"The author demonstrates how core concepts from anthropology—participant-observation, reciprocity, and community—apply to sociality on YouTube. Lange’s book reconceptualizes and updates these concepts for video-sharing cultures. Lange draws on 152 interviews with YouTube participants at gather
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ings throughout the United States, content analyses of more than 300 videos, observations of interactions on and off the site, and participant-observation. She documents how the introduction of monetization options impacted perceived opportunities for open sharing and creative exploration of personal and social messages. Lange’s book provides new insight into patterns of digital migration, YouTube’s influence on off-site interactions, and the emotional impact of losing control over images. The book also debunks traditional myths about online interaction, such as the supposed online/offline binary, the notion that anonymity always degrades public discourse, and the popular characterization of online participants as over-sharing narcissists. YouTubers’ experiences illustrate fascinating hybrid forms of contemporary sociality that are neither purely mediated nor sufficient when conducted only in person. Combining intensive ethnography, analysis of video artifacts, and Lange’s personal vlogging experiences, the book explores how YouTubers are creating a posthuman collective characterized by interaction, support, and controversy." (Publisher description)
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"Combining theoretical and empirical discussions with shorter thick description case studies, this book offers an anthropological exploration of the emergence in Malaysia of lifestyle bloggers – precursors to current social media microcelebrities and influencers. It tracks the transformation of pe
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rsonal blogs, which attracted readers with spontaneous and authentic accounts of everyday life, into lifestyle blogs that generate income through advertising and foreground consumerist lifestyles. It argues that lifestyle blogs are dialogically constituted between the blogger, the readers, and the blog itself, and challenges the assumption of a unitary self by proposing that lifestyle blogs can best be understood in terms of the dividual self." (Publisher description)
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"This book explores the evolving political role of street art in Latin America during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It examines the use, appropriation and reconfiguration of public spaces and political opportunities through street art forms, drawing on empirical work undertaken in
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Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. Bringing together a range of insights from social movement studies, aesthetics and anthropology, the book highlights some of the difficulties in theorising and understanding the complex interplay between art and political practice. It seeks to explore 'what art can do' in protest, and in so doing, aims to provide a useful point of reference for students and scholars interested in political communication, culture and resistance." (Publisher description)
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"La idea de este libro surgió durante el evento conmemorativo de los 30 años de la publicación de: De los Medios a las Mediaciones (1987), realizado a finales de noviembre de 2017, en el ámbito del Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul/ Brasil
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. El encuentro reunió a investigadores vinculados a los cursos de postgrado de Rio Grande do Sul, los investigadores Omar Rincón, Amparo Marroquín y Rosario Sanchez, que vinieron de Colombia, El Salvador y Uruguay, respectivamente, además de Immacolata Lopes de la Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo.
La jornada de presentaciones y debates estimuló al colega Omar Rincón a la invitación para organizar esa publicación, según él porque Brasil desarrolló una perspectiva empírica y metodológica muy pertinente y creativa con relación a los mapas de las mediaciones propuestos por Jesús Martín-Barbero (JMB). El mapa más reciente, objeto de esa publicación, fue presentado por JMB en una entrevista con Omar Rincón en el 2017 (Martín-Barbero, 2017a), y hasta el momento de la invitación de Omar había sido poco discutido en el escenario académico latinoamericano, este libro responde a este desafío. El “mapa para investigar el sensorium contemporáneo”, entre confluencias y divergencias con los modelos anteriores (1987, 1998, 2009), propone nuevos ejes y mediaciones para la comprensión de las mutaciones comunicacionales y culturales de nuestro tiempo. Ellos son temporalidad, espacialidad, sensorialidad, tecnicidad, ciudadanía, identidad, narrativa y redes, algunos ya presentes y otros inéditos en el trazado intelectual del autor.
