F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: »Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.« In the 1990s, nobody fell deeper than O.J. Simpson. Once considered a national treasure, the athlete was accused of ...brutally slaying his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994. Within days, the media and public developed an unprecedented obsession with the story, turning a murder investigation and trial into a sensationalized reality show. Tatjana Neubauer examines the mediatization, deliberate manipulation, and the simplification of popular criminal trials for profit on television. She demonstrates that TV conflated legal proceedings into entertainment programming by commodifying events, people, and places.
Racial reckoning was a recurrent theme throughout the summer of 2020, a response to George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented impact of COVID on marginalized groups. Theater and Crisis proposes a ...literary and theatrical study of how Floyd's killing could possibly happen in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, and in the supposedly post-racial era following the election of Barack Obama. In the days and months following Floyd's death, there were nightly protests in streets across the United States and broader world. At the same time, theater performances were forced to shift online to video conferencing platforms and to find new ways to engage audiences. In each case, groups made shared meaning through storytelling and narrative, a liberatory process of myth-making and reverence that author Patrice D. Rankine calls “epiphanic encoding.” Rather than approaching the problem of racial reckoning through history, where periodization and progress are dominant narratives, Theater and Crisis argues that myth and memory allow for better theorization about recurring events from the past, their haunting, and what these apparent ghosts ask of us. Building on the study of myth as active, processual storytelling, Rankine acknowledges that it grounds and orients groups toward significant events. Theater and Crisis aligns narratives about Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, among others, with ancient, mythic figures such as Christ, Dionysus, Oedipus, and Moses. As living and verbal visitations, these stories performed on stage encode the past through their epiphanies in the present, urging audiences toward shared meaning. Rankine traces the cyclical hauntings of race through the refiguring of mythic stories across the past 75 years in the plays of James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Antoinette Nwandu, and many more, and in response to flashpoints in US racial history, such as the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the wars on drugs and crime, and the continued violence against and disenfranchisement of Black people into the twenty-first century. Theater and Crisis explores the appearance of myth on the American stage and showcases the ongoing response by the theatrical establishment to transform the stage into a space for racial reckoning. This timely book is essential reading for scholars of theater studies, classics, and American studies.
The extraordinary global success of Turkish drama serials is a significant development in contemporary popular culture. This book presents comparative audience data from three different regions to ...explore its ramifications across the Global South. We learn how this phenomenon has transformed Turkey—a Muslim-majority country—into the world’s second-largest producer of scripted television serials, enticing audiences from all over the world. The book takes an audience-centred approach, investigating the reasons for the allure of Turkish dramas to Arab, Latin American, and Israeli audiences. In tandem, it explores Turkey's changing foreign policy, economic, and trade relationships since the turn of the millennium, which have coincided with the enormous success of the country's television output. It also analyses the role and importance of Turkish dramas as a soft-power tool by scrutinizing how they have influenced viewers' perceptions of Turkey, its people, and its culture. This volume will appeal to those working in various disciplines—from media and communication, international relations, public diplomacy, sociology, and Middle Eastern studies. The material will also be of great relevance to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduate students, academics, scholars and researchers.
Meme marketing has become a common media practice in the advertising industry. Many companies advertise on social media using memes to generate attention for their brands, products and services and ...to signal that they are part of the digital media culture. However, the use of memes is fraught with risk. If advertisers are not aware of the media practices of memeing, they run the risk of using memes incorrectly and being ridiculed or excluded by their target group. Subcultures on platforms such as Reddit are meticulous about protecting their media culture from outsiders. Advertisers there are suspected of only exploiting memes for profit. So how does the anti-commercial production, circulation and reception of memes in social media relate to the visual use of memes in advertising? Kevin Pauliks answers this question in eight media praxeographic samples that examine the difference between memeing and meme marketing and show how memes are used in advertising using different brands such as IKEA, Gucci, Siemens and Sixt.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-ND licence This book pulls back the curtain on the link between technology and activism. It explores the intricate ways activists from Italy, Spain and ...Greece interact with data on a day-to-day basis and shows how they navigate the impact of digital media on today’s grassroots politics. It is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of how modern politics' deep media integration reshape social movements and contemporary political landscapes.
Wir sind umgeben von einer Vielzahl an Informationsströmen, die uns selbstverständlich erscheinen. Um diese digitalen Kulturen zu beschreiben, entwickeln medienwissenschaftliche Arbeiten Theorien ...einer Welt im Fluss. Dabei erliegen ihre Diagnosen oftmals einem Technikfetisch und vernachlässigen gesellschaftliche Strukturen. Mathias Denecke legt eine systematische Kritik dieser Theoriebildung vor. Dazu zeichnet er die Geschichte der Rede von strömenden Informationen in der Entwicklung digitaler Computer nach und diskutiert, wie der Begriff für Gegenwartsbeschreibungen produktiv gemacht werden kann.
Influencer*innen in den sozialen Medien sprechen ihre Fans auf persönlicher Ebene an, denn nur so sind ihre Produktempfehlungen glaubwürdig. Doch inwiefern thematisieren sie dabei auch das Gender ...ihrer Follower*innen? Anastasia-Patricia Och liefert Einblicke in die multimodale Gestaltung von YouTube-Videos erfolgreicher Influencer*innen und in die Mediennutzung Jugendlicher, die sowohl während als auch nach der Rezeption gegenderte Praktiken umfasst. Im Fokus ihrer parainteraktiven und genderbezogenen Analyse stehen Beauty-Videos und FIFA-Let's-Plays. Außerdem kommen Jugendliche zu ihren Erfahrungen mit diesen Formaten und ihrem eigenen Umgang mit YouTube zu Wort.
Inwiefern spiegeln Videospiele und ihre Kultur gesellschaftliche Machtverhältnisse? Vor welchen Herausforderungen steht die Spieleindustrie und welche strukturellen Mechanismen prägen sie? Wie können ...virtuelle Welten utopische Möglichkeitsräume eröffnen? Erstmalig im deutschsprachigen Raum versammeln die Beiträger*innen kritische Perspektiven auf herrschende Ideologien sowie die Produktion und die Nutzung eines Mediums, dessen gesellschaftliche Relevanz stetig wächst. Dabei finden sie Zugänge über Kunst, Wissenschaft sowie Journalismus, um Videospiele im Spannungsfeld von Kapitalismus, Patriarchat und Kolonialismus unter die Lupe zu nehmen.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, turning comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Multipoint videoconferencing in particular has become a favored ...means for web-based forms of remote communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Taking the recent mainstreaming of videoconferencing as its point of departure, this anthology examines the complex mediality of this new form of social interaction. Connecting theoretical reflection with material case studies, the contributors question practices, politics and aesthetics of videoconferencing and the specific meanings it acquires in different historical, cultural and social contexts.
A visionary report on the revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century.
Digital_Humanities is a ...compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question “What is digital humanities?,” it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry—including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation—to show their relevance for contemporary culture. Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.