Rewiring the DMCA’s history: 20th-century new media and the expanding imaginary for infringement

This article analyzes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a refinement of governmental techniques developed for technologies such as piano rolls, reprography, DAT, and VCRs. The technological history recontextualizes legal transitions in copyrights during the 20th century and builds on poststructuralist work on law, technology, and government. Building on Kittler’s understanding of symbolic/technical media and storage/processing, I develop a framework for disentangling the relationship among copyright, DRM, and media technologies. The case studies indicate ICTs are vectors for extending copyright into previously unimagined territories. I argue cultural practices become problematized as they are remediated in new technologies. The evidence suggests the shift from governing storage to processing corresponds to broader rearrangements in power, binding our rituals and means of perception ever more tightly to articulations of industry and state.     

“Is this Ella Fitzgerald?”: My Reflections of James C. McCroskey

Editor’s Note: This essay reflects the final in our five-part set of essays on the career of Communication Research Reports founding editor, James C. McCroskey. In these previous essays, Levine and Park (2017) offered the opening essay in our series, with a professional and personal rememberance of a scholar deeply impactful on both of their careers. Hickson (2018) commented on McCroskey’s formal and informal mentorship styles, and how others might understand the critical importance of offering oneself to one’s peers. Park, Oh, and Ryu (2018) explained the unique impact of McCroskey’s research on communication scholarship in South Korea, and Frymier (2018) reminded us of McCroskey’s impact as a core scholar for instructional communication research. In this final essay, we reached out to current West Virginia University Department of Communication chair Matthew M. Martin for his thoughts. As McCroskey spent most of his career at WVU (including a 25-year stretch as the department chair, from 1972 to 1997), inviting the current chair of that department for a closing commentary seemed most fitting. We hope that these five essays serve as a memorial to a scholar whose career and influence extends far beyond his publication record.     

From the media of the periphery to peripheral media: The changing priorities of Brazil’s alternative ecology

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a new appraisal of Brazil’s alternative media. By investing in the concept of the periphery, this study draws on past literature, semistructured interviews, and data collected from across the country (n = 50) to propose a repertoire analysis of media producers’ views of the country’s popular notion of the periphery. Evidence shows that they have shown nuanced views of the periphery as a site of purpose, pluralism, and authorship. Despite crisis and turmoil, this study presents some paths that could help reorientate the priorities of alternative media research toward a closer consideration of the periphery as entity that appears much more in line with local realities and expectations than previous international debates.     

“We want to see you sex it up and be slutty:” post-feminism and sports media’s appearance double standard

The notion that women in the United States’ electronic sports media face greater standards of appearance is not new (Sheffer, M. L., & Schultz, B. (2007) Double standard: Why women have trouble getting jobs in local television sports. Journal of Sports Media, 2(1), 77–101). What has not been explored, however, is the persistence of this double standard through a Foucauldian lens. Using Michel Foucault’s (Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Vol. 1, an introduction. New York: Vintage Books) power/knowledge paradigm, this Foucauldian discourse analysis uses one-on-one interviews with women sportscasters and textual analysis to grapple with this previously unexplored aspect of one of electronic sports media’s longest standing gendered double standards.

Using these data, this article argues that post-feminist discourses (Gill, R. (2007) Gender and the media. Cambridge: Polity Press; McRobbie, A. (2004) Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies, 4(3), 255–264) have a mutually informing relationship with three manifestations of the electronic sports media’s gendered double standard of appearance: sportscaster hiring and retention, inequitable media consumer evaluations of on-screen appearance, and expectations for sportscaster dress, the latter of which have required many women to wear increasingly revealing clothing, a trend this article refers to as nightclubification. While post-feminist analysis explicates the nuances of the appearance double standard and the electronic sports media’s contributions to our culture’s constructions of gender relations, Foucauldian discourse analysis demonstrates how the appearance double standard has been taken for granted and how it might inform other obstacles women in the industry must navigate.     

