BIRDS OF THE INTERNET

Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder's handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.     

Weaving Webs of Faith: Examining Internet Use and Religious Communication Among Chinese Protestant Transmigrants

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between new media use and international communication that addresses religiosity and affirms users’ standpoints occupied by transmigrants that are marginalized in dominant societal structures. Drawing from focus group interviews among recent Chinese Protestant immigrants in Toronto, we argue that new media “use” is broadened by users’ cultural appropriation in situational contexts to include proxy internet access as accommodative communication given the political and legal constraints in their home country. Chinese transmigrants not only reinterpret and alter semantic associations that spiritualize the internet, they also engage in innovative strategies that involve the intertwining of offline and online communicative modes. These include deploying complementary media forms or communicating in codes that are mutually understood among participating members to facilitate intragroup networking among Chinese religious communities. Implications are discussed with regard to the importance of cultural norms and situational context in shaping mediated international communication.     

Alternatives to review by peers: A contribution to the theory of scientific choice

Conclusion The questions of scientific choice which were left unresolved when the rapid expansion of academic science in the United States began in the early 1960s have come back to trouble the scientific community. There is now widespread dissatisfaction with the process of review by peers as one of the major systems for the allocation of public funds for research. While earlier criticisms had been brushed off by the assertion—unsupported by facts—that no other systems existed, the present situation cannot be so easily dismissed.A serious examination of other national and international arrangements shows that a wide variety of procedures are in use and there is no research which shows that one system is either more productive scientifically, or more cost-effective in bringing about valuable scientific research. New systems which may be considered should avoid the major defects of the system of peer review as now practised: the enormous waste of scientists' time, the great potential for conflicts of interest, and the inherent bias against innovation.The principal system which I have proposed here combines the best elements of peer review with the simplicity and efficiency of the use of a formula. Moreover, this formula based on peer review of performance incorporates all the elements for which the academic scientific establishment should be accountable to its patron, which is the public treasury. A final virtue of the proposed system is that it provides simple and convenient procedures through the use of numerical weighting factors for the policy-maker to guide the support of scientific research as a whole.     

Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.     

Ethnic performance,language proficiency,and ethnic media use among Indian American immigrants

This study focuses on how and why Indian American immigrants engage with movies from their home country in a transnational global context. Existing literature has focused on lack of host language proficiency as the primary reason for ethnic media consumption. We suggest that for Indian Americans, the motivation for consuming Indian films is driven by ethnic performance rather than language proficiency. A survey was conducted with Indian Americans to explore the relationships among Indian movie consumption, acculturation indices, language proficiency, and ethnic performance. Results show that ethnic performance is a stronger predictor of Indian movie consumption than language proficiency and acculturation indices.     

The internet as a celestial TiVo: What can we learn from cable television adoption?

It appears that the Internet is soon going to fulfill its potential to become a giant on-demand repository of television shows (and movies) available asynchronously, greatly increasing the variety of shows available at a moment in time. As companies such as Netflix and Hulu increase their activities in this sphere, there are many unanswered questions about the impacts of this transition. In this paper, we attempt to foretell the impact of Internet-induced increased variety on the amount of time individuals devote to viewing television. We use cable and satellite television’s impact on viewing as a proxy for the likely impact that future Internet transmission of programs will have. Using country-based panel data going back to the mid-1990s, we find that the increased variety brought about by cable and satellite has had virtually no impact on the amount of time devoted to television viewing. We discuss the import of this finding for Internet business models of television transmission.     

Indigenous Digital Art as Politics in Australia

This essay contributes to discussions about Indigenous politics and debates about contemporary democracy. It uses a case study of video art produced by young indigenous people and a community development organisation in the Pilbara, Australia. Those involved in the project use digital media under the auspices of the Big hART Yijala Yala Project to produce an interactive comic series. The essay addresses the following questions: Do contemporary community development projects play a conservatising role serving the interests of a neoliberal polity? Given the long-standing practice of representing modern media as a vehicle for western domination what, if anything, do these projects imply about the political relations between Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians? Are Indigenous media and cultural work inherently political? What conceptions of the political are at stake in such arguments? We focus on how certain groups of young people use new media, and how their activities are political. The argument is that Indigenous media like these are ‘inherently political’ because they are about efforts to reclaim the images of indigenous peoples for themselves.     

