While the Western was dying a slow death across the cultural landscape, it was blazing back to life as a video game in the early twenty-first century. Rockstar Games' Red Dead franchise, beginning with Red Dead Revolver in 2004, has grown into one of the most critically acclaimed video game franchises of the twenty-first century. Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West offers a critical, interdisciplinary look at this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of game studies and American history. Drawing on game studies, western history, American studies, and cultural studies, the authors train a wide-ranging, deeply informed analytic perspective on the Red Dead franchise-from its earliest incarnation to the latest, Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Their intersecting chapters put the series in the context of American history, culture, and contemporary media, with inquiries into issues of authenticity, realism, the meaning of play and commercial promotion, and the relationship between the game and the wider cultural iterations of the classic Western. The contributors also delve into the role the series' development has played in recent debates around working conditions in the gaming industry and gaming culture. In its redeployment and reinvention of the Western's myth and memes, the Red Dead franchise speaks to broader aspects of American culture-the hold of the frontier myth and the "Wild West" over the popular imagination, the role of gun culture in society, depictions of gender and ethnicity in mass media, and the increasing allure of digital escapism-all of which come in for scrutiny here, making this volume a vital, sweeping, and deeply revealing cultural intervention.

This edited collection explores the malleability and influence of body image, focusing particularly on how media representation and popular culture's focus on the body exacerbates the crucial social influence these representations can have on audiences' perceptions of themselves and others. Contributors investigate the cultural context and lived experiences of individuals' relationships with their bodies, going beyond examination of the thin, ideal body type to explore the emerging representations and portrayals of a diverse set of body types across the media spectrum, paving the way for future research on this topic. Scholars of media studies, popular culture, and health communication will find this book particularly useful.

American Boarding School Fiction, 1981-2021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers - the center was filled with students: white, male, Protestant students at boys' schools. More recently, a new generation of writers-including Richard A. Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff-has transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in unprecedented ways. These new writers present characters who are rich and underprivileged, white and Black, male and female, adolescent and middle-aged, conformist and rebellious. By turning their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, they have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.

From 1910 to the end of World War I, American society witnessed a tremendous outpouring of books, pamphlets, and especially newspapers espousing virulently anti-Catholic themes and calling on readers to recognize the danger of Catholicism to the American republic. By 1915 the most popular anti-Catholic newspaper, The Menace, boasted over 1.6 million weekly readers. Justin Nordstrom's Danger on the Doorstep examines for the first time the rise and abrupt decline of anti-Catholic literature during the Progressive Era, as well as the issues and motivations that informed anti-Catholic writers and their "Romanist" opponents. Nordstrom explores the connection between anti-Catholicism and nationalism from 1910-1919. He argues that the anti-Catholic literature that occupied such a prominent place in the cultural landscape derived its popularity by infusing long-standing anti-Catholic traditions with the emerging themes of progressivism, masculinity, and nationalism. Nordstrom demonstrates that in the pages of anti-Catholic texts, Catholicism emerged as a manifestation of and a scapegoat for the dangers of modernity-including rampant urbanization, immigration, political corruption, and the proliferation of power conglomerates. Samples of Menace cartoons underscore Nordstrom's arguments. Danger on the Doorstep also examines Catholics' vigorous and highly-organized responses to journalistic attacks in the 1910s, ranging from lawsuits to widespread public relations campaigns. According to Nordstrom, the unraveling of anti-Catholic print literature by the end of the 1910s and the growing public presence of American Catholicism suggest that Catholic claims to full citizenship had trumped opponents' assertions of conspiracy. This fascinating look at an understudied episode of anti-Catholic radicalism will be of interest to scholars and students of religious history, popular culture, and journalism.