Marketing the recreational sublime: Jumbo Wild and the rhetorics of humans in nature

Since Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams captured the sublime landscapes of Yosemite, immense technological changes have occurred that demand we revisit discourses about the sublime. Panmediation combined with ever-reaching capitalist practices have shifted the ways in which the sublime is imaged, conceptualized, and utilized. In this paper, we turn to DeLuca and Demo’s (2000. Imaging nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the birth of environmentalism. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3), 241–260.) and Stormer’s (2004. Addressing the sublime: Space, mass representation, and the unpresentable. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21(3), 212–240.) essays on the sublime to trace the trajectory of the sublime’s domestication and the ways in which its use in contemporary environmentalist discourses, led by corporations like Patagonia, have reinforced human–nature binaries and anthropocentric discourses. To do so, we examine the 2015 documentary Jumbo Wild, which represents one example of a new turn in depictions of the sublime—what we term the recreational sublime—and how it is rhetorically grounded in visual discourses.     

Reclaiming history: Arthur Schomburg

Focusing on the inter-war period, this article examines the context of the publication of Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s Manual of Archive Administration alongside the less well-known contemporary publication of Arthur Schomburg’s ‘The Negro Digs up his Past’. By placing these publications together, this article raises questions about the production and reproduction of the professional canon, as well as highlighting Schomburg’s contribution to key archival questions on the nature of collecting. This work discusses Schomburg’s articulation of the purpose of archival collecting which offers a radically different conception of the value and use of archives, one that focuses on the concepts of recovery and transformation. This article also places Schomburg within the wider emergence of the Pan-African movement and situates his work within the developing Pan-African ideologies and the networks in which he operated, and argues that Schomburg’s legacy can be found in the development of Black-led archives in London.     

Representing insect sexualities in Life in the Undergrowth and Green Porno

What does it mean to represent insect sexualities? What are the technologies that one uses to make insect bodies visible? In this article, I examine two series in order to examine representations of insect sexualities. In the documentary Life in the Undergrowth, famed British broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s hushed tones tell us that new technologies of seeing are making new worlds visible. In the second, Isabella Rossellini stars in the series Green Porno, in which she uses biologically accurate costumes to blow up insect bodies to human size, using the costumes as technologies of seeing to help her audience visualize how insects have sex. Here, the costumes themselves become ways of knowing insect bodies while simultaneously rendering them as spectacular media moments. I rely upon feminist media studies of representations of wildlife to ask how assumptions around gender and sexuality continue to shape contemporary depictions of the insect world in Sir David Attenborough’s series Life in the Undergrowth, whereas I argue that Green Porno represents a queering of traditional documentaries on insects and examine what possibilities this might provide us with for rethinking insect sexualities—from monogamy and heterosexual reproduction to S/M, queer sex, and polyamory.     

“It’s kind of like an assault,you know”: media resisters’ meta-decoding practices of media culture

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/decoding” essay sparked an on-going focus in media studies on reception and audience studies that remains theoretically robust today. Hall’s insight that audience members decode media content in multiple ways, some in line with the dominant cultural ideology and some resistant to that ideology, illuminates the phenomenon of media resistance. Media resisters significantly limit their media consumption and they do so based on their decodings of media culture—decodings, or readings, that resist normative messages about commercialism and consumption, about the natural diffusion and inherent benefits of mobile technologies and social media, and about the political landscape depicted and generated by news media. Hall’s encoding/decoding model is expanded here to include not only audiences’ decodings of specific content, but of media culture broadly. Concerns about media culture in the aggregate lead to media resisters’ practices of limiting media engagement, practices themselves that are counter hegemonic.     

Candidates’ use of informal communication on social media reduces credibility and support: Examining the consequences of expectancy violations

ABSTRACT

This experiment (N= 476) investigates how individuals evaluate political candidates who use informal communication on social media. We use expectancy violations theory (EVT) to predict that informal communication will lead to negative evaluations. Our results suggest that politicians’ use of informal communication on social media leads to expectancy violation, which decreases perceived credibility and lessens intention to support a candidate. This effect was not moderated by sex (male versus female) or age (young versus old) of the candidate, nor of participants being the same sex as the candidate. These findings suggest that political figures should use informal communication on social media with caution.     

