What does it mean to regard cinema as technology? How do special effects change our experience of contemporary film? How important is the Internet to the film industry and film fans? "CineTech" explores these debates and examines the important intersection between film and new media. Providing a comprehensive introduction to the digital practices used in film, this book moves from historical perspectives to up-to-date analysis. Applying these debates through specific case studies, examples are drawn from recent Hollywood blockbusters such as the "Star Wars" prequels and the "Matrix" trilogy. Case studies, exercises, and suggestions for further study make this an ideal resource for courses and student assignments in both film and media studies.

An international collection of papers focused on media, culture and society in postcommunist Russia. Contributors deploy a wealth of primary data in examining the kinds of issues that are central to our understanding of the kind of system that has been established in the worlds largest country after a period of far-reaching change.

"Re-reading Popular Culture" is an entertaining investigation of the meanings and value of popular culture today. It explores the theme of cultural citizenship by combining textual analysis and media reception theory to analyze popular culture.
Includes such contemporary issues as the rewriting of masculinity after the success of feminism, and the layers of meaning in semi-public and private talk of multiculturalism and ethnicity
Traces its topics across a variety of media forms and texts, including sports; detective fiction and police series; and children's television and games
Clearly and accessibly written for the student, scholar, and general reader.

Bridal magazines have become increasingly popular in Western society, proliferating the idea of a 'princess bride' on her 'big day'. Yet little has been written on how the ever-expanding wedding media and the popular wedding culture constructs gender and affects the ways women live and experience their weddings. Offering a critique of contemporary wedding discourse, this book marries together analyses of media texts and their reception to propose a new approach to media discourse. The analysis richly illustrates how women are invited to embrace not only the stereotypical idea of bridal femininity but also a consumptive way of experiencing it. Through examination of brides' accounts of their 'big days', the book observes the imprints of the popular gender imagery on their self-portraits and self-narratives, and describes the women's diverse approaches to them. Based on insights from gender and critical discourse studies, sociology and audience research, this exploration illuminates the ongoing debate on 'media and gender' and its methodological approaches.

Contemporary anthropology is done in a world where social and digital media are playing an increasingly significant role, where anthropological and arts practices are often intertwined in museum and public intervention contexts, and where anthropologists are encouraged to engage with mass media. Because anthropologists are often expected and inspired to ensure their work engages with public issues, these opportunities to disseminate work in new ways and to new publics simultaneously create challenges as anthropologists move their practice into unfamiliar collaborative domains and expose their research to new forms of scrutiny. In this volume, contributors question whether a fresh public anthropology is emerging through these new practices.

"This book is an examination of German media attempts to deal with the recent past at a time of heightened Cold War tensions, focusing on East and West German radio broadcasts around the time of the first Auschwitz Trial in 1963. It highlights reportage on the trial and the ideological interpretations of the Holocaust used by broadcasters"--Provided by publisher.

Written by leading scholars in a range of disciplines (from law, philosophy, politics and sociology to media studies and translation studies), this book provides key insights into the globalization of violence and the role of translation in this context, and includes detailed empirical analyses of media representations and translators accounts.

Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated courses addressing video games and digital play as significant phenomena in contemporary everyday life and media cultures. Seth Giddings looks to fill a gap by focusing on the relationship between the actual and virtual worlds of play in everyday life. He addresses both the continuities and differences between digital play and longer-established modes of play (role-play, play with toys, etc.). The 'gameworlds' title indicates both the virtual world designed into the videogame and the wider environments in which play is manifested: social relationships between players; hardware and software; between the virtual worlds of the game and the media universes they extend (e.g. Harry Potter, Lego, Star Wars); and the gameworlds generated by children's imaginations and creativity (through talk and role-play, drawings and outdoor play). The gameworld raises questions about who, and what, is in play.Drawing on recent theoretical work in science and technology studies and new media studies, a key theme is the material and embodied character of these gameworlds and their components (players' bodies, computer hardware, toys, virtual physics, the physical environment, etc.). Gameworlds uses each chapter to discuss small-scale ethnographic studies and close analyses of particular videogames, with shorter sections addressing the theoretical and conceptual issues that arise. Building on detailed case studies, this is the first book to explore the nature of play in the virtual worlds of video games and how this play relates to, and crosses over into, everyday play in the actual world.

