Media & Culture Review

Journal articles published between March and June 2016 are covered in this collection, dealing with material, technical, institutional, and labor aspects of media industry transformation and consumption, as well as the globalizing play of cultural capital influence on media micro markets.

Starlets, Subscribers and Beneficiaries: Disney, Latino Children and Television Labor

Christopher Chavez, Aleah Kiley
International Journal of Communication
Volume 10 | Issue 1 | 2016
Source

A case study approach is employed in this research analyzing Disney’s cable channels to demonstrate that Latino children perform labor on behalf of the corporation in three ways: as subscribers to Disney’s cable networks, as actors in programming designed to deliver those subscribers, and as beneficiaries in the company’s corporate social responsibility efforts. The logic by which Disney assigns various forms of labor to different types of Latino children helps to advance the company’s economic goals, rendering Latino children hypervisible in some spaces and invisible in others.

The DVD region code system: Standardizing home video’s disjunctive global flows

Evan Elkins
International Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 19 | Issue 2 | 2016
Source

This article analyzes the DVD region code system by drawing together work from global media studies, research on digital media regulation and governance, and cultural theory to detail how the technology came about through a process of global governance that set the terms for home video’s global distribution to the general advantage of Hollywood’s film industries. The emergence of region codes represents an international process of technical development and standardization by private media industries that reflect and generate understandings of media regions as both differentiated economic markets and spaces of cultural organization and coherence.

Global aspirations and local talent: the development of creative higher education in Singapore

Roberta Comunian, Can-Seng Ooi
International Journal of Cultural Policy
Volume 22 | Issue 1 | 2016
Source

Within the landscape of an increasingly globalized creative economy and international cultural policy transfer, this paper explores higher education development and policy shifts in Singapore over the last decade. Based on interviews with key players in policy and higher education institutions, the paper argues that there are global policy lessons to be learned from the case of Singapore as regards the role that higher education can play in developing a creative economy while striving to overcome issues of over-supply and innate vulnerability of creative careers.

The old media business in the new: ‘the Googlization of everything’ as the capitalization of digital consumption

Brice Nixon
Media Culture & Society
Volume 38 | Issue 2 | 2016
Source

Google is an exemplary case of how most digital media companies must control the activities of their users as cultural consumers in order to generate revenue, just as most ‘old media’ companies have long done, and ‘the Googlization of Everything’ is primarily a process of trying to gain control over numerous activities of digital cultural consumption—activities that can be understood as digital audience labor. Google Search, Google Books, and YouTube are examples of this effort to use its control to extract value by exploiting digital audience labor, conceptualized here as the use of digital media to consume culture and make meaning.

The SAG–AFTRA Merger: Union Convergence in a Changing Media Landscape

Kate Fortmueller
Television & New Media
Volume 17 | Issue 3 | 2016
Source

As a response to larger trends in media industries, the merger of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) in March 2012 positions the newly converged union as a more unified front at the bargaining table. This paper analyzes the public discourse of SAG and AFTRA from 1980 through the 2012 merger, and argues that by focusing on “convergence” the merger rhetoric effectively masks one of the core issues that propelled it—the diminishing importance of film and the growing importance of television and other media.

Watching From an Arm's Length: The Foreign Hand in Tamil Cinema Authors

Preeti Mudliar and Joyojeet Pal
Communication, Culture, & Critique
Volume 9 | Issue 2 | 2016
Source

While scholarly work on Tamil cinema has traditionally focused on the construction of Tamil authenticity, little work exists on the construction of the non-Indian space or person. Through an analysis of 90 films and 5 in-depth interviews, we demonstrate that Tamil film presents an opportunity to understand how an important regional center of Indian cinema both represents the foreign and constructs the Indian Diaspora and its spaces, while differing from the more globally known Hindi-language productions of Bollywood.

Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies

Miriyam Aouragh and Paula Chakravartty
Media, Culture & Society
Volume 38 | Issue 4 | 2016
Source

This article propose an alternate trajectory toward reorienting discussions of media and information infrastructures as embedded within the resurgence of idealized liberal democratic norms following the end of the Cold War, looking at the demise of the media and empire debates and ‘the rise of the BRICS’ as modes of intra-imperial competition that complicate earlier Eurocentric narratives of media and empire. The Arab Uprisings of 2011 are examined in this light, questioning the view of scholars who have argued from them that digital media technologies fuel or transform political change through new networked publics and new forms of connective action cultivating liberal democratic values.

International News and the Distribution Question: China, Falun Dafa and Pluralism in Canadian Media Policy

Ian Kivelin Davis
Political Economy of Communication
Volume 4 | Issue 1 | 2016
Source

This article examines and critiques Canadian regulation of foreign media by focusing on a series of conflicts over the purpose and role of the Chinese press in Canadian society, illustrating how media globalization is a site of cultural struggle by pointing to three cases in which Canadian authorities weighed in on the controversial Chinese-language news. Distribution decisions from these authorities tended to refuse consideration of political and economic inequalities among media stakeholders, so calling attention to these inequalities, the article asks if guiding regulatory principles of pluralism and multiculturalism are sufficient to recognize new forms of power in a more multipolar media world.

Cultural capital at its best: factors influencing consumption of American television programmes among young Croatians

Ivanka Pjesivac and Iveta Imre
Journal of International Communication
Volume 22 | Issue 2 | 2016
Source

This study examined factors that influence the consumption of American television programmes among young Croatians, by conducting a paper and pencil survey. The results, in which knowledge of English language, of US lifestyle, consumption of American movies and American press all had a significant unique contribution to the model, indicate that young Croatians are avid consumers of American dramas and sitcoms, and that a set of cultural capital variables is a significant predictor of the consumption of American TV.