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How should platforms be archived? On sustainable use practices of a Telegram Archive to study Russia’s war against Ukraine Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-04-10 Miglė Bareikytė, Mykola Makhortykh, Alexander Martin, Taras Nazaruk, Yarden Skop
After Russia’s war against Ukraine destroyed people’s ability to move and communicate freely in Ukraine, many Ukrainians turned to social media and messenger apps, especially Telegram, to produce and share information. The vast amount of this digital data is privatized, ephemeral, and difficult to utilize for research, raising urgent questions about its sustainable accessibility and usability. In this
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Journalistic and reception mechanisms of remote threat domestication: EU asylum seekers in Israeli media Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-04-10 Sabina Lissitsa, Matan Aharoni, Nonna Kushnirovich
The current study reveals the mechanisms used by both media and news consumers for domesticating distant threatening events. To this end, the study applies thematic analysis to textual and visual content presented in media items (Study 1) and media content reception from the perspective of news consumers (Study 2). Study 1 sample included 209 Israeli media items in Hebrew, covering asylum seekers in
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The details that matter: Racism in Norwegian media during the Covid-19 pandemic Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Banafsheh Ranji, Cristina Archetti
This article is about the role of the media in the phenomenon of contemporary racism. More specifically, it outlines the discursive mechanisms through which insidious, hidden forms of racism are able to exist “invisible in plain sight,” even in the media and public discourse of countries, like Norway, that regard themselves as democratic and tolerant. The study is part of a broader investigation into
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Gentlemen rappers: Masculinity and traditional style in Korean popular music performance Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-03-27 Vivien Nara
Across its history, K-pop has put traditional Korean elements to a diversity of uses, including in music, dance and visual style. This article investigates the use of traditional elements in the sub-genre of Korean hip hop and rap performance. In this strongly masculine sub-genre, the cultural meanings invoked in the incorporation and remediation of traditional Korean elements take on a more particular
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Advertising as governance: The digital commodity audience and platform advertising dependency Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-03-22 Daniel Joseph, Sophie Bishop
This article draws from an ethnographic investigation of YouTube to argue the significant and specific role of advertising in the governance of platformised cultural production. We pursue this investigation in a critical dialog with theoretical approaches drawn from platform governance, platformisation and political economy communications, foregrounding the concept of the audience commodity. In our
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Ordinary lives – Extraordinary journeys: Television entertainment from game shows to reality TV Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Jean K. Chalaby
This article defends the thesis that game shows were a key influence in the development of reality TV, and understanding the latter depends on our knowledge of the former. The first section addresses the knowledge gap about game shows and asks the following questions: What are they made of, and what are the core elements that distinguish them from any other genre? The second part examines the relationship
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The life-transition perspective in mediatization research: Exploring lived experiences of media-related social changes through transitioning social roles Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Maja Sonne Damkjaer
This article introduces the life-transition perspective as a novel conceptual framework for mediatization research. By examining individuals’ media engagement during significant life transitions, this perspective illuminates the interplay between media-communicative practices and transitioning social roles. The article argues that the life-transition perspective offers methodological advantages and
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Europe is not like you see on TV! Ramadan drama as a platform of education on Harga in Tunisia Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Omar Sayfo
The increase in clandestine migrants to Italy following the 2010 Tunisian uprising has been an issue of popular and political concern in both countries. This article investigates Harga (2021, 2022), a top-rated and critically acclaimed drama series. Produced and aired by Tunisian national television as a vehicle of entertainment-education, Harga strove to make a geopolitical intervention in the process
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Mind the Gap: Facebook’s measures against information disorder do not go far enough Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos, Wilson Ceron
In recent decades, a revolutionary transformation has substantially altered the way people access information. Online social media platforms have become a significant facet of our daily lives. The intersection of political discourse with the proliferation of what is commonly termed as “fake news” on these platforms has given rise to an environment that does not necessarily foster independent and critical
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Why mainstream news media still matter Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 David Deacon, David Smith, Dominic Wring
It is frequently claimed that mainstream news organisations are in crisis and becoming ever more marginalised in the contemporary high-choice media environment. Such claims frequently conflate different challenges facing the industry, resulting in over-generalised claims about the prospects for established news brands. In this article, we identify four related crises: reach, resource, reputation and
