scholarly journals Self-representation in literary fandom: Women's leisure reader selfies as postfeminist performance

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn S. Opel

In social media communities dedicated to women's leisure reading and literary fandom, images of women engaged in the act of reading circulate prominently. These images—created and uploaded to fan sites by the fans themselves—have recurring characteristics: the woman often holds a leather-bound book, wears romanticized, neo-Victorian dress, and has exaggeratedly feminine, sexualized features. These representations are not of actual members of the community but rather fictive, collected, circulated, and commented upon in a communal act of identity construction. This gendered visual representation of the literate self provides a performance of a double movement in postfeminist culture: a broadcasting of discourses that is empowering (participatory digital cultural production around literature) and yet promotes a cultural context for reinforcement of conventional gender norms. To demonstrate this double movement, I utilize a case study of these self-representational fan images, collected over a year on a Facebook group page for fans of 19th-century British literature and filmic adaptations. These images and their circulation are then analyzed via a two-pronged double movement theoretical framework. First, feminist media scholarship helps explain the empowering aspects of the new media creation of the reader selfie. Second, gender performance uncovers how these repeated sexualized images of women readers reentrench conventional, hyperfeminine, and sexualized gender roles. Double movement takes place in contemporary women leisure readers' lives, and the media-led postfeminist cultural movement offers a depoliticized, self-indulgent path toward youth and beauty at the expense of institutional or social change.

Author(s):  
Zizi Papacharissi

The objective of this article is to sketch out the profile of the digital citizen. The premise for this article rests upon utopian views that embrace new media technologies as democratizers of postindustrial society (e.g., Bell, 1981; Johnson & Kaye, 1998; Kling, 1996; Negroponte, 1998; Rheingold, 1993) and cautionary criticism that questions the substantial impact new media could have on reviving a dormant public sphere (e.g., Bimber & Davis, 2003; Davis, 1999; Hill & Hughes, 1998; Jankowski & van Selm, 2000; Jones, 1997; Margolis & Resnick, 2000; Scheufele & Nisbet, 2002). Concurrently, declining participation in traditional forms of political involvement and growing public cynicism (e.g., Cappella & Jamieson, 1996, 1997; Fallows, 1996; Patterson, 1993, 1996) position the Internet and related technologies as vehicles through which political activity can be reinvented. Still, conflicting narratives on civic involvement, as articulated by the government, politicians, the media, and the public, create confusion about the place and role of the citizen in a digital age. The digital citizen profile, therefore, is defined by historical and cultural context, divided between expectation and skepticism regarding new media, and presents hope of resurrecting the public sphere and awakening a latent, postmodern political consciousness. This article outlines these conditions, reviews perceptions of the digital citizen, and proposes a digital citizen role model for the future.


Author(s):  
Z. Papacharissi

The objective of this article is to sketch out the profile of the digital citizen. The premise for this article rests upon utopian views that embrace new media technologies as democratizers of postindustrial society (e.g., Bell, 1981; Johnson & Kaye, 1998; Kling, 1996; Negroponte, 1998; Rheingold, 1993) and cautionary criticism that questions the substantial impact new media could have on reviving a dormant public sphere (e.g., Bimber & Davis, 2003; Davis, 1999; Hill & Hughes, 1998; Jankowski & van Selm, 2000; Jones, 1997; Margolis & Resnick, 2000; Scheufele & Nisbet, 2002). Concurrently, declining participation in traditional forms of political involvement and growing public cynicism (e.g., Cappella & Jamieson, 1996, 1997; Fallows, 1996; Patterson, 1993, 1996) position the Internet and related technologies as vehicles through which political activity can be reinvented. Still, conflicting narratives on civic involvement, as articulated by the government, politicians, the media, and the public, create confusion about the place and role of the citizen in a digital age. The digital citizen profile, therefore, is defined by historical and cultural context, divided between expectation and skepticism regarding new media, and presents hope of resurrecting the public sphere and awakening a latent, postmodern political consciousness. This article outlines these conditions, reviews perceptions of the digital citizen, and proposes a digital citizen role model for the future.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-45
Author(s):  
Р. К. Махачашвілі ◽  
А. О. Сидоркіна

The article is devoted to new media discourse in Japan. Considering the fact that new technologies, such as Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, phygital space, big data, etc. have changed the media landscape dramatically, we now are talking about a new type of discourse: digital discourse. The principles of identifying and excluding new media discourse are analyzed in this article. The article reviews the main theoretical and conceptual approaches to studying new media discourse in its dynamic and overlooks its special aspects comparing to TV and print media discourse. A case study is Japanese new media analyzed as a complex open system prone to fluctuations and capable of transformations. This article attempts to provide a better understanding of the new phenomenon of digital space and the way media discourse can develop in its framework. As the modes of communication are changing and media discourse is fluctuating as well, it is opening new perspectives to further media studying that will consider not only new parameters of the phenomenon but also its socio-cultural context.


