- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture
- Previous Issues
- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012
-
-
Transforming neighbourhood mediators driven by poverty on Turkish reality television
More LessIn Turkey, there are different audience groups meeting at the crossroads of the popular entertainment format of reality television; first, those who are familiar with the fictional world of the media; second, those who make fun of passing traditions in social media; and third, those who still live a more traditional life in their neighbourhoods. Focusing on the third audience group, this article will trace the transformation of neighbourhoods from pre- to postmodern. Mainstream media entertainment becomes popular with the support of pseudo ‘neighbourhood mediators’ in talk shows, game shows, and reality TV that rely on audience participation. Istanbul TV studios working within the global format of reality TV in their Turkish versions (with codings of kinship and hometown neighbourhoods for those who have immigrated to Istanbul) will be analyzed here as part of a broader research. In this article, audience research is conducted in the context of whether any versions of reality TV induce audience participation at least in appearances, turns media into a ‘melting pot spectacle’ for real people with real problems. The research shows that the connection between taking comfort in the old-style neighbouring of pre-modern times, and the expectations within the rationale of the modern human right to a better living, alongside the deficiency of liberal economic rights, all meet paradoxically in postmodern studio systems.
-
-
-
‘I don’t wanna be anything other than me’: A case study on gender representations of teenagers in American teen drama series One Tree Hill
Authors: Elke Van Damme and Sofie Van BauwelEconomic and demographic trends have turned young people into a target audience, and media producers and the marketing industry have realized that the contemporary teenage market has substantial potential. Television is still the most popular medium among teenagers; along with web surfing and social networking, television is part of teens’ daily media use. Media content is essential in teenagers’ self-representation: fictional media programmes produce commodified meanings, and models of behaviour and information about norms and values are repetitively delivered by attractive characters in the form of entertainment. This article gives an overview of the gender representations of teenagers in the American teen series by Schwahn One Tree Hill (2003–2012) by using a qualitative thematic textual analysis. We can say that the series revolves around a male-oriented world in which basketball is the main topic. Teen subcultures are often portrayed in a prototypical manner and traditional discourses of masculinity and femininity are often rein-forced. A more liberal stance was noted regarding (female) sexuality.
-
-
-
Got worry? Missing children notices on milk cartons in the United States
By Perry HowellWhile contemporary media scholars note the increasing breadth and intimacy of media’s involvement in everyday life (cell phones, electronic surveillance, foetal ultrasounds), there is a long history of ordinary objects serving media functions, acting as messengers in a sender–receiver relationship with complex consequences, both intended and less so. The missing children notices on milk cartons in the United States present a communication phenomenon with a strong cultural presence but obscure cultural history. For all of their cultural resonance, their frequent use in satire, their near-synonymity with the idea of disappearing with little or no trace, specifics about these notices on milk cartons are surprisingly difficult to come by. As many as five billion milk cartons with missing children pictured on their sides were in circulation at one time in the United States. The practice of placing missing children notices on milk cartons grew explosively because of a complex confluence of political and social pressures in 1980s America. These pressures led many, with a wide variety of motives, to invest the phenomenon with meanings and hopes beyond its laudable surface goal of aiding in the return of particular missing children. Milk carton notices serve as an example of how ordinary objects can not only respond to and amplify the communicative contributions of more traditional mass media, but can become media themselves.
-
-
-
How Dirty Harry was Rodney King’d: The vigilante cop in modern American cinema
More LessThis paper is an examination of the vigilante cop’s emergence as an American film icon in the 1970s and 80s as well as an investigation into his recent descent to the role of antagonist in popular films such as Training Day and Pride and Glory. While many cultural and political factors contribute to the evolution of a cinematic genre, this paper attempts to show that the impetus for this particular, significant transformation was the highly televised and controversial 1991 beating of Rodney King, an African American citizen of Los Angeles, by the LAPD. This blatant act forced American audiences to reconsider the glorification of police vigilantism they had so easily embraced for two decades and cast a shadow of corruption over future cinematic incarnations.
-
-
-
Diasporic gender and communication
More LessThis article analyses the peculiarities of the relation between three concepts: ‘diaspora’, ‘gender’ and ‘communication’ in the case of women of Romanian ethnic origin living in Canada. Diasporas and diasporic experiences, even in their apparently more traditionalist variants, should not be dismissed simplistically as backward-looking, as they are almost invariably constituting new transnational spaces of experience that are complexly interfacing with the experiential frameworks that both countries of settlement and purported countries of origin represent. Diasporas are located in the midst of diverse circulations. Borrowing Appadurai’s notions (1996), it can be argued that ‘diaspora is the intersection point of ethno-scapes, finance-scapes, ideo-scapes, techno-scapes and media-scapes’ (1996). The article assumes that the interaction between gender, social identity and communication can be a new way of understanding the peculiarities of diaspora in the modern age. The article favours a qualitative research methodology. On the basis of ‘methods’ triangulation’ principle and for validity reasons, two main methods of data collection will be used: the discourse analysis of the online journals (blogs) written by Romanian women and the semi-structured interviews with a sample of Romanian women from the Canadian diaspora. Communication, either as ‘a bridge to homeland’, or as ‘a link between the diaspora communities in local, national and transnational levels’ is contributing to the creation of symbolic community spaces in which identities can be reconstructed.
-