Anti-Market Research: Piracy,New Media Metrics,and Commodity Communities

Over a decade after Napster’s introduction, file sharing programs still shoulder much of the blame for music and other media’s declining sales. Although labels and industry associations point their fingers at the harm digital piracy and file-sharing cause, they are less likely to admit the extent to which these anti-markets inform everyday decisions. File-sharing technologies create networks of users that serve as profitable data for ratings and metrics agencies. Using a case study of BigChampagne and its relationship to Napster, this article considers how the look, structure, and function of file-sharing software helped turn an economically threatening community into a commodity and how piracy’s disruptive potential is always in tension with processes of commodification.     

Translife: International Triennial of New Media Art

Ahuman being whose organs have evolved into USB plugs is experiencing a certain state of existence through camera lens, microphones and speakers. In the future, human organs may be replaced by USB organs and human beings tend to receive signals from various electronics. This magic scene is a works of art by Chinese artist Wu Juehui, currently on display at     

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.     

Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited

This article seeks primarily to call for a reappraisal of Richard Bulliet's well-known “curve of conversion” and of its interpretation, for it has been largely misinterpreted. It is argued, with particular reference to the Christian experience in al-Andalus, that reading the data as Bulliet intended could have a significant effect on how we view the historical process of conversion in the early Islamic world. Thus, since Bulliet's data do not support the prevailing view regarding Christianity's survival under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, it is proposed that the evidence available in the particularly weak historical record for this period and place is enough to warrant reconsideration of the nature and length of that survival.     

Intergroup Contact,Media Exposure,and Racial Attitudes

The present investigation uses intergroup contact and media systems’ dependency theories to illuminate the relative significance of various sources of information in shaping Caucasian-American attitudes toward African-Americans. It uses empirical data from an exploratory survey of college students to build a chain of related variables that link primary sources of information (face-to-face versus mediated) to stereotypical beliefs, perceived internal causal attributions for African-Americans’ failures, and prejudicial feelings toward African-Americans. Results suggest that face-to-face sources of racial/ethnic out-group information are more effective than mediated sources in prejudice reduction. The discussion includes theoretical and practical implications of the findings.     

Theatre,Law and Society in the Provinces: The Case of Sarah Baker

Sarah Baker was one of the eighteenth century's most successful provincial theatrical managers and entrepreneurs, but her career does not fit happily with the conventional image of the provincial theatre of that era. By considering her activities in the context of the Licensing Act of 1737 and the Theatrical Representations Act of 1788 this article explains the discrepancies and, in so doing, also reveals the cultural, social and political significance of her presence in the burgeoning Kentish towns where she built her theatres in the last decade of the eighteenth century.