This article analyses continuities and changes in how disease has been instrumentalised in cinema as a way of conceptualizing race—comparing five films depicting epidemics produced before the Second World War and five after. In the 1930s films, non-white populations often passively accept assistance in dealing with epidemic disease—a paternalistic white savior narrative—but not always with “gratitude”, and sometimes direct resistance. Here, epidemics take root in physical sites of economic “underdevelopment”, perpetuated further by perceived “premodern” cultural practices demarcated down the lines of race or ethnicity, and intersect with other gendered and socio-economic categories. After the war, while some cinematic tropes such as the “white knight” continue, other narratives emerge including a shift in emphasis away from the Othered environment as the nexus of disease (the disease’s “incubation”), and towards greater alarm about the appearance of disease within recipient, frequently white, communities.
{"title":"From Disease Incubation to Disease Receipt: Representing Epidemics and Race in Pre- and Post-Second World War American Cinema (1931–1939 and 1950–1962)","authors":"Phạm Thùy Dung, Daniel R. Curtis, Q. Han","doi":"10.18146/tmg.842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.842","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses continuities and changes in how disease has been instrumentalised in cinema as a way of conceptualizing race—comparing five films depicting epidemics produced before the Second World War and five after. In the 1930s films, non-white populations often passively accept assistance in dealing with epidemic disease—a paternalistic white savior narrative—but not always with “gratitude”, and sometimes direct resistance. Here, epidemics take root in physical sites of economic “underdevelopment”, perpetuated further by perceived “premodern” cultural practices demarcated down the lines of race or ethnicity, and intersect with other gendered and socio-economic categories. After the war, while some cinematic tropes such as the “white knight” continue, other narratives emerge including a shift in emphasis away from the Othered environment as the nexus of disease (the disease’s “incubation”), and towards greater alarm about the appearance of disease within recipient, frequently white, communities.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139140983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Book review of: Barend de Voogd, De filmfabriek. Profilti, de Haagse concurrent van Polygoon 1929-1933. (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2023), 319 pp. ISBN 9789464561609
书评Barend de Voogd, De filmfabriek.Profilti, the Hague competitor of Polygoon 1929-1933.(Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2023), 319 pp.国际标准书号 9789464561609
{"title":"De filmfabriek. Profilti, de Haagse concurrent van Polygoon 1929-1933","authors":"Abel Van Oosterwijk","doi":"10.18146/tmg.880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.880","url":null,"abstract":"Book review of: Barend de Voogd, De filmfabriek. Profilti, de Haagse concurrent van Polygoon 1929-1933. (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2023), 319 pp. ISBN 9789464561609","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139138809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recent articles suggesting the late-1990s animatronic children’s toy, Furby, was promoted and perceived as true Artificial Intelligence in 1998-99 are not wholly accurate. In examining 130 North American news stories, Furby is often accurately described as only imitating machine learning. This paper analyses these articles from the perspective of mythmaking in technological culture. In the article, I analyse the media discourses at the time and provide their historical context within North American technological culture, containing events such as the Y2K bug, popular media representations, and the dotcom bubble. I also describe several potent emotional reactions to Furby. However, recent media discourses suggest Furby had been perceived as a panic-inducing new technology, similar to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast and silent cinema train effect, both of which historians have largely discounted. I contribute evidence to the contrary, while acknowledging emotional reactions, which are not necessarily indicators of utopian or dystopian cultural panics, but instead a technological banal. The contemporary mythmaking about Furby is situated as comparable to Foucault’s analysis of myths of Victorian prudishness and silence around sexuality. Retroactive mythmaking risks supporting uncritical perspectives in the present, warranting interrogation of myths about AI as it develops and expands.