Film festivals around the world are in the business of making experiences for audiences, elites, industry, professionals, and even future cultural workers. Cinema and the Festivalization of Capitalism explains why these non-profit organizations work as they do: by attracting people who work for free, while appealing to businesses and policymakers as a cheap means to illuminate the creative city and draw attention to film art. Ann Vogel's unprecedented systematic sociological analysis thus provides firm evidence for the 'festival effect', which situates the festival as a key intermediary in cinema value chains, yet also demonstrates the impact of such event culture on cultural workers' lives. By probing the various resources and institutional pillars ensuring that the festivalization of capitalism is here to stay, Vogel urges us to think critically about publicly displayed benevolence in the context of cinema-and beyond.

This collection of original essays examines debates on how written, printed, visual, and performed works produced meaning in American culture before 1900. The contributors argue that America has been a multimedia culture since the eighteenth century. According to Sandra M. Gustafson, the verbal arts before 1900 manifest a strikingly rich pattern of development and change. From the wide variety of indigenous traditions, through the initial productions of settler communities, to the elaborations of colonial, postcolonial, and national expressive forms, the shifting dynamics of performed, manuscript-based, and printed verbal art capture critical elements of rapidly changing societies. The contributors address performances of religion and government, race and gender, poetry, theater, and song. Their studies are based on texts-intended for reading silently or out loud-maps, recovered speech, and pictorial sources. As these essays demonstrate, media, even when they appear to be fixed, reflected a dynamic American experience. Contributors: Caroline F. Sloat, Matthew P. Brown, David S. Shields, Martin Bruckner, Jeffrey H. Richards, Phillip H. Round, Hilary E. Wyss, Angela Vietto, Katherine Wilson, Joan Newlon Radner, Ingrid Satelmajer, Joycelyn Moody, Philip F. Gura, Coleman Hutchison, Oz Frankel, Susan S. Williams, Laura Burd Schiavo, and Sandra M. Gustafson

This book explores the media ecologies of literature - the ways in which a literary text is interwoven in its material, technical, performative, praxeological, affective, and discursive network and which determine how it is experienced and interpreted. Through novel approaches to the complex, contingent and interdependent environments of literature, this volume demonstrates how questions about the mediality of literature - particularly in the wake of digitization - shed a new light on our understanding of textuality, reading, platforms and reception processes. By drawing on recent developments in advanced media theory, Media Ecologies of Literature emphasizes the productivity of innovative re-conceptualizations of literature as a medium in its own right. In an intentionally wide historical scope, the essays engage with literary texts from the Romantic to the contemporary period, from Charlotte Smith and Oscar Wilde to A. L. Kennedy and Mark Z. Danielewski, from the traditionally printed novel to audiobooks and reading apps.

We are at a defining point in the history of news. Following a surge of fake news, clickbait and conspiracy theories, the 2020s have ushered in a welter of existential threats for public service broadcasting. So, where do we go from here? Former Today editor and head of BBC television news Roger Mosey thinks public service broadcasters must buck the trends and in this incisive book he offers twenty core ways in which the news can save itself by getting smarter, sharper, more diverse, more nuanced and less exposed to pummelling by politicians. Mosey sees two possible futures: one in which the incitements of populist demagogues and the passions of social media are ever dominant - or one where we fight hard to retain media that has an interest in the public good and preserves truth, fairness and evidence-based judgements. From one of British broadcasting's most experienced voices comes the definitive exploration of Britain's news output and what must change if we are to avoid a future of uninspiring news, uninformed decision-making and accountability-dodging politicians.

International advertising is an important discipline in social sciences studies. Many books and articles have been published in international advertising, however only few of them contain information about advertising industry and research in specific international countries/regions. This book intends to give a local/global perspective to international advertising. Therefore, this book provides an ideal resource for academicians, researchers, advertising and marketing experts and students on a global perspective. This book includes information about international advertising and different international cultures. It covers specific countries and specific international regions regarding advertising. This text also includes a literature review of the advertising industry for various countries and regions. This book, within the social science studies discipline, is comprised of articles in international advertising about specific countries and international regions.