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Combining motherhood and work in the creative industries: Mothers have the problem Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Anne O’Brien, Sarah Arnold
This article examines film and television workers’ experience of mothering in Ireland and argues that not only are mothers constructed as a ‘problem’ in these Creative Industries workplaces because of their care work duties, but the ‘problem’ of work’s incompatibility with motherhood is presented as one to be ‘solved’ by mothers themselves. Drawing from the scholarship on motherhood in film and television
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From studio to screen: The production processes of Polish televised football and discursive (re)constructions of race/ethnicity Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Arne van Lienden, Jacco van Sterkenburg, Mélodine Sommier, Radoslaw Kossakowski
In this study, we shed light on the relationship between the production processes in televised football in Poland and representations of race/ethnicity. Previous research has extensively explored representations of race/ethnicity in mediated sports texts, but there remains a gap in understanding the production processes and their connection to these representations, particularly in contexts beyond
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‘What a funny looking video’: Using allegorical representations of technological change to reflect on future digital communication and design challenges Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Yaron Meron
This paper presents a reflective examination of challenges to design and communication from the current digital revolution, using the prism of a 1980s television advertisement for the Yellow Pages. Originating at the same time as the height of the desktop publishing revolution, the advert illuminates a transitional period in the evolution of digital technology and media communications, marked by changing
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More than keyboard heroes? #ichoosefish, disaster framing, and environmental protests in Vietnam Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Thai Nguyen Van Quoc, Elen-Maarja Trell, Gunnar Mallon
This paper investigates the role of social media in mobilizing environmentalism amid authoritarian restrictions, focusing on the Vietnam coastal pollution of 2016. It contributes to current academic debates by showing how elements that are apparently mundane and irrelevant become the stage for political action within social media. We examined the interface of connective actions (social media activism)
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Mapping a pluralistic continuum of approaches to digital disconnection Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Morgan Quinn Ross, Alicia Gilbert, Julius Klingelhoefer, Mora Matassi, Lise-Marie Nassen, Sara Van Bruyssel, Alice Verlinden, Douglas A Parry
The study of digital disconnection – the voluntary non-use of digital media – is a growing research domain characterized by increasingly pluralistic approaches. To map this diverse terrain, we offer an analytical heuristic: a continuum of approaches to digital disconnection. This tool proposes one primary dimension – viewing digital disconnection as individually functional to socially meaningful (ontology)
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Indigenous dance, cultural continuity, and resistance: A netnographic analysis of the Palestinian Dabke in the diaspora Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Zeana Hamdonah, Janelle Joseph
Contending with the structural erasure and appropriation of their land, culture, history, and traditions imposed by the settler state, Palestinians have adopted/adapted traditional cultural elements to further their nationalist aspirations and assert their rights as Palestine’s Indigenous people. In the diaspora, Palestinians practice and perform the dabke folkdance, as a tool of anti-colonial memory
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Symbolic power of sports journalists as challenged by external recognition of women’s sports performance Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Robin Guyot, Fabien Ohl, Lucie Schoch
This study examines journalists’ working experiences to understand how they hinder the recognition of female footballers’ performances. It relies on 16 semi-structured interviews with Swiss sports journalists on Swiss French-speaking television. Guided by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, the study shows that advancements in the recognition of women’s football are promoted by a combination of external actors’
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‘Hypocrite!’ Affective and argumentative engagement on Twitter, following the Christchurch terrorist attack Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 John E. Richardson, Eva Haifa Giraud, Elizabeth Poole, Ed de Quincey
This article intervenes in debates about whether public-facing social media enable the rapid spread of hate speech, or whether these platforms can offer valuable opportunities to contest it. Advancing scholarship on ‘networked counter-publics’ and research emphasising the affective dimensions of digital media, we identify three different modes of counter-public contestation that coalesced on Twitter
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Remembering Marielle Franco: Haunting online presence and the memorialization of resistance on social media Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Raiana de Carvalho
Social media has transformed how we construct collective memory, with increased opportunities for dispersed individuals and groups to participate in collective remembrance. With the ever-changing nature of social media practices, the field of critical memory studies begs for more research on the role of digital media in memory construction. Based on a critical rhetorical analysis of YouTube and Instagram