Sustainability in environment is the key to achieve the goals for development. In the media, we have a lot of environmental issues, by regarding this the policy makers and the wider community people have taken action towards the green intiatives in the village people through community radio. Community Radio mainly represent for the people with a beautiful tagline like "By the People, of the people and for the people" leads to represent the different social, economic and cultural context. Women Empowerment and their magnitude development are major affair in the process of evolution. In India, above 850 million people are denied from a vast range of understanding information and knowledge and some of the rural people are isolated without any kind of impact. Traditional Media, New media and Development communication which would develop our livelihood pattern and also the way of communicating with each other. For the rural ,poor people within certain communities "Community Radio" has been proved as the most effective medium of capability and comprehensive to provide impartial content and useful programme among the certain community mankind. The aim of this research is to analyze the benefaction of community radio for women empowerment in SHYAMALAVAANI COMMUNITY RADIO. From this detailed analysis, community radio programmes has created fully participation among Community audience and also equal circulation of ideas among this particular community. This is expected to reveal some attention to all the people for the programmes and effectiveness among women to get authority and get more confident in sway your life and hold their rights.


Author(s):  
Mattias Aronsson

The article examines recent reviews of Marguerite Duras’s works in Sweden. A corpus of reviews published in the Swedish press has been collected (here called “established criticism”), and this material is compared to and contrasted with reviews published on the Internet, on personal blogs and homepages (in the study labelled as “non-established criticism”). The non-established literary criticism published on the Internet represents a somewhat new phenomenon, insomuch as it constitutes a parallel to the traditional reviews published in the “old” press – such as printed daily newspapers, literary magazines, etc. It also presents the interpretations and opinions of “ordinary” readers, and by that I refer to people who do not occupy a position of power in the field of cultural production. This category of readers did not have access to the literary debate before the democratization of information and communication technology, i.e., personal computers with high-performance Internet connection, smartphones, IPads, etc. In that respect, reviews written and published by non- established critics represent a new facet of literary criticism. Recent studies show the importance of opinions expressed by bloggers in the modern economy, where the “e-commerce” phenomenon has been soaring for quite some years. Hence, all publishing houses today must keep an eye not only on what the established critics in the old media have to say about the products, but they must also be increasingly aware of the opinions expressed by amateur critics in the blogosphere. The narratives studied in this article have crossed several borders. First, Marguerite Duras’s works have been translated from French to Swedish, which means that the texts have been transformed to fit a new linguistic and cultural context. Secondly, the examined corpus does not only come from established critics, but it also contains reviews that originate from the less explored territory of the blogosphere. The study is inspired by concepts such as convergence culture and participatory culture, popularized by media researcher Henry Jenkins, among other scholars. In a culture where old and new media tend to converge, the consumer of literature (and other products) has the opportunity to be an active participant in the construction of meaning and value – for instance by publishing literary reviews on the Internet. Thus, the notion of prosumer (neologism created by merging “producer” with “consumer”) is used with reference to this somewhat new actor in the world of commerce – and, indeed, in the world of reader-response research.


Author(s):  
Christo Sims

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. This book documents the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. It is the account of how this “school for digital kids,” heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. The book shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes. It traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. It offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. The book offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.


Author(s):  
Chris Forster

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.


Author(s):  
Crispin Thurlow

This chapter focuses on sex/uality in the context of so-called new media and, specifically, digital discourse: technologically mediated linguistic or communicative practices, and mediatized representations of these practices. To help think through the relationship among sex, discourse, and (new) media, the discussion focuses on sexting and two instances of sexting “scandals” in the news. Against this backdrop, the chapter sets out four persistent binaries that typically shape public and academic writing about sex/uality and especially digital sex/uality: new-old, mediation-mediatization, private/real-public/fake, and personal-political. These either-or approaches are problematic, because they no longer account for the practical realities and lived experiences of both sex and media. Scholars interested in digital sex/uality are advised to adopt a “both-and” approach in which media (i.e., digital technologies and The Media) both create pleasurable, potentially liberating opportunities to use our bodies (sexually or otherwise) and simultaneously thwart us, shame us, or shut us down. In this sense, there is nothing that is really “new” after all.


Author(s):  
Michael X. Delli Carpini ◽  
Bruce A. Williams

The media landscape of countries across the globe is changing in profound ways that are of relevance to the study and practice of political campaigns and elections. This chapter uses the concept of media regimes to put these changes in historical context and describe the major drivers that lead to a regime’s formation, institutionalization, and dissolution. It then turns to a more detailed examination of the causes and qualities of what is arguably a new media regime that has formed in the United States; the extent to which this phenomenon has or is occurring (albeit in different ways) elsewhere; and how the conduct of campaigns and elections are changing as a result. The chapter concludes with thoughts on the implications of the changing media landscape for the study and practice of campaigns and elections specifically, and democratic politics more generally.


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