In nineteenth-century Toronto, people took to the streets to express their jubilation on special occasions, such as the 1860 visit of the Prince of Wales and the return in 1885 of the local Volunteers who helped to suppress the Riel resistance in the North-West. In a contrasting mood, people also took to the streets in anger to object to government measures, such as the Rebellion Losses bill, to heckle rival candidates in provincial election campaigns, to assert their ethno-religious differences, and to support striking workers. Expressive Acts examines instances of both celebration and protest when Torontonians publicly displayed their allegiances, politics, and values. The book illustrates not just the Victorian city's vibrant public life but also the intense social tensions and cultural differences within the city. Drawing from journalists' accounts in newspapers, Expressive Acts illuminates what drove Torontonians to claim public space, where their passions lay, and how they gave expression to them.

On March 15, 2011, Donald Trump changed television forever. The Comedy Central Roast of Trump was the first major live broadcast to place a hashtag in the corner of the screen to encourage real-time reactions on Twitter, generating more than 25,000 tweets and making the broadcast the most-watched Roast in Comedy Central history. The #trumproast initiative personified the media and tech industries' utopian vision for a multiscreen and communal live TV experience. In Social TV: Multiscreen Content and Ephemeral Culture, author Cory Barker reveals how the US television industry promised-but failed to deliver-a social media revolution in the 2010s to combat the imminent threat of on-demand streaming video. Barker examines the rise and fall of Social TV across press coverage, corporate documents, and an array of digital ephemera. He demonstrates that, despite the talk of disruption, the movement merely aimed to exploit social media to reinforce the value of live TV in the modern attention economy. Case studies from broadcast networks to tech start-ups uncover a persistent focus on community that aimed to monetize consumer behavior in a transitionary industry period. To trace these unfulfilled promises and flopped ideas, Barker draws upon a unique mix of personal Social TV experiences and curated archives of material that were intentionally marginalized amid pivots to the next big thing. Yet in placing this now-forgotten material in recent historical context, Social TV shows how the era altered how the industry pursues audiences. Multiscreen campaigns have shifted away from a focus on live TV and toward all-day "content" streams. The legacy of Social TV, then, is the further embedding of media and promotional material onto every screen and into every moment of life.

How did the Israeli military learn to cope with the ubiquity of media technologies that routinely document their power abuses? Why did they re-appropriate these to tighten their grip on Palestinian civilians? This book explains why a high-tech nation with advanced military technologies came to rely on the everyday media habits performed by soldiers and civilians. Daniel Mann argues that the intensification of the security regime in Palestine, and the increasingly personal use of media technologies by both soldiers and civilians, are deeply entangled. The book traces how, beginning in the 1990s, the integration of media into the lives of civilians and Israeli soldiers enabled Israel to transfer responsibilities to individual users, who in turn became legally and ethically liable for state abuses of power. Drawing on declassified documents, found footage, and social media, Mann shows how both media and warfare have been remodelled around the figure of the defensive, isolated, and insular 'individual'. Mann suggests that the focus on representations and their close visual analysis paradoxically hinders our ability to understand media. Instead of zooming into fine details, we must step back to reveal the assemblage of images, users, and infrastructure that together serve to maintain the racial, legal and aesthetic divide between Israel and Palestine.

It may be stipulated that, in the emergent media age of illusion, the scope of media issues is vast and pervasive in every field of scientific research as-well-as mystical philosophy. Issues of a "conscious universe", "universal fractal "sentience", and subjects of nanotechnology and the "Psychic paranormal" have begun to be understood as issues of the global media that have been subdivided into issues of "fake news", social media, propaganda, transpersonal psychology, human "embodiment", climate change & human intention, governmental structure, and more. This book establishes a possible template for addressing the global media mandate as a scientific study of paranormal influence on global culture. Such an approach to the "New Normal" has been mandated by recent events (especially the attempted insurrection in the U.S.) that highlight global issues of mediated influences on the dynamic of government. Futurist academics and professionals who are researching this ""new normal"" of the mediasphere and this book will be a valuable contribution to the field.