Strategic timing of entry: evidence from video games

This paper investigates how video game publishers’ choice of game release date is affected by the expected level of competition within the game’s product niche. We identify game niches by genre, age-appropriateness, console system, a release cohort, and publisher. First, we show that games are more likely to be released so as to avoid weeks when their niche already faces competition. Next, we show that consumer substitution across games is stronger within most of the dimensions describing product niches. Sales volumes decay quickly after the opening weekend, so at any point in time, a niche will typically be served by few current titles. From this, we calculate that delaying game release 1 week yields substantial increase in revenue for a video game facing higher-than-average competition.     

Reputational capital in ‘the PR University’: public relations and market rationalities

Drawing on empirical data, this article identifies the emergence of the ‘PR University’ as an assemblage. Using a case study of university press officers’ work, I analyse how this form of media relations PR stages competition between UK universities through the media. A key form of this competition centres on the accumulation and circulation of what I term ‘reputational capital’. I focus on one core element of reputational capital – media stories about HE research and the circulation of research metrics. I argue that the assemblage of the public relations (PR) University pulls the HE sector into dialogue with PR principles and practices in the context of recent shifts towards market rationalities. But this relationship is not a simple cause and effect model in which increasing HE ‘marketisation’ creates a boom in universities’ PR practices, or intensifying investment in PR by universities merely amplifies or legitimises existing market tendencies in the sector. I argue that the PR University as assemblage starts generating its own logics around which actors in the field must orient themselves. More broadly, the PR University operates not only to promote an individual university’s market position, but also acts upon public debates about the social role, legitimacy and financing of UK Higher Education.     

Text Messaging in Tok Pisin: Etymologies and Orthographies in Cosmopolitan Papua New Guinea

This essay examines an aspect of the historical trajectory of Papua New Guinea's creole language Tok Pisin. A medium key to colonisation, pacification, and nationalisation, Tok Pisin's fortunes as a ‘real’ language in popular perception can be tracked through the orthographic choices that have clarified or obscured the etymological connections to the colonial, English-language past. Scholarly approaches to Tok Pisin and other creole languages have concentrated on the orthographic reflection of the regularities of structure that index ‘full’ languaged-ness and modern national autonomy. In contrast to this project of linguistic nationalisation, contemporary Tok Pisin speakers are developing repertoires of speaking/writing that invoke Tok Pisin's connections to Australian English even as they do not conform to it, an enregisterment of forms obscuring the boundaries between Standard English and Tok Pisin. As a convention used by youth in SMS and similar contexts, this practice subverts a prior generation's language ideology by pairing the lateral connections of new media with a repudiation of creole orderedness.     

Competitive Research Grants and Their Impact on Career Performance

The role of competitive funds as a source of funding for academic research has increased in many countries. For the individual researcher, the receipt of a grant can influence both scientific production and career paths. This paper focuses on the importance of the receipt of a research grant for researchers’ academic career paths utilizing a mixed methods approach that combines econometric analysis with in-depth qualitative interviews. The analysis has novel elements both in terms of its subject (impact of funding grants on individuals’ academic career paths) and approach. The results of this study indicate that while research grants have a positive impact on the research performed under the grant itself, there are very important secondary effects on research performance through positive effects on academic career advancement. The probability of obtaining a full professorship for grant recipients is almost double that for rejected applicants, 16 percent compared to 9 percent. The probability for career advancement in general is about 9 percentage points higher for grant recipients. Qualitative interviews support these quantitative results by providing insights into how grants impact research careers, through heightened status, recognition, networking and other factors.     

