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Barbara Abrash, New York University; and Pat Aufderheide, American University NGOs, Funders, and Filmmakers: Jointly Crafting Tools for Social Action Agendas Funders, media makers and nonprofit organizations have increasingly formed teams to produce highly strategic, often interactive, but still richly storytelling media. Propelling this teamwork has been a combination of new technologies, changing funder strategies in which funders have often taken the initiative in designing projects, and the awareness of nonprofit organizations that media are central to any strategic objective. This paper will discuss several recent cases of such creative partnering, such as: Steps to the Future, a project that created dozens of videos on the subject of HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa; Take this Heart, an award-winning cinema verite look at a year in the life of a foster mother and her six charges; Legacy, the five-year-long project of independent filmmaker Tod Lending tracking the family of an African-American boy who was murdered in the heart of urban Chicago; and Silence and Complicity, a short video that began as a scandal in the public health services of Peru, where women were being abused sexually and financially. Peruvian and U.S. women’s organizations teamed to make a video of the women’s testimony using foundation resources. When exhibited in a human rights context, it forced the Peruvian government to change policies at its clinics. These and other projects demonstrate that social action media production has become an effort that can and does begin in various institutional locations; that relatively sophisticated media production and use are integral to social action and expression at many levels; and that media are increasingly designed as projects with a range of facets appropriate to the different screens and their current capacities. | |
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Ryadi Adityavarman, Kansas State University Digital Media Communication in International Design Practice: A Comparative Intercultural Perspective Computer-mediated communication such as electronic mail and Web sites enable efficient and effective communication between various design participants across the world. A growing number of American architectural design firms have practiced in Asia with intensive communication activities among their clients and local design-firm counterparts. Within this context of a globalized design practice, this paper will analyze design interaction from an intercultural perspective. | |
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Stuart Allan, University of West Bristol Toward a New(s) Society: Online Journalism and Citizenship in an Information Age 'A new society emerges,' Castells (2000) writes, 'when and if a structural transformation can be observed in the relationships of production, in the relationships of power, and in the relationships of experience' (2000: 371). Corresponding to these transformations, he contends, is the emergence of a new culture, and with it modified forms of space and time. Accordingly, in taking as its starting point the 'new normal' of post-September 11, this paper elaborates upon Castells' thesis that 'cultural battles are the power battles of the Information Age'. Specifically, it seeks to explore several pressing issues concerning the online reporting of that day's tragic events, both with respect to the main news sites but also in terms of those operated by so-called 'amateur newsies'. Regarding the latter, the paper will examine how certain ordinary citizens transformed into 'personal journalists', acting the part of instant reporters, photojournalists and opinion columnists. Eyewitness accounts, personal photographs, video-footage and the like appeared on hundreds of refashioned websites over the course of the day. Taken together, these websites resembled something of a first-person news network, a collective form of collaborative newsgathering that was very much consistent with the animating ethos of the Internet. Still, the paper argues, important questions need to be asked about the continued availability of diverse spaces for alternative forms of reporting in the aftermath of the crisis. | |
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Anne Allison The Cultural Politics of Pokemon Capitalism When Pokemon, the media-mix entertainment complex and mega kid’s hit, took off in the States, the Japanese press reported it as a sign of Japan’s "cultural power" that was finally gaining recognition and cachet around the world. It was telling that reception of this Japanese pop product counted for so much in the States, itself the longtime world capital of children’s fantasy-production and hegemonizer of global (including kid’s) culture. What does it mean though to calculate national prestige on the basis of imaginary monsters packaged in the form of commodity fetishism targeted to a global (and millennial) consumerism? And does the success of Japan’s children entertainment industry with Pokemon and other properties in the 1990s indicate a shift in the geo-political domination of global trends by Euro-america and particularly the United States? I address these questions by examining two sets of shifting junctures -- culture/commodity and global/national -- against each other in the case of marketing Pokemon both in Japan and the US. My discussion is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted both in Japan and the United States on the entertainment fad of Pokemon with producers, designers, marketers, parents, children, child experts, scholars, reporters, and activists. How, I will ask first, has a discourse reading national(ist) pride and cultural identity in the global success of children’s play products been constructed in Japan? And, second, how have Pokemon marketers in the US dealt with what they perceive as its "cultural" inflection when (re)packaging the property for American kids? | |
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Michela Ardizzoni, Indiana University North/South, East/West: Italian Television and National Identity in a Global Context The issue of cultural identity in Italy has, until recently, been construed upon the North-South divide that has characterized Italian national identity since World War II. The social, cultural, and economic cleavages at the heart of such divide have been challenged in the past 10-15 years by the continuous flows of immigration into the country from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe. In this paper, I explore how Italian television responds to the articulation of identity, media industries, and politics in light of contemporary globalizing forces, and how multilateral forces of globalization and transnational socio-cultural movements affect the workings of Italian television at the turn of the 21st century. |
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Sanjay Asthana, University of Minnesota Visual Hegemonies: Representations of Globalization and Nation in Print and Electronic Media in Post-Colonial India, 1982 - 2002 This paper examines themes of globalization and nation represented in print and electronic media in India during 1982 to 2002. An analysis of a few short programs and advertisements drawn from a variety of media will be used to explore themes of globalization and nation in hegemonic ways. The liberalization policies of the government of India since 1991, and the subsequent changes in the media environment, particularly television software and hardware have provided a powerful impetus to globalization in India, which led to new patterns of consumption among a growing urban middle class (around 300 million). In contemporary India, state-run television, private (transnational and local) satellite television networks and private print media seek to produce particular conceptions of citizens and citizenship through a range of programming content. These notions of audiences as citizen-subjects and consumer-subjects need to examined more closely, particularly so in the context of globalization and national discourses that seek to join the two: citizens and consumers. The following questions guide the research: 1. What are the ways representations of globalization appear in print and electronic media? 2. What are the ways representations of nation appear in print and electronic media? 3. How are the representations of globalization and nation related to each other in print and electronic media? 4. What are the visual vocabularies through which representations of globalization and nation appear in print and electronic media? 5. In what ways are citizen-subjects implicated in representations of globalization and nation in print and electronic media? | |
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Pat Aufderheide, American University; and Barbara Abrash, New York University NGOs, Funders, and Filmmakers: Jointly Crafting Tools for Social Action Agendas Funders, media makers and nonprofit organizations have increasingly formed teams to produce highly strategic, often interactive, but still richly storytelling media. Propelling this teamwork has been a combination of new technologies, changing funder strategies in which funders have often taken the initiative in designing projects, and the awareness of nonprofit organizations that media are central to any strategic objective. This paper will discuss several recent cases of such creative partnering, such as: Steps to the Future, a project that created dozens of videos on the subject of HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa; Take this Heart, an award-winning cinema verite look at a year in the life of a foster mother and her six charges; Legacy, the five-year-long project of independent filmmaker Tod Lending tracking the family of an African-American boy who was murdered in the heart of urban Chicago; and Silence and Complicity, a short video that began as a scandal in the public health services of Peru, where women were being abused sexually and financially. Peruvian and U.S. women’s organizations teamed to make a video of the women’s testimony using foundation resources. When exhibited in a human rights context, it forced the Peruvian government to change policies at its clinics. These and other projects demonstrate that social action media production has become an effort that can and does begin in various institutional locations; that relatively sophisticated media production and use are integral to social action and expression at many levels; and that media are increasingly designed as projects with a range of facets appropriate to the different screens and their current capacities. | |
