Chained to the grassroots: the music industries and DCMS

The paper analyses the implicit assumptions made by three key DCMS reports about how successful music products are made. I show how the reports divide the music sector into small and large producers, handing responsibility for innovation to small producers and expecting that large producers will exploit these innovations efficiently. I argue that this approach risks ignoring the realities of music production and contradicts the findings contained in the reports themselves. I conclude that a romantic idea of successful products developing from small producers may not only misrepresent and misunderstand small producers in the music industries but constrain them.     

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.     

National nostalgia: A group-based emotion that benefits the in-group but hampers intergroup relations

Social psychological research on nostalgia has mainly considered this emotion at the individual level rather than the group level. The current paper proposes that group-based nostalgia for the nation (i.e., national nostalgia) is likely to be related to a positive in-group orientation and a negative out-group orientation, because it fosters an exclusionary and essentialist sense of national identity that is based on ancestry and common descent (i.e., ethnic national identity). This prediction was tested in three survey studies. Study 1 was conducted among a broad sample of the native Dutch population, and demonstrated that national (and not personal) nostalgia is positively related to national in-group identification and out-group prejudice. Study 2 replicated the findings of Study 1 among a nationally representative sample of the native Dutch population, and provided support for the mediation by ethnic national identity. Study 3 replicated the findings of Study 2 and additionally demonstrated that national nostalgia positively predicts tendencies to protect national in-group identity, via a stronger sense of ethnic national identity. These findings demonstrate the potential of group-based nostalgia to have positive and negative consequences for group dynamics at the same time.     

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.     

A Chinese in the new world: television dramas,global cities,and travels to modernity

Abstract

After having lain dormant for some 20 years during 1973 and 1991, the Singaporean film industry is experiencing a revival. Films produced since the early 1990s have been resolutely ‘local’ in their portrayals in an effort to ground this emergent cinematic modernity. Only a handful of these films have, however, received any international attention; most remain ‘too local’, ‘too colloquial’ to be exported further afield. This paper explores those visions or versions of the local presented in contemporary films from Singapore that simultaneously manufacture a brand of foreignness assimilable by international audiences. Through an overview of films from the revival period, this paper will show that the images that do travel successfully overseas are those that portray the dark side to Singapore’s road to economic modernization, the failed processes of an Asianized modernity. It is these images, representing one vision of an ‘authentic’ social reality, that is recognizable by international audiences in the context of previous successes by Asian films utilizing a shared form of (local) expression. My question is whether we can read these images as a particular kind of ‘slang’ – a vagabond expression that represents a filmic vernacular that also strategically invokes a cinematic modernity for the Singaporean film industry. This argument may extend to other (emergent) Asian cinemas that also participate in the production of this particular brand of foreignness. The paper will therefore provide some initial speculations towards the regionalization of cinema and ask whether such a move might be desirable and what its purpose might be.