This article explores the consequences of scholars' failure to engage with the Japanese anime series Heidi, Girl of the Alps, despite its significance as an extremely globally influential text and an exemplar of Hayao Miyazaki's early work, an example that in important ways defies anime’s typical characterization as a quintessentially Japanese genre whose attractiveness to foreign audiences comes from its mix of exoticism and universal human values. Exploring how Heidi resonates with dimensions of Japanese culture and of Miyazaki's oeuvre, it demonstrates how “reclaiming” Heidi can help us develop a more sophisticated understanding of transcultural dynamics under conditions of globalization.

This research examines China’s laws and regulations on digital media content, which have developed and transformed along with the market-oriented media reform and Internet growth. It argues that there has been a continuous effort to articulate legal criteria of content regulation since the early 1980s, that the ‘vagueness’ of the law is part of the political and ideological ambiguity of China’s reform and development and will not be resolved independently of larger and more profound transformations of the Chinese state and society, and that these developments only make sense when not compared against an idealized Western legal order.

This study is an attempt to understand and analyze ‘Interlocalization’—a communication praxis involving the horizontal flow of knowledge, culture, tradition, and know-how free from forms of hegemony and domination—in the Indian context, focusing on two possible broad catalysts of the process: India’s communication business alliances, and transnational networking among Indian diaspora communities. It finds that India’s worldwide communication business footprint has not yet generated a strong impetus to interlocalization but that an encouraging scenario is discernible in Indian diaspora networking, with implications for the process.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, Founder and Director of Google Ideas, contend that ‘for governments and companies’, the user-generated content that constitutes big data is ‘a gift, enabling them to better respond to citizen and customer concerns, and, within the emergent field of predictive analysis, to predict what the future will hold’. In this article, I interrogate what it means for data from our social lives to be interpreted as a ‘gift’ by private enterprises such as Google, putting into conversation Schmidt and Cohen’s gift thesis with an analysis of the ‘value’ of participation in digital communication networks, uncovering thereby an intellectual property conundrum that legitimizes the rise of new kinds of labour vulnerabilities in the digital age and that points to the importance of intellectual property as a language of critique and resistance.

Rejecting the “techno-utopianism” and “social media centralism” in traditional social movement studies, this study emphasizes the multidimensionality of media and the context of the movement using primarily the research methods of ethnography and interviews to examine Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement as a case study. The paper proposes an alternative framework of contextualized transmedia mobilization to explore how protestors situated in a specific context employ, create, circulate, amplify, and converge various forms of media to continually mobilize themselves and the public, thus heighten participation levels, innovate contentious repertoires, and experiment with organizational transformation.

This study finds that professional autonomy and civic accountability in public media are supported by four common policy characteristics: multi-year funding and legal charters that restrict partisan government influence while also mandating the provision of diverse, high-quality programming, as well as oversight agencies enjoying independence from the government in power and audience feedback channels designed to strengthen links to diverse publics. Public media governed by policies that continue and extend, rather than depart from, these best practices will likely be the most successful in maintaining their civic mission online.

In a situation in which the telecom market in India has devolved to include poor populations and having thereby stoked a repertoire of unconventional daily use of the internet by youth living in slums, this article locates the ‘wild and everyday’ as a specific sociocultural space in relation to use of mobile Facebook among young populations invisible to mainstream research on internet and culture. Moreover, whereas development as conventionally understood is not focused on purposive outcomes of digital leisure practice (romance, play, entertainment), we argue that online engagements such as these are powerful precursors to ecologies of learning, reconstituting our understandings of global and mobile internet practice.

Drawing on theories of modern reflexive identity and based on interviews with US TV fans among university students in Beijing, this article examines the ways educated urban Chinese youths engage American television fiction as part of their identity work, finding that these youths are drawn to this television primarily because they perceive the American way of life portrayed on it as more ‘authentic’. This perception of authenticity is examined in relation to a sociocultural milieu in which, torn between China’s ingrained collectivist culture and its recent neoliberal emphasis on the individual self, respondents glean from US TV messages about how to live a spontaneous, nonconforming, and fulfilled life while remaining properly Chinese.

This article pursues a fruitful connection between postcolonial and television studies in order to understand how imperial legacies have shaped contemporary television regions, specifically in the form of a postcolonial account of intra-European broadcast regions. It focuses on three examples that highlight the imperial layers which have informed television in Europe—industrial collaborations between East and West, the imperial vestiges of 1960s to 1970s historical adventure series, and the imperial connections that tie together forms of TV comedy across Europe—to demonstrate a way past the nation-state framework and begin to write the region’s history of television in a postcolonial, regional, and European perspective, outlining imperial legacies of aesthetic, infrastructural and economic factors that underscore all cultural industries in the region.

Since 2010, concerned citizens in India argued that cell antenna signals had heating effects on bodies, and media campaigns compared the experience of living in cities with cell towers as being inside the oven. Through their disruptive nature, cell towers call into action a technoscience public consisting of a variety of stakeholders, and this article presents “mediated technoscience public” as a theoretical framework for an ethnographic intervention in media studies which involves the tracking and comparison of media coverage about technological infrastructure as well as the ways humans emotionally perceive and interact with those infrastructures.

The study examines Korea’s unique television production systems and TV drama production strategies in the context of Korean dramas’ rising international trade in light of governmental television industry policies. It looks in particular at a 2006 cultural policy act passed by the government to promote Korean TV content production, which stipulated that media content could be produced using a special purpose company (SPC) system that grew these dramas’ export value in both production and distribution sectors, thus enhancing international flows of K-dramas.

An older, trans-Atlantic political economy tradition forged by Europe and North American scholars who made communications media central objects of their analyses in the late-19th and early-20th centuries was imported into communication studies mostly after the turn of the 20th century, thereby entangling the intellectual history of communication studies with that of political economy from the beginning. A wealth of underused resources is close-to-hand that can help us to reimagine and reconstruct what we mean by the PEC traditions today, and this paper starts to recover these neglected elements, closing with a survey of recent PEC research and some suggested research themes in the contemporary political economy of digital media.