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Doris Baltruschat, Globalization and International TV and Film Co-productions: In Search of New Narratives The paper, titled "Globalization and International TV and Film Co-productions: In Search of New Narratives," explores the changing dynamics of Canada’s and Europe’s film and television sectors, which are increasingly challenged by globalization and the diminishment of local cultural spaces. Co-productions provide an opportunity for the pooling of financial and creative resources for participating partners. They also, potentially, could provide insight into the hybridization of cultural forms of expression. However, co-productions are predominantly used as a means to access funding in an international marketplace--a market dominated by commercial productions which fail to address audiences as nationally and locally differentiated and unique. Through an analysis of professional practices, textual development and narratives, the author highlights how commercial productions are favoured over culturally distinct and differentiated forms of statement and expression. The discussion is framed in theoretical debates around globalization and localization, narrative construction in film and television and the concept of a viable public sphere underscoring cultural production within democratically inspired frameworks. | |
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Arundhati Banerjee The Goddess and the Demon: Contested Territories in Durga Puja The Bengali month of Aswin (September-October) is festival time in Eastern India. People celebrate Durga Puja, a festival that fictionally commemorates the coming home of goddess Durga, after slaying the arch-demon Mahishashur, who was threatening the world. There is public celebration for five days, culminating in Durga’s ceremonial return to her marital home. The institutional form of this festival has shifted over time: from an earlier feudal mode where the local zamindar or landlord would host the festival in his Durga mandap for the rest of the village to gather, it is now the neighborhoods that have taken charge of the organization. This infusion of democracy has turned it into a contested political terrain. While the religious rites remain always nearly identical, the aesthetic form of the mandap and the icons that are custom-made for the occasion, are contested by the many voices of the society: fundamentalist, secular, socialist and feminist groups often use these forms to narrate their own ideologies and to comment upon local and global events. In 2001 the dominant theme appears to have been nostalgia for the intimacy of the feudal mode of celebration, but there were others that were looking out on to the larger world. Mandaps that recreated nostalgically the interior of the decaying zamindari mansions stood next to those that narrated the earthquake of Bhuj, and one even depicted the destruction of the Twin Towers on Sept 11. Indeed, there would have been more on the Twin Towers theme, had the West Bengal government not explicitly forbidden any attempt to interpolate Osama Bin Laden for the archetypal demon Mahishashur. This paper will explore the complex coding system of these narrative devices and their relationship between local politics, global news and regional censorship using extensive footage from Durga Puja 2001. | |
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Emma Baulch 'Post Imperial' Globalization and Balinese Alternative Music The Balinese punk scene has its roots in the state’s media deregulation policies - which took effect in the mid 1990s - as well as the opening up of the Indonesian recording industry to foreign investment in 1994. As a result, rock music, particularly alternative rock, was depicted in media constructions as a realm of hedonism, in contrast to the demonization of rockers in the official state discourse. In this instance, the impact of media globalization provides one instance of how, on the one hand, official, anti-liberal and anti-global and, on the other, pro-capitalist, ‘new rich’ discourses competed for dominance in the late 1990s. As a nascent punk scene emerged in 1996, young punk musicians were reactively labeled by more senior musicians as naïve fashion victims. Indeed, these punks were seemingly compliant - they played only covers, did not adorn their bodies and were yet to develop a distinct dance style. In the following years, however, the same punks came to engage much more critically with the products of the global media as they developed local territories in which intimacy and solidarity was secured. This became evident in the emergence of distinct punk dress and dance styles referred to as "punk chaos" or "punk anarki." In this paper, I demonstrate how the hybridization of punk in Bali took place over time as a progressive territorialization. |
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Bret Benjamin "Attach the Electrodes:" On Ways of Reading the Stories of the Global Information Infrastructure With the new scholarship being produced about the phenomenon of globalization, English studies--most notably post-colonial studies--finds itself needing to re-theorize the tripartite relationship between information technology, capitalism, and cultural production. Amitava Kumar has made useful steps in this regard by challenging us to replace the traditional category of "World Literature" with the more politically responsive category of "World Bank Literature." This paper will extend the work of Kumar to explore some of the implications for literary and cultural studies created by the development of Global Information Infrastructure (GII) --the network backbone of globalization--and the formidable presence of international organizations such as the World Bank in shaping the ways in which we read the stories of GII. In particular, the paper will explore two interrelated rhetorical tropes: the idea of "leapfrogging" into development, and the notion of "economic democracy." I argue that while digital literacies will become increasingly important for the analysis of networked culture, so too will economic literacies--developing ways of reading the narratives of information and capital flow--for the study of cultural production and cultural critique enabled by and, perhaps, demanded by GII. | |
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Sarah Berry-Flint, Portland State University Cognition and Culture - interaction design and globalization The need for general principles of cognition and learning among developers of interactive media has coincided with a growing recognition in communication studies of the role played by culture in peoples' use and understanding of media. How can new media designers and theorists reconcile the desire for psychological models of cognition (such as those used in the fields of human-computer interaction, human factors, and educational technology) with the need for cultural specificity? This paper will look at contradictions between the use of cognitive psychology to provide a basis for media development -military, consumer, and educational - and cultural and media studies that point to the difficulties of universalizing models of media reception and understanding. | |
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Henri Beunders, Eramsus University (Rotterdam) The Failure of the Elite’s Ideas for European Television Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy) was declared the hymn of ‘Europe’ in the seventies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Leonard Bernstein performed this symphony as a celebration for the peaceful breaking down the Wall between East and West-Europe. Two things about this event were interesting. It was an American, not a European, who conducted the symphony, and for the occasion the hymn was transformed in Ode an die Freiheit (Ode to Freedom). Some commentators concluded that the fall of the Wall was not the beginning of unification of Europe but the beginning of an era of globalization of European culture, shaped by American ideas and products. So, not Europeanization but globalization or Americanization of European culture. The nineties, in practice, showed almost the opposite, especially regarding radio and televison. Regionalisation and localization were the tendencies of the day. American domination persisted in the field of cinema, but was forced back on radio and tv in favor of locally produced programs - soaps, talkshows etc. So, the need for local, regional and national identity enforcing programs was much stronger than the European elite’s vision from the fifties onwards on the need for European television, and stronger than the Americanization of European culture. The failure of the European elite in creating European television can be ascribed to their elitist views on ‘the right stuff’ that was to be shown on television: high arts like classical music, opera, ballet and philosophical debates and so on Some of these high-brow arts just were not suited for television, like ballet, but more important was the not accepted fact that ordinary people in Europe simply were not interested in watching these high arts more than occasionally. At the beginning of the 21st century, the uses of television, the programming, etc., are more or less the same everywhere in Europe - although with regional differences - but the content of the programs can still be described as local. In this paper, I will address the fact that Europeans may now live in the best of both worlds: global and local. | |
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Jan Bierhoff, International Institute of Infonomics The State of Multimedia Newsrooms in Europe The majority of the established media plans to transform into more diverse and flexible information processing companies, but it is by no means clear how this objective can be achieved, which content categories one should aim for, how the newsroom of the future should be organised and which strategic alliances are needed to accomplish this formidable task. A high-profile consortium of experienced research institutes and international professional organisations has agreed to carry out groundbreaking research in this area, to establish a European-wide overview of the multimedia playing field, stimulate innovative media practices and develop an understanding of the changing role of information (and information providers) in a networked society. The project will run in 2001 and 2002 with the title "Multimedia Content in the Digital Age" (MUDIA). The presentation for the Media in Transition 2 gathering will focus on the results of a survey conducted in 40 European newsrooms (print, television and net native), describing the way in which European media prepare for and already practice rich media content production. | |
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Anita Biressi,
