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Published By Sage Publications

1527-4764

2022 ◽  
pp. 152747642110677
Author(s):  
Olivia Stowell

This article reads the premiere episode of Top Chef’s fourteenth season, Top Chef: Charleston (2016), for its engagement with the history of slavery in the United States, arguing that Top Chef deploys acknowledgments of historical violences for the purpose of concealing those same violences. By analyzing the discursive and visual content of Charleston’s premiere’s elimination challenge, which required two chefs to cook head-to-head at a plantation, this article outlines how race shapes the action of Top Chef both overtly and covertly, emerging as an organizing factor for the program as a whole. Charleston’s premiere episode illuminates how history is repackaged into popular discursive and material formations, while also suggesting the potential for such formations to cohere around race in unexpected and unpredictable ways.


2022 ◽  
pp. 152747642110594
Author(s):  
Yoav Halperin

This article examines a new form of resistance to right-wing populist discourse on social media which I define as counter-populist algorithmic activism. Practitioners of this type of activism exploit platforms’ automated ranking mechanisms and interface design to bolster the online visibility of counter-populist voices. By so doing, activists seek to stymie the digitally mediated spread of right-wing populist rhetoric and advance an alternative, non-exclusionary vision of “the people.” To explore this nascent form of resistance, this study draws on a year-long online ethnography of a Facebook group of Israeli activists called Strengthening the Left Online. Through an observation of the group’s activities during 2017, as well as interviews with its main administrator and other left-wing Facebook users, I elucidate the distinctive nature of the motivations, strategies, and goals that guide counter-populist algorithmic activists.


2022 ◽  
pp. 152747642110612
Author(s):  
Chun Gan

Traditionally perceived as a country of emigration, China has in recent years become an increasingly popular subject for immigration and diaspora studies, with an immigrant population that has been growing quietly and steadily since the 1990s. However, media representations of immigrants in China have not garnered much attention. This article provides a critical assessment of how immigrants and immigrant experience are portrayed on Chinese television, using the example of Foreigner in China (2013–19), the first-ever program on a national platform to tackle this topic. It argues that, while the program paints a rather insightful and entertaining picture of contemporary immigrant life in China, its representation of immigrants is restricted by not only the internal contradiction of the Xi administration’s globalist discourse, but also the exclusive, ethnocentric conception of Chinese nationhood, which remains the norm in a more heterogenous and globally conscious Chinese society.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110557
Author(s):  
Ali Honari ◽  
Donya Alinejad

In this paper, we reveal the understudied transnational dimensions of politically manipulative activity on social media. Specifically, we identify and investigate a bot-like Twitter network associated with the controversial organization of Iranian political exiles, the Mojaheddin-e Khalgh (MEK). Tracing and contextualizing the Twitter debate around women’s rights within the 2016 Iranian Parliamentary election, our analysis contributes to the scholarship on diaspora and digital media by drawing attention to the often-neglected potentials for non-state actors such as diaspora groups to make use of social media to promote political propaganda that advances militarist violence. We demonstrate how the MEK network’s “online performance of civic participation” is typical of a bot-net of weak influence inside Iran, but that the aims and extent of its influence can only be fully understood by situating it within a historical and transnational analysis of Iranian diasporic media and politics, one that takes complex US-Iran diplomacy dynamics into consideration.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110532
Author(s):  
Charlotte E. Howell

Drawing on fan studies, sports media studies, media industries studies, and participant observation of the American Outlaws, this essay analyzes specific aspects of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup as televised by Fox Sports in the wider context of soccer’s evolving place within the American sports media marketplace. American media companies have increasingly positioned soccer as an upscale sport in the U.S. In addition to representing an affluent and cosmopolitan taste culture, the representation of the American Outlaws as part of Fox Sports’ programming and branding flattened the frictions of class, national identity, politics, and race that shaped American soccer discourse in the summer of 2019. This essay explores this flattening and the underlying tensions between televising a tournament based in American national identity that allows for a more mass audience appeal and the more niche-based framing of soccer—including the progressive politics of women’s soccer—in U.S. sports media.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110529
Author(s):  
Michelle H. S. Ho

Scholars have criticized how tarento (television personalities) who might be considered “transgender” have for decades provided comic relief on Japanese mainstream television, but few have considered the recent emergence of a different kind of trans celebrity who rejects the entertainment narrative to embrace the “wrong body” discourse (having mismatched corporeality). This article explores this phenomenon through the example of Nishihara Satsuki, a trans-identified internet celebrity-turned- tarento, drawing mainly on discourse analysis of their blog, memoir, and variety program appearances. I demonstrate how Satsuki’s celebrity departs from narratives of trans tarento as objects of entertainment to align with hegemonic discourses of the wrong body, which govern how trans individuals are understood in Japan and reflect the broader context of heightened trans visibility elsewhere. In doing so, Satsuki offers an important platform for discussing trans issues and experiences today, which I argue has encouraged the media to take trans representation more seriously.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110528
Author(s):  
Melanie E. S. Kohnen

This essay examines the formal and informal distribution of Australian dramedy Please Like Me via the now-defunct American digital cable channel Pivot and via fan communities on Tumblr. I argue that structural whiteness operates as an invisible engine at the heart of Please Like Me’s distribution. My analysis unpacks how an unexamined narrative of white privilege forms the backbone of Please Like Me’s diegesis, fandom’s investment in circulating the show, and Pivot’s alignment of the show with its supposedly socially conscious brand. Examining trade press, promotional material, and fan discourse, I demonstrate how structural whiteness functions as point of intersection between industry and fan-driven distribution.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110528
Author(s):  
Gavin Feller ◽  
Benjamin Burroughs

This paper analyzes emerging shifts in YouTube, advertising, and children’s digital media industries through a case study of Pocket Watch, a digital-first production and distribution studio built exclusively for YouTube child stars. Our analysis reveals the company’s strategic use of legacy media industry power, networks, and expertise to transform YouTube stars into global brands through the creation of toy, clothing, and lifestyle product lines across several industries. We further argue that Pocket Watch’s newly formed advertising division, Clock Work, exploits its child partners through problematic native advertising and host selling practices. The strategies implemented by Pocket Watch and other similar emerging companies may therefore act as a litmus test for how governmental regulation and platform policy changes will impact the evolving landscape of children’s digital media as commercial forces increasingly groom a growing number of young children to shift from YouTube stars to global brands.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110420
Author(s):  
Marina Dekavalla

This article explores how metaphors about what the internet is inform policymaker and industry discourses, when they propose solutions on internet safety. More specifically, it analyzes documents by key players in this debate during a period when the UK government proposed direct regulation of online harms. The study finds that policy documents construct the internet primarily as a “place” that is separate from offline experience; and to a smaller extent as a “tool” that can be abused if it falls in the wrong hands. The article argues that these constructions obscure any links between online and offline risk, and that they legitimize solutions which may not take into account the social roots of online harms. It also suggests that the discourses of policymakers and SNS companies differ in the degree of agency they attribute to users, indicating a discrepancy in their approaches as direct regulation is introduced in the UK.


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