New media–new voices: satirical representations of Nigeria’s socio-politics in Ogas at the top

New media are increasingly providing spaces and opportunities for media houses and activist groups engaged in socio-political reform in Africa. In Nigeria, social media are becoming platforms for communicating messages of resistance against oppressive political and exploitative economic power structures. This study analyzed Ogas at the top (OATT), an online puppetry series by Buni TV, as a way of examining new platforms and message content in Nigeria’s rapidly changing media sphere. Relying on semiotics and critical discourse analysis perspectives, the study analyzed select episodes of the series, to gauge how producers constructed powerful visual and linguistic messages to boldly satirize social injustices perpetrated by Nigeria’s political elites.     

Social networking site uses,internalization, body surveillance,social comparison and body dissatisfaction of males and females in mainland China

Findings indicated that the mass media exposure significantly associated with body image dissatisfaction [Chen & Jackson, 2012. Gender and age group differences in mass media and interpersonal influences on body dissatisfaction among Chinese adolescents. Sex Roles, 66(1-2), 3–20; Field et al., 2005. Exposure to the mass media, body shape concerns, and use of supplements to improve weight and shape among male and female adolescents. Pediatrics, 116(2), e214–e220]. However, limited studies have examined the effect of social media on body image concerns. In regard to this, this paper aims to explore how appearance presentation and appearance interaction on social networking sites influence young adults’ body image dissatisfaction in the Chinese patriarchal society. It proposes that internalization, social comparison and body surveillance may be potential mediators of SNS influences from appearance presentation and appearance interaction on female’s and male’s body dissatisfaction. A survey of 181 males and 203 females indicated that online appearance interaction was significantly associated with female’s body dissatisfaction. In addition, its effect was partially mediated by body surveillance. Besides, body surveillance also mediated the effect of appearance presentation on female’s body dissatisfaction. In male’s case, the influence of online appearance interaction on body dissatisfaction was mediated by internalization and social comparison.     

Reinforcing attitudes in a gatewatching news era: Individual-level antecedents to sharing fact-checks on social media

Despite the prevalence of fact-checking, little is known about who posts fact-checks online. Based upon a content analysis of Facebook and Twitter digital trace data and a linked online survey (N?=?783), this study reveals that sharing fact-checks in political conversations on social media is linked to age, ideology, and political behaviors. Moreover, an individual’s need for orientation (NFO) is an even stronger predictor of sharing a fact-check than ideological intensity or relevance, alone, and also influences the type of fact-check format (with or without a rating scale) that is shared. Finally, participants generally shared fact-checks to reinforce their existing attitudes. Consequently, concerns over the effects of fact-checking should move beyond a limited-effects approach (e.g., changing attitudes) to also include reinforcing accurate beliefs.     

Jack Chambers’ mixed media paintings from the 1960s and 1970s: Painting technique and condition

Abstract

This study describes the examination and analysis of four mixed media paintings from the 1960s and 1970s by Canadian artist Jack Chambers (1931–1978). The documentary evidence about his materials and methods is summarized and compared with the results of analysis of multilayer paint samples. The combination of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) allowed the components of the paint media to be characterized: ortho-phthalate alkyd resins, iso-phthalate alkyd resins, drying oils, dammar, Pinaceae resin, and turpentine were identified in varying proportions. Many pigments and fillers were identified by FTIR and Raman and are enumerated. The effect that Chambers’ complex technique has had on the aging and degradation of the paintings is discussed. The severe cracking of the paint layers in one of the four paintings may be the result of a high proportion of dammar and turpentine diluent mixed with the alkyd paint and may also be related to the type of alkyd resin medium. Different history and environmental conditions may also be factors.     

News framing of adolescents’ use of Facebook in Taiwanese newspapers

ABSTRACT

While media frames reflect the dominant discourse about an issue, frame analysis can elucidate how they affect public perception. ¹ 1 William A Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 1 (1989): 1–37. Employing content analysis of news coverage of adolescents’ use of social media in mainstream newspapers (n?=?323) from 2014 to 2017, supplemented with secondary data from two national surveys of adolescents, this study investigates how news media construct the reality of adolescents’ use of social media; how the constructed reality differs from the subjective reality reported by adolescents’ themselves; and how news media reflect the elite discourse in terms of adolescence’s nature, agency, and needs in the context of using social media.     

