper uses Barthes’ concept of myth and Debord’s understanding of spectacle to frame media rhetorics of sexuality. For Barthes, a myth is a rhetorical figure that supports ideological social beliefs; for Debord, the spectacle is a system of capitalism that manifests itself via mediated images. On the basis of these ideas, the paper claims the semiological method of myth analysis as a feminist practice. Using myth analysis, patterns of representation of adolescent female sexuality in the 2006 issues of Seventeen magazine were analyzed. The analysis uncovered four overarching myths of girls’ sexuality in the magazine: the myth of sexuality as a function of body hierarchies, the myth of sexuality as spectacle, the myth of sexuality as a heterosexual male domain, and the myth of girls as sexual victims. The paper calls for myth analysis as a media literacy strategy that offers feminist emancipatory potential.

Spectators of Suffering: Witnessing Victims of Jungle Justices on Social Media

With the availability of the media, no one will deny both proximal and distance happenings across the globe especially when it is about suffering of others. The visibilities of these sufferings of others are much triggered with the emergence of new media. People of different socio-cultural and demographic background have adopted social media as means of letting the world know the happenings around them. In Nigeria through the medium, people have become witnesses to the suffering of victims of jungle justice as their images are constantly displayed on daily basis. Existing studies on audience reaction to suffering of others through mediated images shows that audience response to such images are dependent on their gender, socioeconomic, political and religious background, and some arguing that they have become numb and no longer care about suffering of others. Though these may be true, it cannot be generated to Nigeria audiences as a lot of factors determine how audience responded to mediated images. Little or no study of Nigeria background verified how Nigerians respond to suffering of others especially on the victims of disaster and attacks such as jungle justice. It is against these backdrops that this study through survey (focus group interview) determines Nigerian respond to images of victims of jungle justices in Nigeria. The finding reveals that Nigerians are not numbs when faced with such images and reaction is that of pity and ‘it could have been me’ with the sense of responsibility as to help avert the suffering.

Digitally mediated martyrdom: The role of the visual in political Arab activist culture

Digitally mediated images depicting death and martyrdom as a trope of resistance and contestation against oppressive regimes emerged as recurring and critical instruments of dissent during the Arab uprisings of 2010‐11. While the trope of death and martyrdom as a form of political expression and resistance is not a new phenomenon in the Middle East, the affordances of digital and social media technologies have brought forth new opportunities for activists and everyday citizens to construct, circulate and communicate martyr narratives. Drawing from literature in visual politics, digital activist culture, and media and communication, this textual and iconographical analysis of visual tropes focuses on the brutal killing of Egyptian youth Khaled Said, on his construction as a posthumous injustice symbol, and on his subsequent transformation as a martyr of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Activists and everyday citizens participated in symbolically resurrecting Said in and through digitally mediated images and transforming him into a martyr to represent the popular struggle for social justice and universal human rights. The article examines how Said is made a martyr through complex creative processes of recurrent visual appropriation, mediation, re-appropriation and remediation. It shows that the creative authorship of martyrdom is increasingly hybridized, decentralized and driven by a memetic protest dynamic. The article proposes the term ‘digitally mediated martyrdom’ to designate the emergence of a new kind of visually oriented, socially constructed and ritualized protest dynamic. It develops the conceptual framework for understanding digitally mediated martyrdom as a contemporary political practice within activist cultures and popular social justice movements. It also argues digitally mediated martyrdom represents the emergence of a new and transnational protest dynamic.

Challenges And Pressures Of Mediated Images: Exploring Representation Of Postmodern Women In The Leading Magazines Of Pakistan And Understanding The Discourses Of Working Women

The study deals with the media representation of women in the post-modern era and the pressures they face by such mediated images. The study has explored the nature of identities being represented for women in magazines and has also discussed the challenges and pressures that are being faced by women in building and maintaining their own social identities. The critical issue of the feminist research has rectified the appropriateness between the constructed images of a woman, and the challenges and pressure of a working woman she faces in real. Both qualitative and quantitative aspects of media representation of women have been observed through content analysis. Thechallenges and pressures of women have been interpreted by interviewing working women. The thematic analysis of data has shown a visible difference in the mediated images of an empowered woman, and the real discourses of a working woman.

Mary and Modern Catholic Material Culture

This chapter assesses the persistence of material culture in modern Marian devotion, against the backdrop of technological developments in the mass media and in conjunction with a history of modern apparitions. It argues that, despite the ‘virtualization’ of Marian phenomena, iconography, and devotional practice through media such as photography and the internet, the sensuous materiality of objects such as statues, relics, and the rosary still offers an important means through which the faithful experience Mary collectively and phenomenologically. Linking the centrality of material religion in Mary’s cult to theological notions of her corporeal incorruptibility and intercessory power, the chapter presents several cases where both mass and materially mediated images and relics of Mary have been used to propagate devotion to her. The chapter concludes with a discussion of deterritorialized religion in the digital age, arguing that despite the effect of technologies like the internet on Marian devotion and phenomena, Mary’s devotees will still reach for tangible signs of her presence.

W przestrzeni wymiany. Obrazy Jacka Goldsteina i fotografie Olivera Wasowa

The paper, focused on the works of two American artists of the 1980s, Jack Goldstein and Oliver Wasow, is an attempt to consider the process of crossing boundaries between two different kinds of art. That phenomenon was a characteristic feature of the late twentieth-century art, including also The Pictures Generation to which both artists actually belonged. Both Goldstein, in his paintings from the 1980s, and Wasow, in his photos from the same period, used mediated images and simulated the effects achieved by the advanced technology of nature watching and picture transmission. In consequence, among several features common to the works under scrutiny, one realizes in the first place a significant change in the defining of the medium understood not just as a material and technological aspect of the work, but as a dynamic and complex structure connecting different forms and spaces of artistic expression with the spectator’s experience. Challenging the autonomy of art and the separate identities of its kinds, rooted in the historical avant-garde, leads to a revision of the modernist idea of the medium, as well as to reconsidering the ways in which its changing status influences the semantic potential of paintings and photos. Moreover, the spectacular paintings of Goldstein and photos by Wasow, made and taken in relation to the rapidly changing technology of image transmission, provokes questions about their critical potential: do they denounce the spectacle-making techniques or, as fetishized merchandise, do they just take part in it? The frame of reference are analyses conducted by American critics and art historians who redefined the concept of the medium in contemporary artistic practices, examined the role of photography, and considered the subjection of the late twentieth-century art to the logic of spectacle, such as Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, and Hal Foster.