{"title":"Retrospective Technological Mythmaking: Media Discourses of Furby and Artificial Intelligence","authors":"D. T. Scott","doi":"10.18146/tmg.849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.849","url":null,"abstract":"Recent articles suggesting the late-1990s animatronic children’s toy, Furby, was promoted and perceived as true Artificial Intelligence in 1998-99 are not wholly accurate. In examining 130 North American news stories, Furby is often accurately described as only imitating machine learning. This paper analyses these articles from the perspective of mythmaking in technological culture. In the article, I analyse the media discourses at the time and provide their historical context within North American technological culture, containing events such as the Y2K bug, popular media representations, and the dotcom bubble. I also describe several potent emotional reactions to Furby. However, recent media discourses suggest Furby had been perceived as a panic-inducing new technology, similar to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast and silent cinema train effect, both of which historians have largely discounted. I contribute evidence to the contrary, while acknowledging emotional reactions, which are not necessarily indicators of utopian or dystopian cultural panics, but instead a technological banal. The contemporary mythmaking about Furby is situated as comparable to Foucault’s analysis of myths of Victorian prudishness and silence around sexuality. Retroactive mythmaking risks supporting uncritical perspectives in the present, warranting interrogation of myths about AI as it develops and expands.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 44","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139137828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Book review of: Sylvia Alting van Geusau and Ester Wouthuysen, Kunstzinnig vermaak in Amsterdam. Het Panoramagebouw in de Plantage 1880-1935 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Virtùmedia together with Genootschap Amstelodamum, 2021), 239 pp., ISBN 9789491141270.
{"title":"Kunstzinnig vermaak in Amsterdam. Het Panoramagebouw in de Plantage 1880-1935","authors":"Eleonora Paklons","doi":"10.18146/tmg.881","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.881","url":null,"abstract":"Book review of: Sylvia Alting van Geusau and Ester Wouthuysen, Kunstzinnig vermaak in Amsterdam. Het Panoramagebouw in de Plantage 1880-1935 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Virtùmedia together with Genootschap Amstelodamum, 2021), 239 pp., ISBN 9789491141270.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 47","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139138970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the early 1980s, ad campaigns framed purchasing and using emerging consumer electronics as tools for accessing, what Lauren Berlant called, ‘the good life.’ Computers, video games, VCRs, and cassette players might help consumers cultivate a neoliberal, upwardly mobile, and implicitly white, lifestyle. This paper explores early personal computer and home console video game advertisements as a cultural discourse that framed emerging technology through normative gendered, raced, and classed everyday lifestyles in an American context. The central case study is the early 1980s televisual ad campaign for the Atari 2600 system, featuring the “Have You Played Atari Today?” jingle. The campaign was widely viewed and is representative of contemporaneous marketing approaches. The ad’s allusion to time management both reinforced broader neoliberal paradigms and enacted a gendered slippage between labour and leisure. This paper draws from feminist critical theory approaches and uses textual analysis to understand the ways that electronic advertisements appealed to late capitalist social attitudes.
{"title":"Keeping Up With Atari: Neoliberal Expectations in Early Electronics Advertising","authors":"Myrna Moretti","doi":"10.18146/tmg.847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.847","url":null,"abstract":"During the early 1980s, ad campaigns framed purchasing and using emerging consumer electronics as tools for accessing, what Lauren Berlant called, ‘the good life.’ Computers, video games, VCRs, and cassette players might help consumers cultivate a neoliberal, upwardly mobile, and implicitly white, lifestyle. This paper explores early personal computer and home console video game advertisements as a cultural discourse that framed emerging technology through normative gendered, raced, and classed everyday lifestyles in an American context. The central case study is the early 1980s televisual ad campaign for the Atari 2600 system, featuring the “Have You Played Atari Today?” jingle. The campaign was widely viewed and is representative of contemporaneous marketing approaches. The ad’s allusion to time management both reinforced broader neoliberal paradigms and enacted a gendered slippage between labour and leisure. This paper draws from feminist critical theory approaches and uses textual analysis to understand the ways that electronic advertisements appealed to late capitalist social attitudes.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 45","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139139362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The 25th of October 1985, France numbering telephone plan was transformed from seventy telephone zones to two in just one night. The computerisation of France was highly promoted but the Telephone network was quickly running out of numbers. We analyse this overnight event as an infrastructural event and the biggest update in telephone history. It market a crucial step in the direction of network as a service, turning telephones into terminal while network fade in the background. By doing so, we insist on the historical specificity of what was a technocratic event, an innovation process with a highly closed script.