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How “original” are Netflix Original films? Mapping and understanding the recycling of content in the age of streaming cinema Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Eduard Cuelenaere
This article examines Netflix’s recycling content strategies in the era of streaming cinema. It starts from the assumption that because of the different institutional logic at work in the land of SVODs, the affordances that recycled content brings may not be as effective (and necessary) as it has been in Hollywood. Using a database-centered approach, we analyze 658 Netflix Original films. Between 2015
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Paralympic Broadcasting in Sub-Saharan Africa: Production Politics and the Reimagined Postcolonial Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Emma Pullen, Mufunanji Magalasi, Jessica Noske-Turner
The Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games was broadcast for the first time on free to air (FTA) television across 49 territories in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article charts the story of this historic development and marks the first study to explore Paralympic broadcast production beyond the cultural specificities of Global North/Western-centric media practices, infrastructure availability and disability discourses
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Struggling for the right to struggle: Cultural workers’ labour rights and unions Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Hoyoung Kim
This paper explores how writers in the South Korean broadcasting industry have collectively struggled against their precarious working conditions and faced distinctive difficulties in taking their collective actions, including unionization. Based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 23 research participants, this paper examines why and how these South Korean writers have established various
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Remembering a disastrous past to imagine catastrophic future(s) on social media: The expected Istanbul earthquake Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Erol Gülüm
This article explores how collective memory of the 1999 Marmara earthquake frames collective thinking of “the expected Istanbul earthquake” through numerous catastrophic earthquake scenarios posted on the prominent Turkish social media platform called Ekşi Sözlük for nearly two decades. The article first integrates memory, media, and disaster studies to theorize how a looming catastrophe is (re)imagined
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Towards a theory of participatory diplomacy via the Eurovision Song Contest Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Jessica Carniel
The Eurovision Song Contest is officially a non-political event but has nevertheless been a useful tool for participating nations’ public and cultural diplomacy strategies. While Eurovision’s diplomatic utility for states is subject to much scholarly attention, little attention has been paid to how fans and audiences participate actively in these processes as political agents and actors. Drawing upon
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Martín-Barbero’s style Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-01-06 Omar Rincón
In Latin America, Jesús Martín-Barbero is a pop star and a beloved scholar with thousands of followers captured by his original way of thinking, imagining, and researching the relations between communication, culture, and politics. This essay explains five characteristics of Martín-Barbero’s style: (i) his reflections about expressions of popular and mass culture such as music, telenovelas, fairs,
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Tasks, sacrifices and digitized rituals: interpellating the Indian subject through rites of nationalism Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2024-01-02 Sangeet Kumar
This essay advances the concept of ritualized nationalism in order to understand the rise of right wing populism in India. It analyzes Narendra Modi’s strategy of assigning tasks and seeking sacrifices from citizens in the name of nation building to understand how it has helped make nationalism a pervasive phenomenon that is unprecedented in India’s history. The essay utilizes the theory of rituals
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Compelled TikTok creators? The ambivalent affordances of the short video app for Filipino musicians Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Jeremy Tintiangko, Anthony Y.H. Fung, Jindong Leo-Liu
This study is concerned with the incorporation of TikTok by Filipino musicians in their performances, promotion strategies, and other career-related endeavors. As the music artists are compelled, w...
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The use of animation in NGOs’ audio-visual communication about solidarity and migration Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-05-05 Guglielmo Scafirimuto
One of the latest transformations of humanitarian communication in recent years has certainly been the growing adoption of the language of animation, especially in online media. Looking at the effe...
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Deplatforming “the people”: media populism, racial capitalism, and the regulation of online reactionary networks Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Reed Van Schenck
This essay contributes to a materialist theory of media populism by criticizing America First, an influential U.S. American reactionary live-stream hosted by Nicholas J. Fuentes, and its Groyper fa...
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Twitter trolling of Pakistani female journalists: A patriarchal society glance Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Ayesha Siddiqua, Jiakun Gong, Iffat Ali Aksar
The incorporation of new media technology into journalistic practices led to online harassment, particularly of female journalists. The researchers investigated the tweets of four prominent Pakista...
