Behind the Screen: Visuality,Law, and New Media

The article analyzes the 2011 Supreme Court decision in which video games were granted full First Amendment protection. By comparing this case with earlier ones dealing with computer code, the article points to inconsistencies in how the courts are approaching digital media. These inconsistencies are symptomatic of a focus on the screen or the treatment of digital media as commodities. This status and the pervasive logic of commodity fetishism are what, in our current legal and economic environment, enabled the protection of games as pure speech. In actuality, the decision protected corporate rights and speech.     

Escaping to the country: Media,nostalgia, and the new food industries

Over the past decade in the West, television cooking shows have popularized interest in the provenance of food against a backdrop of public concern about the practices of industrial food production. This article explores two series that offer self-sufficiency as a solution to the problem of industrial agriculture. Escape to River Cottage and Gourmet Farmer each centre on a narrative of a city-dweller moving to the country to set up a smallholding. With their nostalgia for an earlier—simultaneously unproblematic and emotionally fulfilling—time of food production, these series imagine a Utopian lifestyle in which audiences are encouraged to choose to produce and consume differently. That it is (middle-class) men who are rediscovering traditional food practices highlights how media discourses surrounding food production can become entangled in gendered representations that give rise to niche food products and experiences designed to ameliorate feelings of risk and uncertainty in contemporary food systems.     

Gifts of the Magi: Chef,Million Dollar Arm,and Cultural Mixtures

When groups using different cultural systems encounter one another in diverse societies, their previous cultures are transformed into a merged, complex cultural picture. Some culture areas are preserved while others are adjusted, exchanged, and merged. In our society, introducing groups to the cooking of other groups is a form of contact which produces less resistance. In sports, as well, contact, and interaction occur with less friction. It is sometimes thought that groups that need each other for survival integrate socially and merge culturally out of practical necessity. However, the pursuit of pleasure and fun can also be an occasion for cultural mixing. Such merging is depicted in the recent movies Chef and Million Dollar Arm.