University of Surrey, Roehampton Heather Nunn, Middlesex University Video Justice: Public Anxiety and Private Trauma (the authors are currently writing a book on factual television and hybrid forms entitled Reality TV: Realism and Revelation for Wallflower Press) This paper concentrates on the U.S. program Video Justice: Crime Caught on Camera (US 1997 Fox Productions) as an example of programming that raises a number of important questions about media spectacle, media technologies and media ethics. This controversial true crime program chronicles a range of crimes including store robberies, shootings and street beatings. Its voiceover begins with the statement: "There’s a war going on in America between citizens and criminals, between the violent and the vulnerable." It was produced through editing together mainly CCTV and security footage and individuals’ recordings, together with film from law enforcement sources. Here scenes of violence and aggression are anchored by a voice over and spliced with interviews with witnesses, experts and the surviving participants. We argue that the appeal of the program operates on several levels and in contradictory ways. Viewers are confronted with scenarios of sudden and unprovoked violence that seemingly confirm public anxiety and fear of crime. They are also arguably offered a ‘safe’ and even pleasurable subject position from which to witness these events. However, the spectacle of crime is punctured by moments of intimate personal revelation when the victim relates the trauma of violent experiences. This paper explores that ways in which these narratives of personal trauma and crisis fracture and undermine the coherence of the program as ‘entertainment’ and consequently reveal a more complex and ambiguous relationship between audience and text. | |
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Jim Bizzocchi, Technical University of British Columbia Ceremony of Innocence and the Subversion of Interface: A Case Study in Interactive Narrative There is a potential inconsistency between the experience of story and the process of interaction. Many interactive narratives ask the interactor to switch between an immersive state of immediacy and a hypermediated awareness of process. This oscillation has the potential to disrupt the narrative experience. The presentation examines the interactive CD-ROM Ceremony of Innocence (an adaptation of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy) with this disruption in mind. The presentation highlights the design decisions that are used to suture the potential disjuncture. Two broad strategies are reviewed. The first is the saturation of narrativity throughout the entire work. Analogies are drawn to both expressionism and expressivity in cinema. Expressionist filmmakers used the exaggeration of film craft (such as lighting, set, costume) to portray and elicit emotion and mood. Filmmakers in general rely on a subtler and more hidden use of craft to enhance the medium’s expressivity. The careful selection and combination of visual and auditory element saturates the cinematic experience with a pervasive narrativity. In the same way Ceremony of Innocence uses graphics, layout, font choice, sound effects, and music to systematically reflect and amplify narrative concerns such as character, mood, and theme. The other strategy employed in Ceremony is more specific to digital environments. The interface itself is subverted to reflect similar narrative concerns and to enhance the experience of story. In the process the graphic user interface is remediated, and narrativity is situated at the heart of the interactive experience. The methodology that underlies the argument is a close reading of Ceremony of Innocence that combines quantitative data with subjective impressions | |
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Mats Bjorkin, Gothenburg University, Sweden Re-mapping the Cash Flow: Digital Media and Corporate Communication When looking back at the rise and fall of many information technology companies the last couple of years, it is striking how often management theory failed. Digital media have not only brought new ways of dealing with information; they have changed the place of business. The borders between the company and the outer world have been blurred, small local enterprises can easily become global; while information and business networks are more important than individual units. This paper discusses information flows and organizational structures in relation to the material history of corporate communication. From the lose-leaf accounting system through mechanical and electronic business machines to digital systems there has been changing ways of making tangible as well as intangible assets explicable or visible both within the organization and in communication with customers and clients. Based on two case studies, a new media consulting firm and an "old-fashioned" truck and bus manufacturer - both transnational organizations - this paper will discuss different ways of historicizing recent trends in management theory and corporate communication. | |
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Vladimir Bratic and Don Flournoy, Ohio University Transnational Political Activism and Global Fusion: The Independent Media Centers as a Case Study Some believe that the development of the Internet promotes pluralism and therefore enhances democracy. In addition, they say, the Internet as the decentralized communication channel eradicates the economic conditions of oligopoly. Others see the rapid merger of global telecommunications and media institutions resulting in online consolidation. Research does shows that a very small number of large corporations, namely AOL Time Warner, Microsoft and Yahoo!, have captured the lion's share (over 40%) of the public online time. This paper argues that the two developments need not be mutually exclusive. The emergence of Indy Media Centers is perhaps the best example of pluralism of the Internet. Since its launch in 1999, this grassroots, low-budget, non-profit project penetrates national borders easier than foreign investments, thanks to the Internet. At the same time it is closely intertwined with the anti-capitalist social movements that aim to undermine the influence of online corporate leaders. As a case study, the IMCs are used to illustrate how the decentralized and unmanageable nature of the Internet helps disenfranchised groups effectively protest centralized acts of business and government. | |
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Robert Burnett, Karlstad University (Sweden) A Look Inside the Global Music Industry: Explaining Swedish Music Export Success Music, its production, distribution, regulation and reception, is an essential feature of the European Information Society. The European music industry is a key asset. Today, three of the world’s five largest music groups are European. The Bertelsmann Music Group (Germany), and EMI (UK), together with Vivendi Universal (formerly Polygram/ MCA) (France), and Sony (Japan) and Warner Music (USA) account for about 80% of the world market for pre-recorded music, a market that was worth an estimated 40 bn ECU in 2000. The music business also has many small companies. The fact that 60% of recordings sold in the EU originate in the EU means that local audiences are likely to continue to demand ‘local’ products despite the ‘globalisation’ of the music industry. In Greece, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, the majority of records sold are by local artists. In the Scandinavian countries around 30 percent of all purchases are by local artists. In Austria and Belgium the number sinks to about 15 percent. Internationally, between 1991 and 2000 the percentage of the global music market share attained by European artists rose from 34 to 45 percent. As well as supplying phonograms nationally, the music companies exploit their recordings in foreign markets. Normally this is done by licensing a local company to supply phonograms in a particular country. In the case of the majors this is usually done through the music company’s local affiliate. The independent phonogram companies often rely on unconnected companies to perform this function, including the majors’ foreign affiliates. Licence income generated in this way is important to music companies. Europe is second to the United States as a supplier of recorded music to the rest of the world, but is closing the gap as more European artists gain global exposure. Using recent empirical data collected in Sweden I will examine the globalisation/localisation issue. | |
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Hamilton Carroll, Indiana University Resisting the Nation: John Sayles' Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) as Postnational Cinema In their introduction to the volume Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake observe that "film, still the crucial genre of transnational production and global circulation for refigured narratives, offers speculative ground for the transnational imaginary and its contention within national and local communities." John Sayles' film Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) engages in an examination of how local forces can be utilized in a critique of capital by illustrating the collapse of Dr Humberto Fuentes’ absolute belief in the myths of the nation-state through his encounters with sites of local resistance and coercion during the course of the film’s "refigured narrative," and can be read as a meditation on the shifting natures of capital, the nation-state, and citizenship in the face of economic, cultural, and political globalization. The film, whose dialogue is almost entirely in Spanish and indigenous dialects, is the product of an American writer and director, and was produced using American money by an American company. Because of its subject matter and in part because of its status within America as a "foreign film," Men with Guns stands in a liminal position in relation to U.S. cultural production. The film functions as an oppositional U.S. cultural production as it is engaged in a precise examination of the function of nation and citizenship in the Americas. Thus, while this paper reads the film on the level of its plot, it also engages in an examination of the film as a transnationally located cultural artifact. Men with Guns is a product of cultural globalization while it is about the process of economic and cultural globalization. Because cinema is a crucial transnational cultural form, this examination of Sayles’ film will be particularly relevant to a conference on media and globalization. | |
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Catherine E. Celebrezze The Organization and Standardization of Television: A Historical Precedent to Current Globalization and Convergence in Media Infrastructure This paper examines the emergence and standardization of television as a historical precedent offering insight into the conglomerated conditions characterizing current U.S. media infrastructure. Its primary goal is to denaturalize the notion that convergence in media infrastructure is a recent occurrence and that it relies solely on chronological, material innovation. Its secondary goal is to compare the debates over spectrum space and standards regarding television in the 1940s and those regarding the convergence between content and telcom industries in the early 21st century. | |