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Audiovisual production in Brazil: Will its public support survive the new political scenario? Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Othon Fernando Jambeiro Barbosa, Kátia Santos de Morais, Natacha Stefanini Canesso, Juliano Mendonça Domingues da Silva, Milena Silvino Evangelista
This article discusses public funding of the development of Brazilian audiovisual production and the main agents involved in its conception and implementation. Public policies impacted the total re...
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Entertainment journalism as a resource for public connection: a qualitative study of digital news audiences Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Joel Penney
Entertainment journalism has long been a marginal object of academic inquiry due to its reputation as a trivial distraction from public affairs journalism, yet this view has since been challenged b...
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Wireless telephone, materiality, and making of the national auditory in Turkey Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Nazlı Özkan
This paper focuses on the radio’s novelty years in 1920s Turkey to examine how the functions of wireless technology as a material artifact are negotiated in ways that fashion a national auditory. M...
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Understanding the popularity and affordances of TikTok through user experiences Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Andreas Schellewald
In this paper I discuss the affordances and popularity of the short-video app TikTok from an audience studies point of view. I do so by drawing on findings from ethnographic fieldwork with young ad...
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Dudes, boobs, and GameCubes: video game advertising enters adolescence Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Megan Condis, Jess Morrissette
When a product is marketed according to gender, it is often positioned as a way for consumers to enact that gender. In the following pages, we trace how video game advertising “grew up,” transition...
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Disablement in figure skating: media, celebrity, spectacle Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Adan Jerreat-Poole
Blood on the ice. Cheers when the injured athlete stands and limps off the field. Comebacks, backflips, and back injuries. Celebrity athletes are punished and rewarded for their abilities, includin...
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Rethinking telepresence: post- and pre-COVID-19 Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Jérôme Bourdon
Following the marked increase in the use of digital technologies during the recent pandemic, the article reconsiders the concept of social telepresence, in the sense of interpersonal connection at ...
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Exploring data journalism practices in Africa: data politics, media ecosystems and newsroom infrastructures Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-15 Sarah Chiumbu, Allen Munoriyarwa
Extant research on data journalism in Africa has focused on newsroom factors and the predilections of individual journalists as determinants of the uptake of data journalism on the continent. This ...
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How to train your algorithm: the struggle for public control over private audience commodities on Tiktok Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Corinne Jones
Social media users are increasingly aware of the politics of their viewing habits, and they attempt to express these politics through interactions with proprietary algorithms. Combining theories ab...
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Public service media and race relations in postcolonial Britain: BBC and immigrant programming, 1965–1988 Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Julia Giese, Diwas Bisht, Aswin Punathambekar
This article explores how British Asians negotiated the politics of race in the formative years of British broadcasting from the 1960s to the 1980s. Marked by significant changes within the BBC and...
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Analyzing caste in media production cultures: a case study from South India Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Deepti Komalam
This paper sifts through the affective connotations and methodological issues that crop up during conversations about caste with dominant caste (savarna) women working in the Malayalam language fil...
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Digital subscribers: between freedom and constraint Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Guillermo Echauri
This article addresses the features, affordances, and limitations that emerge when purchasing and using digital subscriptions, particularly streaming entertainment services. Using a qualitative app...
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Framing data witnessing: Airwars and the production of authority in conflict monitoring Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-03-06 Heather Ford, Michael Richardson
Civilian victims of aerial warfare too often go uncounted and unrecognised by the belligerents. Myriad images and video of attacks against Syrian civilians did little to end their suffering, for ex...
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“That’s PEGI, the American system!”: perceptions of video game age ratings among families in Norway Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Khalid Ezat Azam
The Pan-European Game Information (PEGI) age rating system was established as a self-regulatory system in 2003 and has been touted as a success story of modern European media regulation. Today PEGI...
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Journalism as profession helping women in conflict to move beyond victimhood discourse: a case study of Kashmir Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Ruheela Hassan
Kashmir, the northernmost valley of Indian territory, is an acknowledged conflict area reeling under continuous violence for the past three decades. It is more in focus due to militancy, civil unre...