{"title":"A New Numbering Plan Intended to Develop a Telephone Network","authors":"Adrien Tournier","doi":"10.18146/tmg.852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.852","url":null,"abstract":"The 25th of October 1985, France numbering telephone plan was transformed from seventy telephone zones to two in just one night. The computerisation of France was highly promoted but the Telephone network was quickly running out of numbers. We analyse this overnight event as an infrastructural event and the biggest update in telephone history. It market a crucial step in the direction of network as a service, turning telephones into terminal while network fade in the background. By doing so, we insist on the historical specificity of what was a technocratic event, an innovation process with a highly closed script.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 42","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139139060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mobile phones represent a new era in telecommunications beginning in the 1980s with the development of first-generation mobile phone networks. This article addresses the early history of the mobile phone from a cultural and aesthetic perspective with focus on representations of mobile phones in advertising. The aim is to explore whether images of early mobile phones as trendy and stylish artefacts suggested by examples in a previous study by the author represent a more common aesthetic trend related to advertising and consumer culture in the 1980s. The study is based on a sample of Scandinavian advertisements from 1980 to 1989.
{"title":"From 'Mobile' to 'Really Mobile': Mobile phones in Scandinavian Advertisements from the 1980s","authors":"I. B. Jessen","doi":"10.18146/tmg.850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.850","url":null,"abstract":"Mobile phones represent a new era in telecommunications beginning in the 1980s with the development of first-generation mobile phone networks. This article addresses the early history of the mobile phone from a cultural and aesthetic perspective with focus on representations of mobile phones in advertising. The aim is to explore whether images of early mobile phones as trendy and stylish artefacts suggested by examples in a previous study by the author represent a more common aesthetic trend related to advertising and consumer culture in the 1980s. The study is based on a sample of Scandinavian advertisements from 1980 to 1989.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 27","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139139153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article investigates the transformation of Bulgaria’s print media culture in the 1990s, a period of profound political, economic, social, and cultural change in Eastern Europe. The paper’s contribution is two-fold. Firstly, it focuses on the convergence of selected Bulgarian newspapers with established and emerging media formats alongside Bulgaria’s position between the East and the West. Secondly, the representations of and discourses about technology during the transition period are analysed and their link with identity formation is explored. I compare two tabloids (Trud and 24 Chassa) with two business-focused broadsheets (Cash and Capital) issued in 1997. Adopting a non-Western perspective by focusing on a case of transitional Eastern Europe, the article offers a snapshot and a reflection on the cultural representations of technologies, discursive identity construction, and media practices of the 1990s. The emergence of the free market and the influx of electronics in Bulgaria affected identity formation as technologies related to notions of modernity, Europeanness, globalisation, entertainment, power, gender, and social status.
{"title":"Transformation of Bulgarian 1990s Print Media Cultures: Technology, Cultural Representations, Piracy, and Identity Formation on a Crossroad between the East and the West","authors":"Alexandra Martin Brankova","doi":"10.18146/tmg.844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.844","url":null,"abstract":"The article investigates the transformation of Bulgaria’s print media culture in the 1990s, a period of profound political, economic, social, and cultural change in Eastern Europe. The paper’s contribution is two-fold. Firstly, it focuses on the convergence of selected Bulgarian newspapers with established and emerging media formats alongside Bulgaria’s position between the East and the West. Secondly, the representations of and discourses about technology during the transition period are analysed and their link with identity formation is explored. I compare two tabloids (Trud and 24 Chassa) with two business-focused broadsheets (Cash and Capital) issued in 1997. Adopting a non-Western perspective by focusing on a case of transitional Eastern Europe, the article offers a snapshot and a reflection on the cultural representations of technologies, discursive identity construction, and media practices of the 1990s. The emergence of the free market and the influx of electronics in Bulgaria affected identity formation as technologies related to notions of modernity, Europeanness, globalisation, entertainment, power, gender, and social status.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 24","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139139687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Between 1950 and 1980, television in the Netherlands became a mass medium, which attracted a large audience, in part by broadcasting football matches and news. Scholars have theorised how the rise of a new medium creates anxiety and feelings of rivalry with established media as they are confronted with a new competitor. This paper focuses on this premise by examining to what extent and how such feelings of rivalry between television and newspapers are part of the metadiscourse on football and television within the ranks of Dutch dailies between 1950 and 1980. Based on the results of this qualitative discourse analysis, this paper argues that newspapers certainly discussed the rise of football coverage on television, but did not show any signs of being afraid that television would offer a harmful competition. Much rather, in defending the right to free news gathering as well as the interests of the audience, newspapers positioned themselves by and large as great supporters of football coverage on television.
