Media Representations: Part 4 – Pluralism
Pluralist explanations recognise a variety of different media representations of categories such as gender. They also emphasise the importance of the role of the audience in interpreting such representations – ideas that relate to two dominant themes in pluralist explanations – diversity and choice. In terms of diversity, contemporary media and audiences are characterised more […]
Media Representations: Part 5 – Postmodernism
While Marxist and Feminist perspectives generally discuss media representations in terms of how and why they misrepresent particular groups, Baudrillard (1995) argues representations shouldn’t be considered in terms of whether something is fairly or unfairly represented; this follows because, he argues, how something is represented is its reality. In this respect conventional approaches to understanding […]
New Media: 1. Features
This short series of blog posts looks at various dimensions of new media, beginning with a broad overview of some key distinquishing features: As Socha and Eber-Schmid (2012) argue “Part of the difficulty in defining New Media is that there is an elusive quality to the idea of new”. This “elusive quality” can, perhaps, be […]
New Media: 2. Issues
The various features of new media raise a new set of issues for both producers and consumers. In terms of the former, for example, the development of global computer networks have presented problems for media industries whose products are relatively easy to copy and distribute, with no loss of quality because of digital reproduction. The […]
New Media 3: Implications – digital optimism
The development of new media has led to a general debate about the implications of changing technologies and their impact on economic, political and cultural life, polarised around two opposing views – the first of which can be characterised as: digital optimism From this viewpoint the defining characteristic of new media is a form of […]
New Media 4: Implications – digital pessimism
An alternative interpretation – digital pessimism – argues the globalising processes on which new media depends are neither wholly beneficial nor unambiguous; while globalisation involves decentralising processes, for example, it also produces greater centralisation across economic, political and cultural behaviours. In economic terms “free” business models are only free in the sense they have costs […]
New Media 5: Building a Better Mousetrap – Digital Incarceration
In the final part of this short series on new media we can note a significant extension to the idea of digital pessimism. While new media ownership is sometimes likened to what Socha and Eber-Schmid call “the growing pains of the American Wild West”, where a diversity of companies compete for market share, the reality […]
Crime, Media and Postmodern Modalities
Harari’s “The theatre of terror” article is worth reading because it explicitly sees terrorism as a form of “spectacle” in contemporary Western societies – an idea referenced by Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne (1995) when they argue crime in general can be seen in terms of postmodern spectacle, a general “crime discourse” driven by two main narratives: […]