The ‘diaspora advantage’ of Pauline Chan (1956–): from multicultural filmmaker to cultural broker

ABSTRACT

This is the first academic paper to critically introduce and document the 30-year screen career of Pauline Chan, Australia’s highest profile Chinese film director, television actress and media producer. Sydney-based, Vietnam-born, Hong Kong-educated and US-trained, Chan has directed six films, starred in 14 and produced four television series and films. Despite her prolific career, there has been no sustained research on her profile and repertoire. This paper evaluates the evolution of Chan’s career using the diaspora ‘advantage’ as a new approach. Characterised by mobility rather than culturalism, the term refers to the benefits brought by and skills of diaspora groups that have allowed them to flourish as transnational actors able to leverage resources in both their countries of origin and settlement. It begins by elaborating how Chan’s diaspora advantage has allowed her to challenge welfare multiculturalism and extend aesthetic multiculturalism. It further documents her transition from a multicultural filmmaker to a cultural intermediary by leveraging her diasporic advantage across the film sectors in China and Australia, and opening up new industrial routes outside of the confines of policy. Using interdisciplinary methods to screen biography that include interviews with the filmmaker, film archival research, critical cultural policy studies, and studies in Asian Australian cinema and political economy, this paper argues that the new approach of the diaspora advantage turns the deficit associated with the diaspora into a dividend that has the potential to rethink the imaginary between Asia and Australia.     

How do your rivals’ releasing dates affect your box office?

In this paper, we study to what extent a movie’s box-office receipts are affected by the temporal distribution of rival films. We propose a reduced-form empirical model to measure and test competition effects among films released close to each other in a standard regression framework. Such an analysis is appealing in terms of its policy implication and may provide guidance to distributors to decide on their releasing dates of their firms. We estimate this model using information on the films released in five countries: the USA, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain. The geographical dimension of our data set permits us to control for unobserved heterogeneity among films released using panel data techniques, which allows us to evaluate the individual and specific effects of each film. Thus we deal with one of the most relevant features of the movie market, namely the presence of highly differentiated products.     

全球媒体语境下广州城市形象的传播与建构

城市形象是城市竞争力的重要组成部分。依托全球媒体有关广州的报道,对广州城市形象的全球媒体影响力开展实证分析,并从强化政府主导、畅通参与渠道;融入国家战略、提升传播层级;推进科技创新、塑造崭新形象;发展数字产业、夯实传播基础;布局未来传播、增强舆论引导等方面构建提出了增强广州城市形象全球传播能力的对策建议。     

The Prestige of Social Scientists in Spain and France: An Examination of Their h-Index Values Using Scopus and Google Scholar

We analyze the prestige of 1,500 scholars in economics, sociology, and management who have Spanish and French institutional affiliations operationalized by their h-index in Scopus and Google Scholar. We use a negative binomial count model to examine how some individual factors affect the h-index from both databases. The results show a non-monotonic relationship between the researchers’ career length and their h-index. There is a positive and statistically significant relationship between total research output and the h-index. The share of publications in English over total publications has also a positive and statistically significant effect on the h-index, except in a single case, while the share of publications in other foreign languages does not have such effect. Finally, we found that the effects of the number of citations received by documents in English (international impact) and by those in the vernacular language (local or regional impact) on the h-index vary according to the database, the country, and the discipline in question.

     

Against accumulation: lifestyle minimalism,de-growth and the present post-ecological condition

The post-2008 financial crisis era has seen an upsurge in popular cultural narratives that implicitly challenge principles of economic productivity, consumption and growth by lamenting a so-called ‘world of too much,’ advocating ethics of minimalism, and renouncing everyday busyness. Narratives range from lifestyle advice on simplicity and de-cluttering private homes, to quests for the reduction of individual labor, communication, social contacts and distraction. This article questions these narratives in terms of eco-politics. Using Kate Soper’s concept of ‘alternative hedonism,’ the article analyzes a selection of five self-help books and one blog that promote lifestyle minimalism in order to interrogate their potential in stimulating de-growth eco-politics through popular culture. Drawing on post-ecological theory, it argues that narratives of lifestyle minimalism are paradoxical in that they resist yet at the same time promote capitalist cultures of growth. To overcome this limitation, it is crucial to understand and transform the narrative premises of lifestyle minimalism in ways that contextualize problems of ‘excess,’ ‘clutter’ and ‘a world of too much’ as intrinsic to the current system of capital accumulation. The article concludes by reflecting on the potential of an eco-movement that joins the alternative culture of minimalist hedonism with the eco-political agenda of de-growth.     