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Anita Chan, MIT "Open" Journalism’s Distributed Editors: The Construction and Exchange of Online News on Slashdot.com This paper will explore the emergent social practices surrounding an open journalism model of online news production and exchange, as manifested on the technology-related news and discussion site Salshdot.com, where a global network of users is invited to construct and edit news, rather than merely consume it. This study will examine how practices enacted on Slashdot construct users’ relationship to news, editors, and one another -- and will similarly investigate how it constructs editors’ relationship to news, readers, and one another. By recognizing the activity of Slashdot’s editors and users as necessarily dynamic and cooperative, such an examination complicates theoretical positionings of audiences and users as passive, uncritical readers and consumers of news, and of media producers as self-interested conduits of elite, capitalistic interests. In further acknowledging the diversity and (often disordered) heterogeneity of interests and practices represented on Slashdot, the study also challenges attempts to characterize an essential or definitive experience of online users. | |
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Jung-Bong Choi, University of Iowa Public Broadcasting in the Age of Digital Narrow-casting: A Study of NHK’s (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) Digitization The rapid introduction of digital broadcasting technology has rendered PSBs (public service broadcasters) a volatile battleground where various social forces and ideologies clash. The primary concern of this paper is to explore ways in which NHK articulates and transforms its identity as Japan’s sole public broadcaster amid its endeavors to adapt to digital environments. It views NHK’s digital drive as leverage to implement extensive reorganizations of its institutional practices. Such reform is not confined to programming, technical standards, distribution systems and international networking but entails the alteration of NHK’s relationships with the audience, commercial broadcasters, other digital media businesses, and the state. For example, challenges from other digital media (PCs, cables, satellite TVs) impelled NHK to shift its policies towards a heightened recognition of audience diversity, a broader use of imported contents, and closer collaboration with commercial broadcasters in Japan. | |
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Pei-Chi Chung, Indiana University The Internet, Identity Politics and the Making of Counter Media Culture in Taiwan: A Case Study of Yam This paper examines the power of the Internet in creating an alternative media image of Taiwan. Literature in the field of new media and identity suggests that new communication devices have been vehicles for powerless groups to restructure their social positions in the society. When new communication technologies are first introduced into a society, it is often argued, they often empower people who were previously silenced or had little political voice. To investigate how political activists use the Internet to create a counter-government discourse, this paper focuses on Yam (English version), the first and currently largest Internet company in Taiwan. | |
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Anne Ciecko, University of Massachusetts Tracking Asian Stars: From Electric Shadows to Cyber-Astronomy Using examples from recent Asian popular cinema, this presentation will examine the ways the contemporary technologies and media boundary-crossings of film star construction and international fandom have contributed to a global convergence of film cultures. | |
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Roderick Coover, Art Institute of Chicago; University of California, San Diego Cultures in Webs Through a multimedia presentation, I analyze how differing cultural viewpoints are revealed and concealed through the conventions and rhetorics of differing visual media including photography, film, and the Internet. In bridging theories of performance and visual cognition, the presentation offers alternative strategies of cross-cultural production while also considering some of ways new media might also help to articulate alternative stories, views, and voices. | |
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Nick Couldry The Forgotten Digital Divide: Researching Social Exclusion/Inclusion in the Age of Personalized Media We need empirical research that investigates to what extent inequalities of access to media resources contribute to social and political exclusion in a media age. This question has acquired some urgency in digital-divide debates, but it has tended to be addressed in a superficial way, in terms of basic levels of access, rather than in terms of capacities to make effective use of media resources. This paper will draw both on the author's earlier UK-based empirical and theoretical research into the social roots of media power and on his current research into citizens' reflections on whether media provide them with the resources they need to be connected to a wider public space (leaving it deliberately open for those citizens to reflect on how they think that wider space should be defined). This research examines a number of more specific questions: Do people regard themselves as included in or excluded from social and political debate? Do people regard themselves as actors or spectators in the mediated public sphere? What contribution do they expect and hope technological change (the Web, digital television, media convergence) to make? The priority in this research is to listen closely to agents' reflexivity about these difficult questions, and the paper will give a preliminary report on UK pilot research currently under way, and the prospects for developing this research further. | |
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Peter d'Agostino, Temple University; and David I. Tafler, Muhlenberg College (the authors are co-editors of TRANSMISSION: Toward a Post-Television Culture) Techno/Cultural Consciousness Across the Digital Divides This paper examines the symbiotic relationship between new technologies and traditional cultures across north south, east - west divides, while identifying their convergence within Australian outback. revolves around culturally determined coding methodologies, which use various landmarks to inform a sense of identity place. These landmarks, symbolic icons, represent narratives that build from historic contemporary events in different parts world that, turn, embody own particular states-of-mind. We will argue an understanding reconfiguration consciousness becomes clearer when revisiting some relationships developed such as those indigenous people living central Australia. articulation comes surrounding space time relations. desert live harsh environment with pronounced inscribed legendary meaning. icons informed by actual metaphysical events. | |
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Drew Davidson,
Southwest Texas State University stories in between: narratives and mediums @ play I am interested in how to integrate information and technology to create engaging and relevant stories for people to experience. This is an academic study and a narrative about stories and their mediums [1]. [4] If you choose, you can decipher the puzzle and connect the links; if not, you can read straight through [5]. [3] Links in and between the digital and analog are keyed through repeated symbols (colors, words, numbers, images, etc.) creating a rhizomatic web [4]. [2] Images, colors, words, numbers and links are used to code and layer this chapter [3]. [5] Either way, stories are related and experienced [repeat]. [1] You can experience the story and play with the ideas as you puzzle through the words and images [2]. This is a hypertextual study that can be found at http://www.waxebb.com/sib2/. | |
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Maire Messenger-Davies Mickey and Mr. Gumpy: The Global and the Universal In Children's Media This paper looks at what Paul Hazard (1947) called "the world republic of childhood" in relation to the globalization of children's media products. The concept of childhood is examined in the context of three international developments: first, the International Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1989) and its implicit, and also explicit, assumption that it is possible to arrive at global, universally agreed definitions of the needs, rights and wants of children, despite cultural differences over, for instance, child labor; child military service and gender. Second, the rapidly developing academic fields of the sociology and anthropology of childhood, which are challenging the field of developmental psychology as the primary academic discipline within which childhood is defined and studied. And third, the global market for children's media, with Disney as the archetypal model for the commodification of storytelling, including formerly localized myths and fairy tales (e.g. Aladdin; Moses) on an international scale. The paper will look particularly at animation from both a global and local perspective. |
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Kim De Vries, Program for Writing and Humanistic Studies, MIT Sequential Tart: thinking about gender and online community In the last fifteen years both creators and readers of comic books have become more diverse as women and people of color take an increasingly active role in the industry. These changes have been supported and facilitated by independent websites, some of which serve to make the work of independent comic creators available, bypassing corporate publishers and retailers, and some of which operate as for a for the reporting and review of comic book culture by and for readers. In this paper, I discuss how one of these resistant communities, Sequential Tart (www.sequentialtart.com), has developed a space for women readers of comics, and has worked to change industry perceptions of women as both readers and creators of comics. Additionally, I consider how the community that has grown around this Web site differs from those often explored by scholars, in its close ties to the "real" identities and lives of the participants. This model of the online community offers an instructive alternative to those previously studied, particularly in the way the women of these communities construct their own gender while at the same time consciously working to subvert the gender representations of mainstream comic culture. | |
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Wendy E.