German Crime Dramas from Network Television to Netflix approaches German television crime dramas to uncover the intersections between the genre's media-specific network and post-network formats and how these negotiate with and contribute to concepts of the regional, national, and global. Part I concentrates on the ARD network's long-running flagship series Tatort (Crime Scene 1970-). Because the domestically produced crime drama succeeded in interacting with and competing against dominant U.S. formats during 3 different mediascapes, it offers strategic lessons for post-network television. Situating 9 Tatort episodes in their televisual moment within the Sunday evening flow over 38 years and 3 different German regions reveals how producers, writers, directors, critics, and audiences interacted not only with the cultural socio-political context, but also responded to the challenges aesthetically, narratively, and media-reflexively. Part II explores how post-2017 German crime dramas (Babylon Berlin, Dark, Perfume, and Dogs of Berlin) rework the genre's formal and narrative conventions for global circulation on Netflix. Each chapter concentrates on the dynamic interplay between time-shifted viewing, transmedia storytelling, genre hybridity, and how these interact with projections of cultural specificity and continue or depart from established network practices. The results offer crucial information and inspiration for producers and executives, for creative teams, program directors, and television scholars.

The presidency of Donald J. Trump, has had a considerable impacts on American politics and society. One of these was his altering of the comedic mood in America, taking comedy away from many of its traditions. His presidency turned comedy into political weaponry, as comedians on the liberal side of politics turned their efforts to ridiculing Trump's buffoonish persona, while on the conservative side, a Trump-supportive group of comedians mocked those very comedians who opposed Trump. Trump himself emerged as a comedian, performing his dark, caustic, comical routines with consummate skill at his rallies. If comedy is a pulse for a country, then it is legitimate to ask if that pulse still beating, even after Trump lost reelection in 2020. This book will address this question, examining how Trump's presidency interrupted the historical flow of American comedic traditions, and how it spread a dark mood throughout American society.

The role of disability and deafness in art Distressing Language is full of mistakes-errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. Michael Davidson engages the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics, exploring how physical and intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and poetry. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of "sounding good"? Distressing Language grows out of the author's experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Davidson maintains that verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge. Davidson discusses a range of sites, from captioning errors and Bad Lip Reads on YouTube, to the deaf artist Christine Sun Kim's audiovisual installations, and a poetic reinterpretation of the Biblical Shibboleth responding to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter of Distressing Language, giving us a closer look at a range of artistic mediums and how artists are working with the axiom of "error" to produce novel subjecthoods and possibilities.

Inspired by Raymond Williams' cultural materialism, H.F. Pimlott explores the connections between political practice and cultural form through Marxism Today's transformation from a Communist Party theoretical journal into a 'glossy' left magazine. Marxism Today's successes and failures during the 1980s are analysed through its political and cultural critiques of Thatcherism and the left, especially by Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbawm, innovative publicity and marketplace distribution, relationships with the national UK press, cultural coverage, design and format, and writing style. Wars of Position offers insights for contemporary media activists and challenges the neglect of the left press by media scholars.

Tourism consumers are increasingly demanding and seek to base their travel decision-making process on relevant and credible tourism information. In recent years, user-generated content on social media, the opinion of travel bloggers, and entertainment programs in the media have influenced the public's travel purchasing behavior and acted as a driving force for the development of tourism products, such as film tourism. It also has played a role in the evolution and development of marketing, giving rise to new applications, as in the case of digital and influence marketing. On the other hand, tourism organizations and destination management organizations face major challenges in communicating the attributes of a tourism product, since this cannot be experienced before consumption. Thus, they need to know how and in which means or platforms of communication they can inform potential consumers. Impact of New Media in Tourism provides theoretical and practical contributions in tourism and communication including current research on the influence of new media and the active role of consumers in tourism. With a focus on decision making and increasing the visibility of products and destinations, the book provides support for tourism agencies and organizations around the world. Covering themes that include digital marketing, social media, and online branding, this book is essential for professionals, academicians, researchers, and students working or studying in the field of tourism and hospitality management, marketing, advertising, and media and communications.