Media, culture, and society最新文献

The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured every social, political, economic and cultural aspect of modern society. Millions of people have been stuck in lockdown within and across borders, national and regional terrains, in their homes and worse places. At this time of unprecedented change and 'stuckedness', digital communication technologies have served as a lifeline to forge and nurture communication, intimate ties and a sense of continuity and belongingness. But being stuck and simultaneously virtually mobile has brought many difficulties, tensions and paradoxes. In this paper we discuss first insights from a study with 15 members of the older Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) population in Victoria, Australia to explore experiences of being physically stuck and virtually mobile. We find practices of translocal care - ways of caring for distant others through digital technologies, has been made more complex by the pandemic and shaped by two dynamics: networked collective 'existential mobility', and a quantification of feeling that we call 'intimacy 5.0'.

Tracing global shifts in ownership and conglomeration in the media and technology sectors, this introduction analyzes the emergence of the 'megacorp' and 'super app' as distinct forms and sites of media power. With a focus on Asia, we argue that the pairing of megacorps and super apps is driving the emergence of powerful digital companies that shape social, cultural, and political dynamics worldwide. Through analyses of companies including Reliance, SoftBank, Tencent, Alibaba, and Transsion, this special issue calls for a renewed engagement with theories of monopoly capital via the megacorp, and accounts of consumer and citizen experiences of this monopoly via a quotidian touch point, the super app. In conversation with scholarship on conglomerates, monopolies, and platforms as key institutional forms of media power, we show that media power in this digital conjuncture operates as much through national and regional differences as through the imperative to achieve a global scale.

This article analyzes the political economy of sexually affective data on the Chinese gay dating platform Blued. Having launched in 2012 as a location-based dating app akin to Grindr, Blued has now become a multipurpose platform providing extra services such as newsfeeds and live streaming. Through the continuous imbrication of old and new functionalities and related affordances, users are transformed from dating subjects into performative laborers. Based on Internet ethnographic research that lasted 2 years, this article focuses on sexual-affective data flows (e.g. virtual gifting, following, liking, commenting, and sharing) produced by gay live streamers within the parameters of same-sex desires such as infatuation, sexual arousal, and online intimacy. It argues that these sexually affective data flows increasingly constitute key corporate assets with which Blued attracts venture capital. This analysis of live streamers and their viewers extends understandings of dating apps in two ways. First, it shows how these apps now function as business platforms on top of being channels for hooking up. Second, it emphasizes that whereas users created data freely, now it is produced by paid labor.

Facebook's usage has reached a point that the platform's infrastructural ambitions are to be taken very seriously. To understand the company's evolution in the age of mobile media, we critically engage with the political economy of platformization. This article puts forward a conceptual framework and methodological apparatus to study Facebook's economic growth and expanding platform boundaries in the mobile ecosystem through an analysis of the Facebook Messenger app. Through financial and institutional analysis, we examine Messenger's business dimension and draw on platform studies and information systems research to survey its technical dimension. By retracing how Facebook, through Messenger, operationalizes platform power, this article attempts to bridge the gap between these various disciplines by demonstrating how platforms emerge and how their apps may evolve into platforms of their own, thereby gaining infrastructural properties. It is argued that Messenger functions as a 'platform instance' that facilitates transactions with a wide range of institutions within the boundaries of the app and far beyond.

This article examines the role of television in Australia's 1967 referendum, which is widely believed to have given rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It presents an analysis of archival television footage to identify five stories that moved the nation: Australia's shame, civil rights and global connections, admirable activists, 'a fair go' and consensus. It argues that television shaped the wider culture and opened a channel of communication that allowed Indigenous activists and everyday people to speak directly to non-Indigenous people and other First Nations people throughout the land for the first time. The referendum narrative that television did so much to craft and promote marks the shift from an older form of settler nationalism that simply excluded Indigenous people, to an ongoing project that seeks to recognise, respect and 'reaccredit' the nation-state through incorporation of Indigenous narratives. We conclude that whereas television is understood to have 'united' the nation in 1967, 50 years later seismic shifts in media and society have made the quest for further constitutional reform on Indigenous rights and recognition more sophisticated, diffuse, complex and challenging.

Raymond Williams once wrote, '… there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses'. In an age of personalized media, the word 'masses' seems like an anachronism. Nevertheless, if Williams were to study contemporary online platforms, he would no doubt conclude that there are in fact no individuals, but only ways of seeing people as individuals. This article explores this idea by taking a closer look at online music streaming services. It first conducts a comparison of how two leading streaming platforms conceive of the individual music listener. Then, drawing from Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation, it demonstrates how ways of seeing the individual work to enact the individual on these platforms. In particular, ways of seeing are heavily influenced by the consumer categories that are defined and demanded by advertisers. This article concludes with an examination of how commercial imperatives shape 'ways of seeing' and 'algorithmic individuation' on music streaming platforms.