Dinneen, Dinneen Designs Intellectual Property and Mediation: Bridging the Systems World and the Life World This paper will
examine the intersection of intellectual property and mediation
in the 21st century. Is the practice of mediation,
as an alternative form
of dispute resolution, helped or hindered by the information society,
and can communication between individuals and societies alike improve
as a result of the very nature of its practice? These and other
questions guide this research which incorporates a macro and micro
level approach to analyze an increasingly popular method of conflict
resolution in commercial and non commercial spheres. One focus is
on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and its Center
for Mediation and Arbitration, based in Geneva, Switzerland, and
other foci concentrate on the application of mediation by agencies
handling disputes for public and private entities. Since WIPO adopted
mediation at their headquarters in 1994, has this multi-lateral
institution influenced the way in which conflict is resolved across
diverse sectors and people around the world? While such a question
may take years to answer, this research highlights challenges and
changes in a field which is only in its infancy, promoting a unique
practice which allows for greater communicative freedom. Drawing
from Jurgen Habermas' notions of the life world and systems world,
this paper strongly suggests that mediation be embraced in order
to avoid further separatism with regard to globalization and conflicts
experienced among citizens and nations alike. | |
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James Donald , Curtin University (Australia) Media Freedom in Transition This paper is an early product of research into the category of media freedom, and its ambiguous relationship to the cognate rights of freedom of speech and academic autonomy. From the C18th principle of "liberty of the press," I derive criteria of media regulation that embody modern conceptions of publicness and nationhood as well as the market. Above all, I examine how those traditional criteria of media freedom and regulation have had to respond to a new regulatory environment since the neo-liberalism and globalisation of the 1980s and beyond, convergence between the media and telecommunications, and the impact of the Internet. | |
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Tanja Dreher, Institute for Cultural Research Talk Back: the mediated struggle to define Australian multiculturalism Prompted by news reporting of Sept. 11 and the so-called war on terrorism, people in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown developed innovative media interventions in response to global news. This paper explores the ways in which local events and issues are inflected and impacted by national and international political debates and global media flows. Encompassing Australia's most culturally diverse neighborhoods, Sydney's southwestern suburbs have long featured multiculturalism, crime and ethnicity in news reporting and talkback radio. Recently, the suburb of Bankstown in particular has become enmeshed in a spiral of signification linking local events with a federal election campaign focusing on immigration and refugees, and global attention to terrorism. Through media advocacy, training and cultural production, various communities and representatives in Bankstown responded to global media events by highlighting the experiences of Arab and Muslim communities, young people and women. These media interventions represent alternative models and innovative approaches to media representations of multiculturalism and national identity in a moment of profound border panic in Australian politics. | |
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Eli Dresner, Tel Aviv University No Sense of Global Place? Information Technologies and Political Globalization In this paper I use the theoretical framework presented in Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place in order to characterize and analyze several developments in contemporary global politics. According to Meyrowitz’s well known analysis social situations should be defined in terms of the information (and influence) flow that they consist in, and hence communication media, by changing patterns of information flow, create new types of situations and thereby impact our social behavior. Similarly, I show how various technological changes and innovations (among which is the Internet) gradually break down such distinctions among political situations as the one between the intra-national and international domain of political action. The debate whether recent terrorist attacks are crimes or acts of war exemplifies the conceptual difficulties that ensue. |
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Isa Ducke, German Institute for Japanese Studies Use of the Internet by political actors in the Japanese-Korean textbook controversy This paper examines the bilateral controversy over Japanese junior high school textbooks during the summer of 2001. The government approval of a nationalistic history textbook led to protests "especially in South Korea" and efforts to prevent its use in schools. The official and non-official Korean protests and an Internet-based Japanese NGO network were crucial in achieving an extremely low adoption rate of the book in schools. It is the aim of this presentation to outline the use of the Internet by various state and non-state actors in Japan and Korea regarding this issue. | |
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Nabil Echchaibi, Indiana University (Be)longing Media: Minority Radio Between Cultural Retention and Renewal Diasporic media have often been dissed, by politicians and academics alike, as a toxic concept that hinders integration and encourage the formatting of ethnic cleavages. Such a simplistic view trivializes the straddling process involved in diasporic experiences of two, and possibly more, cultural and political allegiances. The end result of such experiences is very often a dual or multiple consciousness that is neither exclusionary nor regressive. Using fieldwork observation of two radio stations, one in Berlin, the other in Paris, I examine how and if diasporic media can serve as bridging entities. Radio Beur FM, a private radio station in Paris, is heavily implicated in the maintenance of a culture of hybridity between North African in France, particularly the youth within this community. Radio MultiKulti, on the other hand, a radio produced by the Public Broadcasting Corporation, addresses all ethnic minorities in Berlin both in German and in 19 other languages. This paper will look at how these stations fare in their mission in the light of their philosophies of integration. | |
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Jan Ekecrantz, University of Stockholm Cultural panics and other responses to media-driven modernities The paper argues that a focus on literary/artistic and popular responses to new media (technologies) may give some new clues to understand cultural change and the meaning of globalization in local or national contexts. Different modernities, historically and across the world, are always and to a certain extent media-driven, for instance in terms of transformed time and space conditions. These transformations trigger different responses in the cultural world outside the media and in the media themselves. Literary responses may range from cultural panics and ontological insecurity to something more constructive. In mainstream (news) media texts, these changes are very seldom problematized, because stable time/spaces are the sine qua non of reporting. Historical and cross-cultural literary examples from Russia and Western Europe are discussed together with results from comparative studies of news constructions demonstrating that cultural globalization evokes very different responses across time, space, media and genres. The paper relates to the following suggested themes: changing peripheries and centers, global media flows/local media meanings, narrative forms and cultural change. | |
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Victoria Smith Ekstrand, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Controlling the Copyright Bully: The Promise of the Copyright Misuse Doctrine Like persistent bullies on a school playground, America’s copyright holders increasingly resort to intimidation and pressure to punish suspected infringers. But who or what defines the actions a copyright holder can take-- short of requesting an injunction or initiating a lawsuit-- to stop infringement? This paper addresses the doctrine of copyright misuse, an affirmative defense that has emerged in the last ten years since it was used in Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds. The doctrine requires a defendant accused of infringement to show that the plaintiff abused his copyright, thereby damaging the larger public purpose of copyright to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." This paper examines 27 misuse cases at the appeals and district court levels to determine how defendants have successfully argued a copyright misuse defense and whether the doctrine may serve as a check on the ever-expanding rights of copyright holders. This paper suggests that copyright holders should be held accountable for claiming rights beyond the scope of the copyright grant and that a more clearly defined misuse doctrine would benefit the public policy purpose of copyright law, particularly for users of digital media. | |
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Jessica M.