{"title":"Pleitbezorger van de voetbalkijker: Het discours over voetbal op televisie in de Nederlandse dagbladen tussen 1950 en 1980","authors":"Mark Vallinga, F. Harbers, Marcel Broersma","doi":"10.18146/tmg.779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.779","url":null,"abstract":"Between 1950 and 1980, television in the Netherlands became a mass medium, which attracted a large audience, in part by broadcasting football matches and news. Scholars have theorised how the rise of a new medium creates anxiety and feelings of rivalry with established media as they are confronted with a new competitor. This paper focuses on this premise by examining to what extent and how such feelings of rivalry between television and newspapers are part of the metadiscourse on football and television within the ranks of Dutch dailies between 1950 and 1980. Based on the results of this qualitative discourse analysis, this paper argues that newspapers certainly discussed the rise of football coverage on television, but did not show any signs of being afraid that television would offer a harmful competition. Much rather, in defending the right to free news gathering as well as the interests of the audience, newspapers positioned themselves by and large as great supporters of football coverage on television.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":" 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139137581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The following is a case study of a series of pioneering tests with visual teaching aids in elementary and secondary schools in the United States, conducted between 1920 and 1923. As it happened, these tests coincided with similar experiments in the Netherlands. Although unbeknown to each other, the innovative aspect of both studies consisted in taking their research into the classroom. With this measure experimenters in both countries hoped to collect well-founded evidence to refute what appeared to them as unfounded or overstated claims about photography-based, visual teaching aids, film in particular. While the experimenters forwent a controlled lab situation, by entering the classroom they nonetheless introduced adjustments into everyday educational practice, whether it concerned the activities required of pupils, staff, the interactions between them, and/or the composition of test groups. Thus, they changed what today one would call the educational dispostif: the arrangement of a presentation (a lesson by staff) in a designated space (a classroom with its equipment) before an assemblage of attendees (a class of pupils). Although the term educational dispositif was not current at the time, the experimenters did comment on the elements that constitute it. And given elementary and secondary education’s time-honoured routines, they were bound to stumble upon these elements’ interdependence and reconsider, albeit not in so many words, their conception of what goes on in a class. I largely focus on the American experimentsbecause they are more numerous, more invasive, and more extensively discussed in the 1924 book Visual education. The Dutch experiments, on which I published elsewhere, consisted of two, less invasive series, conducted in one secondary school, and were reported on in two articles, in 1923, and one English translation, in 1924.
{"title":"Dismantling the Dispositif: Social Science Experiments in the Classroom","authors":"N. de Klerk","doi":"10.18146/tmg.831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.831","url":null,"abstract":"The following is a case study of a series of pioneering tests with visual teaching aids in elementary and secondary schools in the United States, conducted between 1920 and 1923. As it happened, these tests coincided with similar experiments in the Netherlands. Although unbeknown to each other, the innovative aspect of both studies consisted in taking their research into the classroom. With this measure experimenters in both countries hoped to collect well-founded evidence to refute what appeared to them as unfounded or overstated claims about photography-based, visual teaching aids, film in particular. While the experimenters forwent a controlled lab situation, by entering the classroom they nonetheless introduced adjustments into everyday educational practice, whether it concerned the activities required of pupils, staff, the interactions between them, and/or the composition of test groups. Thus, they changed what today one would call the educational dispostif: the arrangement of a presentation (a lesson by staff) in a designated space (a classroom with its equipment) before an assemblage of attendees (a class of pupils). Although the term educational dispositif was not current at the time, the experimenters did comment on the elements that constitute it. And given elementary and secondary education’s time-honoured routines, they were bound to stumble upon these elements’ interdependence and reconsider, albeit not in so many words, their conception of what goes on in a class. I largely focus on the American experimentsbecause they are more numerous, more invasive, and more extensively discussed in the 1924 book Visual education. The Dutch experiments, on which I published elsewhere, consisted of two, less invasive series, conducted in one secondary school, and were reported on in two articles, in 1923, and one English translation, in 1924.","PeriodicalId":187553,"journal":{"name":"TMG Journal for Media History","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129757189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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