Revising Legacy Media Practices to Serve Hyperlocal Information Needs of Marginalized Populations

ABSTRACT

This study explores how two nonprofit media organizations–PublicSource and Philadelphia Community Access Media (PhillyCAM)–have transformed their legacy practices to better connect within and serve marginalized populations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, PA. As traditional newsrooms have been depleted by dire financial realities, new journalism outcroppings have heeded the Knight Commission’s Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age (2009) report and, consequently, revised their approaches to community engagement. Adjacent to these reformed legacy newsrooms are community media organizations that operate a municipality’s public, educational, or government (PEG) access media production facilities. Although PEG access media’s legacy has no clear genealogical ties with traditional journalism, an increasing amount of PEG operations over the past ten years have started to intentionally test editorialized forms of community news reporting. The data collected and assessed in this study has indicated that news organizations like PublicSource have an explicit need to do more relational community engagement work that will enable it to fill hyperlocal information gaps and better serve marginalized populations. Community media organizations like PhillyCAM have extensive experience engaging diverse publics; however, as this study reveals, they could benefit from employing formalized news production methods that are guided by journalistic standards.     

Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the circulation of journalism in the digital landscape

ABSTRACT

Notions of circuitry are central to Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of how communities, cultures, and media constitute each other. This is very explicit in his encoding/decoding model from 1973. Hall here reserves the term “circulation” for a delimited process within a broader argument for a circular movement, or a “reproduction” of culture through media. In this broader view, however, Hall sees circulation as both technological and hermeneutical processes through which meaning and/or ideology move into and out of discursive form. The encoding/decoding text(s) refer on several occasions to “current affairs” but later applications of this model have somewhat neglected the sphere of journalism. This paper consequently situates Hall’s notions of circulation in relation to new modes of circulating journalism on participatory digital platforms. Given the status of Hall’s model, the overall goal of this re-reading is twofold: seeing Hall through contemporary issues puts into perspective key aspects of Hall’s thinking, while Hall’s framework in turn helps illuminate important characteristics of how journalism is ascribed meaning in a digital landscape. The paper ultimately argues that while Hall’s insistence on seeing the circulation of journalism within a broader circuit of culture is as important as ever, some of his main tenets and assumptions need to be rethought and supplemented in light of newer developments.     

Keepers of Ghosts: old signs,new media and the age of archival flux

The Keepers of Ghosts project began when 10,000 records from a former sign-painting company were rescued from a demolition site in Melbourne’s west. Beginning with the creation of an online archive, the project has since developed into an experimental research program of community outreach involving sign writers, shopkeepers, local history aficionados and people interested in ‘ghost signs’, or the remains of painted advertising signs. Here we discuss the project’s investigation of the use of digital media to informally document and share otherwise-forgotten aspects of urban memory, and the proposition that the interplay between digital and physical archival activities can be harnessed to involve and connect diverse groups with shared interests, both at local and global levels.     

Audience Engagement,Reciprocity, and the Pursuit of Community Connectedness in Public Media Journalism

In light of the media industry’s growing focus on audience engagement, this article explores how online and offline forms of engagement unfold within journalism, based on a comparative case study of two American public media newsrooms. This study addresses gaps in the literature by (1) examining what engagement means for public media and (2) applying the concept of reciprocal journalism to evaluate the nature of reciprocity (direct, indirect, or sustained) in the give-and-take between journalists and their communities. Drawing on direct observation and in-depth interviews, this article shows how this emerging focus on engagement is driven by public media journalists’ desire to make their relationship with the public more enduring and mutually beneficial. We find that such journalists privilege offline modes of engagement (e.g., listening sessions and partnerships with local organizations) in hopes of building trust and strengthening ties with their community, more so than digital modes of engagement (e.g., social media) that are more directly tied to news publishing. Moreover, this case study reveals that public media organizations, in and through their engagement efforts, are distinguishing between the communities they cover in their reporting and the audiences they reach with their reporting.