Fishman, University of Pennsylvania Digital News Cultures: An Analysis of Social Class, Media Convergence and Divergence This is a case study comparing the homepage interface design of two U.S. newspapers: the New York Times and the New York Post. I have organized this study to compare the web features of an elite and a popular online newspaper—or what have been known in their offline versions as part of the broadsheet and tabloid, or the highbrow and lowbrow press. Examining these two websites, I analyze if and how the home page production features reinforce markers of social class distinction. |
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Don Flournoy, Ohio University Innovation and Obsolescence: A Sword That Cuts Two Ways Creative Destruction is a theory of innovation in the study of economics which suggests that the transforming power of technology is perpetually making old ways of doing things obsolete through the introduction of new products and processes. In capitalistic economies, the presence of entrepreneurship, capital investment and competitiveness create an orientation to and acceptance of change as a necessary condition of living in a world where things get better and better. What is paradoxical about modern manifestations of this old idea is the extent to which incessant innovation and the relentless destruction of those innovations are now perceived to be the basis for economic progress and the good life. But there is a serious downside. Displacement of whatever exists has become built into our new millennium institutions, aspirations and values. Nothing is ever good enough. Obsolescence is accelerated at such a pace that corporations can no longer afford to hold off on the introduction of new products and processes until public understanding and acceptance is in place. Acquisition has become so necessary to sustaining a high standard of living that consumption is thought to be a patriotic duty. This paper examines three promising new millennium technologies gone awry: high definition television, broadband cable and open systems software. The examples illustrate the ways capitalist societies have come to count on technologies and their applications to bring improvements to work and leisure, commerce and community while producing great wealth. But when those same developments move too quickly or are mismanaged, they can have adverse social effects. | |
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Roddy Flynn and Aphra Kerr, Dublin City University Revisiting Globalization and Convergence Through the Movie and Digital Games Industries Unsurprisingly, given the film industry’s traditional propensity to borrow from other media as the basis for some of its biggest hits - from Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind to Harry Potter -- Hollywood has for the past fifteen years been producing films based on successful digital video and computer games. At the same time, Nintendo has enjoyed some of its biggest hits from a series of games based around the MGM/UAS Bond series. Major companies like Vivendi Universal have moved, it would appear effortlessly, into the exploitation of both game and film assets on a global scale. From publishing games like Half Life and Diabhlo for Blizzard, to controlling Universal Studios, these companies seem to exemplify what we understand by globalization and convergence. This paper asks do these trends help us to understand globalization and convergence, and what are the consequences of these trends for national economies and national cultures? From a political economy of the media perspective the patterns of ownership in an industry can have a significant effect on the range and quality of content produced. This perspective would argue that cultural products, like films and games, play an important social role that economists often ignore and that globalization and convergence trends must be examined closely to assess their impact on the range and diversity of content sold on global markets. This paper is based on results from the first year of a post-doctoral project based in STeM (Centre for Science, Technology and Media) at Dublin City University that analyzed the global games industry and interviewed fifteen key players in the Irish industry. | |
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Lawrence Fouraker, St. John Fisher College Precursors of Convergence in Interwar Japan From the 1950s until the present day, articles predicting the "inevitable" convergence of Japanese economic and political systems with those of the West have been a staple in American media. Yet for much of this period, key features of Japan’s political economy have actually been diverging from Western mhe 1950s until the present day, articles predicting the "inevitable" convergence of Japanese economic and political systems with those of the West have been a staple in American media. Yet for much of this period, key features of Japan’s political economy have actually been diverging from Western models. The clearest historical precedent for convergence between Japanese and Western systems is the interwar interregnum from the World War I economic boom until the state¹s intervention in the economy in the mid-1930s. My paper will explore how, in those years, the trend was toward a rough approximation of laissez-faire economic and political policies. | |
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Elfriede Fursich, Boston College Between Credibility and Commodification: Non-Fiction Entertainment as a Global Media Genre Global media expansion is connected to other trends such as the fragmentation of audiences, an increase in technological investments, industry consolidation and greater profit expectations of media companies. This competitive climate favors a non-risk approach to programming, more conservative managerial tactics and "lean" management strategies such as outsourcing and shared financing. One of the genres fitting these new programming demands is so-called nonfiction entertainment. I analyze how global television content providers such as Discovery Communication International developed this genre distinction situated between traditional journalistic values and commercial interests. I will analyze the programming strategies of the cable outlet Travel Channel before, during and after Discovery acquired a 70 percent (1997) and finally a 100 percent stake (1999) in the cable channel, and I will offer this profile of a travel program as commercially profitable global product: a show financed by several production companies in different countries, covering latest trends of tourism and fashionable destinations, appealing across cultures, presenting credible and trustworthy information, packaged as nonfiction entertainment, but non-challenging to local political situations or the endeavor of modern tourism. I examine how the situation for producers of travel and other nonfiction television programming is shaped by the economic and globalizing factors of the telecommunications industry in general. Finally, I’ll examine the problematic consequences of this dynamic on traditional documentary filmmaking and investigative journalism. | |
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Joseph Garncarz, University of Cologne Hollywood as an Instrument of European Integration In my paper, I will analyze and interpret a process of cultural integration in the large Continental-European film markets Germany, France and Italy after WWII. First, I will reconstruct and interpret the process of cultural integration that took place. Second, I will argue that my view of Hollywood’s role in Europe is closer to the facts than the well-known hypothesis of the world-wide dominance of American movies since the 1910s, which had been constructed on a restrictive research concept excluding the power of audiences per se. Third, I will give an explanation for this process of European integration by looking not only at economic and political elites as global players but also, and primarily, at the changing tastes of European audiences. Fourth, I will explore the consequences of this process of cultural integration for Europe’s film industries as well as for Hollywood itself. Fifth, I will discuss the implications of my analysis for the existing theories of globalization. | |
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Nate Greenslit, Program in Science, Technology and Society, MIT Antidepressants, Advertising, and Agency: The Internet and New Cross-Cultural Negotiations in Sociomedical Identity Pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) offers a relatively new interface between consumers, patients, drug industries, and the FDA. In this new space where pharmaceuticals are connected with culturally specific images and logics, healthcare products turn into cultural products, and the Internet gives them new presence across national and cultural borders, including those media environments that do not allow pharmaceutical DTC advertising (e.g. Great Britain). This paper will get at the larger topics of globalization and convergence by problematizing the role of the Internet in psychopharmaceutical DTC advertising, specifically in terms of how pharmaceutical companies have used it to promote antidepressants in the U.S., and how a cross-cultural advertising audience has started to appropriate meanings about mental health and illness and rework them to enliven local sociomedical discourses. This paper will be framed as an interdisciplinary effort, using DTC advertising as a case study for how media studies and science studies can inform each other. | |
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Pierre Guerlain,