Re-thinking Copyright Through the Copy in Russia

How one copy of a film or a single is made illegal, while its identical twin is treated as legitimate? By drawing from the material collected in Russia on the illegal copying and distribution of video and musical contents, this paper moves beyond the definition of media piracy in legal terms, and instead examines practices of copying, the properties of copies, and the motivations that drive their circulation, color laws and their continuous application. It approaches the copy not as an isolated, individual unit but part of an assemblage, and demonstrates the existence of a specific culture of circulation which brings together its diverse components as one ‘catchment’. In Russia, the legal and pirate media markets do not stand in opposition to one another but co-exist and even enable each other. Media goods have social value that extends beyond commercial, and which is strongly associated with the cultural reproduction of audiences who are cosmopolitan in character and partake in the transnational circuits of culture. Finally, the very definition of what is ‘legal’ in Russian is an outcome of the unstable process of authentication in which experts test, guess and create material trails of evidence to stabilize elusive digital substances. On the basis of these findings, the paper problematizes the social imaginary around the digital copy and with it, the widely circulating notion of ‘piracy’.     

The Empire Writes Back…Back: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Autogenic War

This essay attempts to disclose a uniquely volatile nexus that implicates – and perhaps, reinvigorates – a postcolonial analytics of insurgency. This nexus includes three strands of inquiry: the first is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which really is – albeit in a qualified sense – revolutionary. War is doing new things with time and space through culture, media, and data technology, and in the process is mutating not only what it means to be a part of this or that national group but is also changing what it means to be human. The second strand of inquiry focuses on the legacy of postcolonial studies, particularly the notion of ‘writing back’ which, I contend, is an apposite starting point for writing critically about the RMA. Apposite though it is, there are limits to postcolonial studies in the contemporary war context. This is so because while the divisions of individual difference are shifting, the coherence of the nation state itself is undergoing radical change. Moving outward in scope to a planetary scale, the human being per se is no longer a primary category by and for which war is happening today. Thus the third strand of inquiry is focused on the residual anthropomorphic tendencies within postcolonial studies that too narrowly limit discussions of violence and collective belonging. The concept of the human being per se remains reliant on early models of technology and media (namely, writing and literature, usually novels). Therefore, in the context of an ever-expanding global war machine, ‘writing back’ is a concept that requires fine-tuning and revision.     

Cache society: transactional records,electronic money,and cultural resistance

Money is an ‘instrument of collective memory’ before it is a means of exchange, a unit of account or a store of value. Money's status as a memory technology is particularly significant in light of the role that information and communication technologies now play in economic transactions. Many of the new channels and infrastructures for payments, such as magnetic cards, mobile phones, the wired Internet, social media platforms, and RFID technologies, record detailed transactional data alongside a range of other identifying data. We now have extremely detailed records of the many ways that money circulates, is transferred and is spent. This paper concerns this previously latent transactional data and how it is currently recorded, monetised, and used to inform action. What has been recorded in and about money at different moments in time and how are these categories breaking down? Who has access to and ownership over this collectively produced record and how is it driving new data practices and business models based on the monetisation and application of monetary records? And how might re-engaging with money's mnemonic status help to foreground a politics and ethics of transactional data?     

Confronting Precarity in the Warhol Economy

Normative cultural economy discourse on New York City embraces the creative industries as engines of job creation but neglects the quality of employment within them. This article sets out to both illuminate the precarious conditions of nonstandard workers in New York's vaunted creative sectors and identify emerging collective responses to precarity in this city. Three areas of labour activity are focused upon: fashion industry frictions, art world agitations, and independent worker initiatives. Under each of these headings, the article profiles two organizations that are variously exposing, resisting, and mitigating precarity among flexible labour forces in the arts, the media, cultural industries, and beyond. The discussion of these organizations is informed by interviews with some of their protagonists, by documents produced by the organizations, and/or by media coverage of them. Challenging the assumption that getting by in informal cultural labour markets obliges individual coping strategies, this article reveals scenes from a metropolitan laboratory of precarious labour politics. These initiatives are inklings of a recomposition of labour politics in which flexible workforces in creative industries are important participants.