The word 'digital' refers to both digital data, as used in computers, and also the digits, fingers, of the hand, and thus by extension touch, which has long been a trope for connectivity, community, and participation. Thus, in its drive towards greater connectivity, our culture is digital in more than one sense, in that it increasingly encourages such contact (from the Latin, 'com', together, and 'tangere', to touch). But at the same time such technologies always involve separation, gap and distance. Community Without Community in Digital Culture suggests that networks always involve this other aspect of touch, separation, distance and gap, as a necessary concomitant of our fundamental technicity. Thus, against the prevailing presumptions that new technologies involve greater contact, relationality and community, this book proposes that they exemplify the gap inherent in touch, the 'inconceivable, small, 'infinitesimal difference'' that separates us from each other in time and space. In this such technologies are part of the history of the death of God, the loss of an overarching metaphysical framework which would bind us together in some form of relation or communion. This can be understood in terms of contingency, which has the same root as contact.

- Nigel Holmes is one of the leading graphic and information designers of the late 20th and 21st century - The book is written in non-academic, easy to understand language, is full of visual examples (historical and contemporary) and will appeal to any level of reader - This is the first book to focus on humor and joy in relation to information graphics and data visualization, and it teaches the reader how to use humor and joy to make visual information more understandable

Sensationalist newspaper coverage of crime has been a matter of keen public interest. But what role has sensationalist reporting played in creating public understanding of the criminal justice system in England and Wales? This book provides an answer, presenting an engaging account of crime reportage from the late eighteenth century to the present day; from the era of specialist reporters to the days of modern investigative journalism. Written in a lively and accessible style and locating familiar crime stories from Constance Kent to Sara Payne in their contemporary presentations to newspaper readers, the chapters explore crime news in broadsheet, quality and tabloid publications and explain its importance to how the criminal justice system has been understood. The book identifies why particular crime stories came to public prominence and how these were constructed and presented for popular consumption, offering new ways of thinking about reportage and the criminal justice system.

The traditional documentary programming of network television's bygone era has given way to the recent explosion of ratings-driven, personality-based news magazine programming. While ostensibly conforming to a high standard of public service, these magazines, as even some of their producers admit, must succumb to the forces of public appetite and profit maximization in order to be competitive.

This study examines this phenomenon of the electronic magazine and shows how the soft news programs affect the public's view of American politics and culture. Maintaining the distinction between the syndicated, tabloid-style programming (whose survival depends almost entirely on rating success) and the more responsibly conceived network magazine programming, Spragens provides a thorough content analysis of "60 Minutes," "Dateline NBC," "20/20," and similar network series. His study traces the development of the television magazine genre from the original "60 Minutes" through the current crop of news programs; it tracks the soft/hard or sensational/serious content dichotomy and its relation to ratings; and it draws conclusions about the trends in soft news programming and their impact on the American public.

Drawing upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and cinema studies, Salgo presents a new way of looking at the "art of European unification." The official visual narratives of the European Union constitute the main object of inquiry - the iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and the videos through which the supranational elite seek to generate "collective effervescence," allow for a European carnival to take place, and prompt citizens to pledge allegiance to the sacred dogma of the "ever closer union," thereby strengthening the mythical sources of the organization's legitimacy. The author seeks to illustrate how and why the federalist utopia turned into a political soteriology after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.

We live in a world of the image. In many ways, images have replaced words as the defining aspect of cultural identity, whilst at the same time they have become part of our global culture. The rapidly developing discipline of visual cultural studies has become the key ares for examining the issues of our age. This book explains issues and concepts such as psychoanalysis, cultural theory, psotmodernism, queer theory, gender studies and narrative theory. The major theorists are all covered as the authors look at the significance of the visual in the works of Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard and Guattari. Taking up a range of themes such as spectatorship, pleasure, power, doubles, hallucination and the frame, the book explains them within the context of these theoretical developments.

From the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century, printed disputations were the main academic output of universities. This genre is especially attractive as it deals with the most significant cultural and scientific innovations of the early modern period, such as the printing revolution and the development of new methods in philosophy, education and scholarly exchange via personal networks. Until recently, academic disputations have attracted comparatively little scholarly attention. This volume provides for the first time a comprehensive study of the early modern disputation culture, both through theoretical discussions and overviews, and numerous case studies that analyze particular features of disputations in various European regions.

This timely collection provides high-quality interdisciplinary essays which address lesbian and bisexual representation in popular television shows such as "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "E.R.," "Queer as Folk," "Sex and the City," "The L Word" and "The O.C.." It also offers a critical introduction to queer women on television and to the scholarship that discusses such representation, and allows a framework for a multiplicity of viewpoints on a variety of topics and series.