Université du Maine, Le Mans Institut d'Études Politiques, Paris The morphing of Le Monde: The "conquest of cool" in a new media environment . From an austere publication with hardly any photographs, Le Monde has became a more eye-catching and thicker newspaper that resembles its counterparts in the English or German-speaking worlds. Its various sections have become more numerous and are devised to target specific audiences that often do not communicate with each other. The business sections are calculated to attract up-and-coming executives, while the arts and literature sections target a younger more upbeat audience whose interest in sex and gossip is not taboo. By redefining itself as several neoliberal publications rolled into one with a bohemian-libertarian tone in its cultural sections, a People page and a mainstream political and economic core section Le Monde has proved a major success on the market. Its Web site is, according to its own advertising, the most visited news site in France. This paper will demonstrate how the newspaper has tailored its layout and ideological outlook to fit a new epoch shaped by the values of infotainment. |
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Sabine Haenni, University of Chicago A Global Nation: The Logic of Incorporation in Early Twentieth Century Hollywood Film historians have often emphasized early Hollywood’s homogenizing and assimilative logic. The teens, in particular, as Miriam Hansen has argued, saw the emergence of a rhetoric of the cinema as a "universal" language that erased local, cultural and national differences. This universalism, it is often assumed, is key to Hollywood's global success; moreover, because of this universalist rhetoric, American cinema is usually not regarded as a "national" cinema. Complicating this account, this paper explores a different discourse, produced by the American film industry itself, that insisted on the cinema's ability to incorporate and transform, but not erase, the nation's, even the world's different cultures. I look at the emerging discourse of the global nation on three different levels. First, I examine the emergence of studios in California, such as Inceville and Universal City, which were often regarded as ideal global villages in journalistic accounts that soon attracted a steady stream of tourists. Second, I look at advertising campaigns by producers such as Thomas Ince who stressed American cinema's ability to produce a pleasurable experience of cultural alterity. And third, I examine the filmic national discourse generated by World War One (visible in articles in trade journals, scripts and stills from lost films located at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), which directly addressed the nation's ethnic and racial minorities, insisting on the cultural differences within the United States even as it was advocating political unity. | |
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Randall Halle, University of Rochester The Enemy at the Gates: History and Commodity in New European Film In my presentation I will concentrate on the following three points as a way of exploring the connections between transnational production and transcultural aesthetics. First, it is possible to quickly conclude from this that war and the Holocaust offer narrative material that cuts across national boundaries and is available for deployment within various ensembles of production. It remains to be examined if there are specific strategies or subgenres that attend to the various ensembles or national production networks. Second, the list of films above represents widely disparate narratives. Indeed semiotic analysis would find here rich material for the description of subgenres and sub-subgenres like Holocaust comedies or gay and lesbian Holocaust tragedies. Here the genres follow the same pattern as the historical genre in general; they offer a visual opulence and likewise move to entertain with plot lines that turn from explicit explorations of history to rely on melodrama, love stories, fantasies, even feel-good comedies. Many critical voices have objected to the ethics of these films. It remains to be examined what significance such narrative strategies and plot motivations have for the representation of history. Third and final, the war genre, the genre singularly most important for the public production and consumption of national narratives and symbols, proves to have a great deal of resiliency. Here in the above films we witness its ability actually to break with national specificity in a manner absent in many of the recent historical films. While the war genre might represent a particular national perspective in its choice. The Holocaust offers modern morality tales that can be related so as to be germane to universal audiences. Films about the 30s and 40s, the era of European fascism and WWII, for Europe the last moments of profound national conflict, become productions of a history that propels its viewers beyond national specificity and into a transcultural position. | |
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Orit Halpern, Harvard University Bioinformatic Databases: A New Mode of Global Surveillance? Bioinformatics is the convergence of information technology with the biological sciences. Increasingly, bioinformatic systems are playing a critical role within police and medical practice for disease surveillance and criminal identification. As bioinformatic systems render organisms into digital information through the computerized sequencing and reading of biological products, such as DNA, we are forced to ask what are the consequences? This paper will examine the political and social implications that emerge from this integration of the biologic and informatic, particularly within police DNA databases. I explore and describe changing modes of governmentality and identity that result from making biology an information technology. The transformation of life into code is about producing supporting structures of mediation-technical, discursive, and institutional-that support certain understandings of human identity and biology, and not others. I will, therefore, produce an account of criminal identification systems, which explores the biases or possibilities being programmed into systems as they are developed. What sort of information can or cannot be encoded? What is lost and what is gained through digitalization? What are the ideological, political, and technical pre-conditions that encourage one type of system over another? I track what happens to police surveillance systems as they change media and move from analog documentary and storage techniques to digital ones. | |
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Tal Halpern, New York University Towards a New Artistic Context - Critical Documentary in the Age of Global Surveillance Networks Today, advances in automated image capture and processing technologies are converging with computer database technologies to produce a new mode of surveillance-automated facial recognition. In this paper, I will examine the global application of facial recognition technology in a broad range of areas from airports to personal computing interface design in order to ask how facial recognition technologies are both disciplining observation while also rendering bodies visible both locally and globally. I will then turn to consider the possible role artistic documentary practice can play in responding, commenting, and critiquing this emerging mode of visuality. In so doing, I draw direct inspiration from the artist and critic Allan Sekula. | |
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Ferenc Hammer , Open Society Institute, Budapest Reality Television and the Public Sphere - A Hungarian Case Study My study focuses on a relatively new genre in post-communist public service and commercial television entertainment: A multitude of formerly rather unknown programs, such as factual human-interest magazines, confessional television chat shows, real-life police stories, and hospital dramas have competed for their -- cumulatively remarkable -- audience share in prime-time television. This study focuses on reality TV programs covering (either in a dramaturgical, or in a coordinated manner) problems, joys, and other facts of life of economically disadvantaged groups in the society. We have found these representations as important for critical inquiry, because the theme of poverty in non-fiction TV represents an unusual blend of rather unexamined, as well as (suspiciously) all-well-known themes in media studies and more generally, in social theory. The study contains (i) textual analyses of Hungarian television reality TV programs, (ii) analyses of audience reception based on survey data and focus group research, (iii) an analysis of production considerations based on industry data and interviews with television producers, (iv) an analysis of media regulation procedures and practices, especially in the area of content regulation, (v) and a critical assessment of relevant media studies and social theory literature. | |
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Ramaswami Harindranath, The Open University, UK Reconfiguring "cultural imperialism": global audiences, local interpretative frames, and the distribution of cultural resources Using original data from a project on audiences in Britain and India, this paper will address the issue of cultural imperialism, attempting to go beyond the impasse between the political economists and audience researchers to explore the ways in which members of one putative ‘culture’ differ significantly in terms of their interpretative frames, and how these reflect the unequal distribution of cultural resources. The paper will argue that aspects of the colonial and postcolonial histories of India (and by extension other former colonies) are significant in order to understand the complexities of the data linking audience interpretations with cultural contexts. | |