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Onlife intersectionalities as flows of playbour: the case of women in gaming Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Sine N Just, Kai Storm, Sandra-Louise Bukuru
Digital capitalism troubles classical notions of contextual singularity and agential unity and destabilises delineations of online and offline realities. Following Floridi, this paper applies the c...
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Patenting sociality: uncovering the operational logics of Facebook through critical patent analysis Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-24 Lungani Hlongwa, Fernan Talamayan
While the growing influence of digital platforms on social life is now widely recognized, scholars continue to grapple with the operation of digital platforms and their mediation of social life. Th...
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From A to Zari: the impact of Baghch-e-Simsim on gender equity attitudes among children and parents in Afghanistan Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-24 Kim Foulds, Daniel Labin, Lilith Dollard, Estee Bardanashvili, Farhad Hashimi
Inequitable access to education is a widely acknowledged development challenge, an issue even more pronounced in conflict-affected communities like Afghanistan, where insecurity and violence target...
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Heterodox approaches to save the day: a framework for analysing data-related innovation in legacy media businesses Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Hanna Jemmer, Indrek Ibrus
That legacy media organisations are struggling in this era of global platformisation and datafication is well established. Yet, the power of platforms as well as critiques of them could be seen as ...
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Sellers, Shifters, Sharers & Science Communicators: The initial beliefs and positions of fitness influencers and creators on Instagram Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-19 Kyle Kubler
This article investigates the initial beliefs about social media held by fitness influencers and content creators. As influencers and content creators continue to play a growing role in mediating o...
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Protests, Internet shutdowns, and disinformation in a transitioning state Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Kiran Vinod Bhatia, Mariam Elhussein, Ben Kreimer, Trevor Snapp
Internet shutdowns authorized by the state are becoming a recurring case in countries under military or authoritarian rule, such as Sudan. This article examines how the military in Sudan shut down ...
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Rethinking affective publics as media rituals through temporality, performativity and liminality Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Haktan Ural
This article calls for a rethinking of the formation of affective publics as a ritual process. Given the particularities of networked media, I suggest that media rituals extend into the formation o...
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Framing the Israel-Palestine conflict 2021: Investigation of CNN’s coverage from a peace journalism perspective Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Sima Bhowmik, Jolene Fisher
This study uses textual analysis to examine CNN’s World News coverage of the 12-day conflict between Israel and Palestine in May 2021. We bring into conversation the influential factors that shape ...
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The wellbeing of ordinary people in factual television production Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Emily Rose Coleman
This article aims to explore the links between the structural organisation of the television industry and the wellbeing of the ordinary people who take part in its productions. Following a series o...
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Crosscurrents: Welfare Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Anne Kaun, Stine Lomborg, Christian Pentzold, Doris Alhutter, Karolina Sztandar-Sztanderska
In this crosscurrent contribution, we approach the notion of welfare through the lens of the data welfare state. We, further, suggest that datafied welfare can be fruitfully studied with the capabi...
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Audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes: denial mechanisms and acts of moral justification Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Zhe Xu
The study of the audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes has received relatively little scholarly attention. This article begins to ameliorate this gap in knowledge by examining how...
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Digital dependence: Online fatigue and coping strategies during the COVID-19 lockdown Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-11 Emilie Munch Gregersen, Sofie Læbo Astrupgaard, Malene Hornstrup Jespersen, Tobias Priesholm Gårdhus, Kristoffer Albris
As the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns forced populations across the world to become completely dependent on digital devices for working, studying, and socializing, there has been no shortage of publis...
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Why so serious? Studying humor on the right Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-02-11 AJ Bauer
This essay reviews two new books examining different aspects of right-wing humor, “The Souls of White Jokes” (Stanford University Press, 2022) by Raúl Pérez and “That’s Not Funny” (University of Ca...
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Chatting with the dead: the hermeneutics of thanabots Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-01-22 Leah Henrickson
In 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle released a feature article about a man who chose to resurrect his deceased fiancée by training a chatbot system built on OpenAI’s GPT language models on her old...
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South African tabloid coverage of Covid19: The Daily Sun Media, Culture & Society (IF 3.248) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Tanja Bosch, Herman Wasserman
Around the world, tabloid newspapers are routinely surrounded by a moral and cultural panic. They are criticised for lowering standards of journalism and privileging sensation above substance, dive...