Taking a close look at ordinary people 'telling their own story', Nancy Thumim explores self-representations in contemporary digital culture in settings as diverse as reality TV, online storytelling, and oral histories displayed in museums. Self-Representation and Digital Culture addresses the institutional contexts of production, technology and form of the texts, and the point of view of those who represent themselves. This highly original research examines how contradictory and widely different politics inform and shape examples of 'speaking for oneself'. Thumim argues that analysis and theorization of the activity of self-representation is vital for media, communication and cultural studies at a time when examples of this genre both surround us and appear, at first glance, to all be alike.

Travel and Representation is a timely volume of essays that explores and re-examines the various convergences between literature, art, photography, television, cinema and travel. The essays do so in a way that appreciates the entanglement of representations and travel at a juncture in theoretical work that recognizes the limits of representation, things that lie outside of representation and the continuing power of representation. The emphasis is on the myriad ways travelers/scholars employ representation in their writing/analyses as they re-think the intersections between travelers, fields of representation, imagination, emotions and corporeal experiences in the past, the present and the future.

Global Media Convergence and Cultural Transformation: Emerging Social Patterns and Characteristics aims to engage the complex relationship between technology, culture, and socio-economic elements by exploring it in a transnational, yet contextually grounded, framework. This book explores diverse perspectives and approaches, from political economy to cultural studies, and from policy studies to ethnography, In order to reflect varied perspectives on the convergence of culture and new media technology.

Winner, 2021 Ray and Pat Browne Edited Collection Award, given by the Popular Culture Association How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we're fighting for-not just what we're fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes "civic imagination" as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture-from Beyonce to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR-for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children's literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

This collection explores the representation and performance of queer youth in media cultures, primarily examining TV, film and online new media. Specific themes of investigation include the context of queer youth suicide and educational strategies to avert this within online new media, and the significance of coming out videos produced online.

This book represents a major milestone in the endeavour to understand how communication is impacting on the fashion industry and on societal fashion-related practices and values in the digital age. It presents the proceedings of FACTUM 19, the first in a series of fashion communication conferences that highlights important theoretical and empirical work in the field. Beyond documenting the latest scientific insights, the book is intended to foster the sharing of methodological approaches, expand the dialogue between communications' studies and fashion-related disciplines, help establish an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars, and offer encouragement and fresh ideas to junior researchers. It is of high value to academics and students in the fields of fashion communication, fashion marketing, visual studies in fashion, digital transformation of the fashion industry, and the cultural heritage dimension of fashion. In addition, it is a key resource for professionals seeking sound research on fashion communication and marketing.

Known as ""Captain Fiction,"" Gordon Lish (b. 1934) is among the most influential--and controversial--figures in modern American letters. As an editor at Esquire (1969-1977), Alfred A. Knopf (1977-1995), and The Quarterly (1987-1995) and as a teacher both in and outside the university system, he has worked closely with many of the most pioneering writers of recent times, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Sam Lipsyte, and Ben Marcus. A prolific author of stories and novels, Lish has also won a cult following for his own fiction, earning comparisons with Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Conversations with Gordon Lish collects all of Lish's major interviews, covering the entire span of his extraordinary career. Ranging from 1965 to 2015, these interviews document his pivotal role in the period's defining developments: the impact of the Californian counterculture, the rise and decline of so-called literary ""minimalism,"" dramatic transformations in book and magazine publishing, and the ongoing growth of creative writing instruction. Over time, Lish--a self-described ""dynamic conversationalist""-- forges an evolving conversation not only with his interviewers, but with the central trends of twentieth-century literary history. This book will be essential reading not only for students and fans of contemporary fiction, but for writers too: included are several interviews in which Lish discusses his legendary writing classes. Indeed, these pieces themselves amount to a masterclass in Lishian literary language--each is a work of art in its own right.

This book offers an interpretation of the myths that shape television images and reinforce this culture's dominant ideology. It provides histories of all television genres and connects developments within each genre to political, social, and cultural shifts in the larger society. This new Second Edition updates the previous edition's close textual analysis of representative series and serials to mid-1993, reflecting the significant changes that have occurred in both the business of television in the United States and in the larger society's dominant ideology. The Second Edition also reflects significant advances in critical theory related to the study of television that have occurred over the past decade, and it incorporates both the structuralist critical position (dominant in the first edition) and a post-structuralist position which moves away from a determinist textual analysis of ideology to a consideration of possible multiple decodings.