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Laurie Harnick, University of Ontario The Transformation of Television: Domestic Rehabilitation in Times of Catastrophe My paper considers the work of Mary Anne Doane and Patricia Mellencamp in their discussions of the immediate televisual response to catastrophe, however, I look beyond to resultant programming and consumption and consider the role of domestic and lifestyle programming as a personal and institutional restorative. Rather than the familiar television-as-hearth phenomenon, I believe that in the wake of Sept. 11, domestic and lifestyle programming has become a necessary curative and promises to move consumption (at least, temporarily) away from dramatic "real TV," court TV, fitness TV and the like to the diversion and comfort of the familiar, contained, and instructive electronic "mother." | |
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Matt Hills, Cardiff University Transcultural otaku: Japanese representations of fandom and representations of Japan in anime/manga fan cultures " Otaku is a Japanese word coined during the eighties, it is used to describe fanatics that have an obsessive interest or hobby... The Japanese think of otaku the same way most people think of nerds - sad and socially inept. Western Anime fans often use the word to describe anime and manga fans, except with more enthusiastic tones than the Japanese." This paper will consider the transcultural appropriation of Japanese representations of fandom, and will argue that a focus on media representations of fandom must be central to any analysis of US and UK fans’ self-identifications as "otaku". I will argue that Japanese culture’s pathologisation of fandom is taken up as a "badge of honour" by fractions of US and UK fans (Napier 2000:254) via a series of potentially contradictory ‘practical logics’: -- US/UK use of the term "otaku" acknowledges that fandom is hegemonically devalued both in Japan and ‘the West’. The Japanese fan is therefore linked to the non-Japanese fan: fan identity is prioritised over national identity. This identification can be read as an attempt to ‘naturalise’ fan identities by implying that fandom is an essentially transnational/transcultural experience. --However, US/UK "otaku" continue to use limited images of Japan (Moeran and Skov 1993) within their construction of ‘transcultural’ fan identities. The desire to legitimate and exoticise fan culture as part of a technocultural and consumerist avant-garde draws on stereotypical connotations of ‘Japaneseness’. | |
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Teresa Hoefert de Turégano, University of Lausanne World Cinema as World Music My aim is to explore a notion of the term world cinema in relation to the term world music, where national and cultural identities are used as marketing tools within the international market. Independent, cinematographic coproductions (two or more countries involved in the financing and production of a film) made in a North -South context are an ideal site to explore questions of cultural diversity in the current global context. In many instances of coproduction between European and developing countries, the funding institutions, foundations, etc., hinge their financing and support of a film on its essence as a vehicle promoting national and cultural identities. In countries where there is a dependence on funding from outside sources, this stipulation of cultural identity can be enabling, but also potentially disempowering. | |
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Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Margarita Maas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events. | |
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Jan Holmberg Globalized Vision In 1912, a French film journal characterizes the times as "where the antipodes thanks to the telegraph, the telephone, the talking newspaper and radio telegraphy... touch each other, unite, merge, when a gigantic net of electrical wires surrounds the globe." This notion of a World Wide Web avant la lettre leads the same journal in a later issue to exclaim: "In a few years, we will no longer have use for the word ‘stranger’, for we will know him as well as we do our selves." This rather naïve take on technological progress is of course a familiar topic today, where our own hopes for the information age are often equally optimistic. Globalization, in this sense, is hardly a new phenomenon. For this paper, I would like to analyze how "globalization" as a function of new media of the nineteenth century, is reflected in contemporaneous cultural discourses in art, film and literature. With Martin Heidegger’s concept of the "Weltbild" (i.e. the fundamental experience of modernity of conquering the world as picture) as my starting point, I will try to demonstrate how the new media of modernity held the promise of a united world, and how cultural expressions bear witness to this hope. | |
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Derek Hrynyshyn, York University, Toronto The Commodification of Sovereignty in the Domain-Name Space Although cyberspace appears to be a global realm without national borders, and although information flows across international borders unhindered, the relationship between national communities and cyberspace is a deeply political one. The original decision, made in the early days of the Internet, to create two-letter designations for internet addresses specific to different national territories (known as ‘country code top-level domains, such as ‘.uk’ and ‘.ca’) established a possibility for the use of cyberspace to promote national communities online. But this original potential is undermined by the recent practice of marketing the two-letter designators. By turning the domain name spaces of countries into commodities, the value they have for national identity is superceded by their economic value to others. | |
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Ying-Fen Huang, Simon Fraser University (Canada) Techno-Culture in Global Cities: Aesthetics and Spectacle My paper will focus on the studies of urban technoculture in China’s rising global cities. Envisaging global capitalism, cities are incorporated into the global capitalist flows - economy, information, ethnic, and division of labors and culture etc. New media (generally referring to Internet, video game, and digital image-based forms) and information technology play crucial roles in transforming the disposition of urban culture. I attempt to explore the issues surrounding technoculture in relation to the Chinese metropolis, such as the spectacularization and the consumption of digital culture, the aesthetics shifting phenomenon of virtual discourses in everyday life, and the disparity of power in ever changing spatial discourse in urban space. In speaking of Chinese global cities, this paper will primarily focus on Shanghai and Hong Kong in particular as pivotal textual axis. I will examine the project of Digital 21 in Hong Kong and Shanghai’s Informational Port to demonstrate the ways in which the spectacularization of digital media has been implemented into the fabrics of urban life. My paper will illuminate the changing aesthetics of new information media - the ways in which the increasing image/information spectacle has transformed the new virtual worlds and the ways in which the surface play of new media implicates a shift of aesthetics towards sensation, appearance, and stimulation. | |
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Daniel Huecker, MIT Moving Images: the crusade to project the ‘JESUS’ film to all nations In my paper I will examine the ‘JESUS’ film, a 1979 religious docudrama based on the book of Luke, and the ‘JESUS’ Film Project (JFP), the evangelical Christian missionary organization that is distributing and exhibiting this film around the world. The ‘JESUS’ film, which has been dubbed into hundreds of languages and shown in nearly every country, is a useful case study for examining the way media are mobilized across traditional linguistic, class, cultural and political bounds. Intentionally created as an evangelistic tool, the film was carefully researched and created to both authentically reproduce the life of Jesus according to scripture, and to engage a diverse and international audience. Why the JFP founders saw film as a useful medium for international evangelization, and how they continue to use the ‘JESUS’ film with a global audience will be two lines of inquiry in my paper. I will draw upon the books, audiovisual media, and documents produced by the JFP during its 20+ years of global film distribution and exhibition. I will also use interviews and first hand observations of the JFP in the US and Guatemala. | |
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Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Margarita Maas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events. |
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Fran Ilich, Centro del Centro Nacional de las Artes _borderhacking Borderhack is a camp where the world of technology and the Internet--tools that are known to break borders and erase limits--meet with the world of physical borders and passport handicaps. Hactivists, Internet artists, cyberculture devotees, border activists, electronic musicians and punk rockers are ready to delete the border on Tijuana-San Diego if only for a few days, with java applets, port scans, radio, microwaves, ISDN, face-to-face communication, technology workshops, presentations, music events. The idea to synthesize the camp is born out of our condition of dilettante border kids, out of our years of crossing the border and doing a little window shopping, pretending that we could be part of the American dream of wealth, happiness and freedom. On one side, the malls are filled with happiness, and on the other--the wrong side-- we are forever condemned to produce goods that we will never enjoy ourselves. A part of the project is the borderhack attachment online exhibition, which was presented August 26, 2001 at playas de Tijuana (Tijuana beach) right in the border wall between Mexico and the US. |