El libro dedica un capítulo para cada una de esas mediaciones y polos, y todos los capítulos empiezan con un mapa sobre el desarrollo conceptual del término que nombra la mediación en la disciplina donde JMB fue a buscarla para plantear su discusión. Esta introducción fue realizada por especialistas invitados por las autoras de cada capítulo, las cuales, a su vez, fueron invitadas por nosotras. La tarea de cada especialista invitado fue rescatar el origen teórico de la mediación en cuestión. Así, la mediación de la ciudadanía fue introducida por un sociólogo, temporalidad por un historiador, espacialidad por un geógrafo y así sucesivamente." (Presentación, páginas 11-12)
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"This paper sets out to challenge the dominant narrative of the creative economy as a new option for developing countries. The much-vaunted growth rates proclaimed by UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Programme have slowed, and are seen to apply to a particular kind of manufactured good, as well as being
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overwhelmingly dominated by Asia, and especially China. This paper tries to unpick the dominant creative economy model of entrepreneurship, creative human capital and open market opportunity and suggests that – other than in East Asia – it is business as usual for the Global North. The creative economy not only fails to deliver its promise of development but has profound consequences for local cultures, caught up in an ever more global web of exploitation driven by the new digital platforms. We need to return to the earlier concerns of ‘culture and development’ now fully aware of the downsides, as well as the potential, of cultural economies in an uncertain global landscape." (Page 1)
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"This book interrogates the possibilities of global thinking from the south in the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Through lenses of millennial media cultures, it refocuses the praxis of the global south in relation to the established ideas of globalization, development, and con
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ditions of postcoloniality. Bringing together original empirical work from media scholars from across the global south, the volume highlights how contemporary thinking about the region as theoretical framework - an emerging area of theory in its own right - is incomplete without due consideration being placed on narrative forms, both analogue and digital, traditional and sub-cultural. From news to music cultures, from journalism to visual culture, from screen forms to culture-jamming, the chapters in the volume explore contemporary popular forms of communication as manifested in diverse global south contexts." (Publisher description)
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"A l’ère du numérique, séraphins, chérubins et autres figures angéliques peuplent toujours notre imaginaire. Les images de ces êtres pourtant invisibles se multiplient : ils sont présents dans les religions traditionnelles, dans l’ésotérisme de néo-spiritualités et classiquement repr
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sentés ou popularisés dans une esthétique du kitsch et dans les littératures de l’imaginaire comme la Fantasy. Mais cette diversité culturelle illustre toute une fonction principale, celle de médiation : les anges sont de puissants messagers entre ciel et terre. En tant que tels, ils ne pouvaient pas ne pas se saisir des technologies de l’information et de la communication. L’ange peut troquer sa cithare contre une tablette tactile. L’ère du numérique, dans son immatérialité, son immédiateté, sa globalité, constitue un terrain naturel de déploiement de leurs activités." (Dos de couverture)
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"Anthropologists began to study media relatively late in the history of the discipline. Research on media - in particular, mass media - tended to be associated wiht he societies most anthropologists came from, and thus with the self rather than the other, and except for a few rare exceptions, it was
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not until the late 1980s that anthropologists began to turn systematic attention to media as a social practice. This was true even for older media, such as songs, dance and theater, since those topics were associated with the other late research focus of urban anthropology." (Introduction)
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"The article revisits classical debates about the positive and negative relation of popular culture and socio-political developments with regard to the Arab world. Within the Frankfurt School and modern Cultural Studies at times contradictory approaches to the role of entertainment in political cult
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ure are being debated. In Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies rather positive readings of entertainments’ political potential seem to prevail. During the “Arab Spring” the impact of participatory values promoted by both popular culture and the new social media (“entertainment is political”) appeared to be actually tangible. The article discusses the dynamic relation of entertainment television and individualization on a theoretical and empirical level. On the basis of a large body of follow-up discourses of media reception (group discussions) with young Egyptians during the time of the “Arab Spring,” we ask whether contemporary television shows promote both individualization on a cognitive, affective and practical level of experience as well as the appreciation of individualization as a social value. We argue that popular culture reveals tendencies of differentiation and modernization in Arab societies, which are all too often described as “collectivistic.” The case study shows that critical faculty, media literacy and the appreciation of individual articulation can be triggered by entertainment. Moments of “ironic pleasure” and transitions of simulated empathy and stimulated action are discussed." (Abstract)
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"The overall aim of the workshop was to promote discussion among the archives on their respective practices, to reflect on the practice of interviewing with the involved historians and, last but not least, to find ways to make better use of the interviews available in the archives [...] The first pa
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rt of this reader contains the self-portrayals of the archives involved in the network and presentations of their contemporary witness projects, while the second part features reports from the historians on their practice, including reflections on their approaches. The appendix contains detailed overviews of the archived interviews of contemporary witnesses. Together with the texts, they are intended to give an impression of the interesting interviews that can already be found in the Ecology Archives and to arouse curiosity about their scientific use." (Editorial, page 4)
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