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- Volume 1, Issue 3, 2011
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2011
Volume 1, Issue 3, 2011
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That familiarity with the world born of habit: A phenomenological approach to the study of media uses in daily living
By Shaun MooresIn this article, the author doubts whether media uses in daily living, and the activities of daily living more generally, are primarily ‘interpretative’ in character – at least in the way that many qualitative audience researchers have previously imagined them to be. Implicit in the social-semiotic approach, with its references to ‘codes’ and ‘representations’, is a conception of signification as a predominantly cognitive process of meaning construction. However, media uses involve much more than this, and what is now required is a phenomenological approach that can attend to precognitive ‘familiarity with the world’ – a different kind of meaningfulness. Within the tradition of phenomenological philosophy, that basic ‘precognitive familiarity’ is explored most interestingly by Merleau-Ponty in his phenomenology of perception, given the strong focus there on ‘embodiment’. This article offers a consideration of his account of ‘the acquisition of habit’, in which he is pointing to a sort of knowledge that is practical and embodied. For Merleau- Ponty, then, perception is not ‘mental representation’. Instead, he directs our attention to matters of ‘orientation’ and ‘habitation’, which are central to the kind of phenomenological approach that is being advocated here for the study of media uses in daily living.
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Objects of amplified context: an interview with artist-teacher Pepón Osorio
Authors: John Corner, Kay Richardson and Katy ParryThis article seeks to contribute to the emerging literature on the mediation of politics in the wider sphere of civic and popular culture. By focusing on one particular country, the United Kingdom, and on a specific audit period, February 2010, we present some preliminary findings from a larger project assessing contemporary mediations of politics and the political across a diverse range of genres within print, broadcast and online media. Our findings are derived from three complementary studies, one focusing on the variety of generic forms through which the story of ‘MPs expenses’ was mediated; one focusing on a reality-style series, Tower Block of Commons, and the range of ways that it sought to engage the political imagination of its audience; and a final study addressing the place of emotions in political life. Substantively, the findings point towards a desire for a new moral order for British politics, including a new kind of politician. Theoretically, the article validates the proposition that there is much more to political mediation than the dominant focus on political journalism can satisfactorily encompass.
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Time and relative dimensions on line: Doctor Who, wikis and the production of narrative/history
By Paul BoothThe wiki illustrates an entwining of history and narrative, a relation that becomes obvious through comparisons with the long-form television programme Doctor Who. In this article I examine the fan-created wiki for this long-running British television series, http:/ tardis.wikia.com, to articulate the interconnectedness of narrative and history on wikis. Tardis.wikia illustrates an important tension present within editable digital archives: that is, wikis represent the archival of knowledge as both a historical misrepresentation as well as a necessary step in equating ‘knowledge’ with historical truth. Wikis represent a particularly salient view of how memory, culture and history collide in a ‘Web 2.0’ world. By looking at four different functions of history in the narrative of Doctor Who, and then examining how these functions become represented on tardis.wikia, I illustrate some of the ideology, production, historical memory and editability of our contemporary digital culture, and show how traditional media forms can often offer a useful heuristic for understanding new media technologies.
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The Faustian cyborg: Technology, subjectivity and the spirit of silent comedy in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
More LessThis essay traces the tendencies of the cinema towards the cyborgist re-composition of a film’s characters, mise-en-scène, and spectatorship. It first discusses the early silent comedies of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd in relation to Martin Heidegger’s exposition of technology as Gestell or Enframing, as essentially “a way of revealing” what we call material realities or truths that in modern times dovetails into the challenge to take these truths, submit them to manufacture, and order them into standing reserves. After arguing that the films of these comedians represent the cinematic apparatus as at once a simple, complex, and Rube Goldberg-style machine – while also reenacting its automaticity through the recursive functioning of certain slapstick routines – the essay moves on to consider Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) as an “emulator” of the workings of this sort of cinematic reflexivity as it connects up with advances in cybernetic technologies and information systems. The Shining serves as a tutor text of the re-versioning of the cinema into an intelligent machine, and this essay therefore recommends the counter-notion of Disenframing as a way of resisting certain agendas of the epistemo-technological regime that this machine instances, namely its reduction of the subject’s flesh to the status of a tool or instrument and its concentration of such “instruments” into a new form of standing reserve.
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The Biggest Loser: The discursive constitution of fatness
Authors: Michael L. Silk, Jessica Francombe and Faye BachelorLocated within a superficially depoliticized ‘more government’ predicated on the technocratic embedding of routines and institutions of neo-liberal governance, reality television operates as a ‘cultural technology’ concerned with the conduct of conduct, or more specifically, with the calculated direction of conduct to shape behaviour to certain ends. Focused on physical fitness and weight loss, we focus on the globally successful reality TV format, The Biggest Loser (TBL), as a highly politicized space that educates subjects and disciplines the non-compliant: part of a moral economy that differentiates between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. We read TBL as a powerful public pedagogy that circulates techniques and provides the platforms for a government of the self, a component in the neo-liberal reinvention of ‘welfare’ that promotes choice, personal accountability and self-empowerment as ethics of citizenship while, at the same time, masking social forces that position people into the dejected borderlands of consumer capitalism. Contributing to the ‘biopedagogies’ of weight, TBL classifies the obese, overweight and physically unfit as personal moral failures, immoral and irresponsible citizens, socially, morally and economically pathologized outsiders.
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Deconstructing ideological notions of otherness in Far from Heaven
Authors: Sakile Camara, Theresa White, Darlene K. Drummond and Ronald L. Jackson IIUsing a critical cultural studies framework, and the tenets of critical media literacy, this project began as an opportunity for 76 racially mixed students (i.e. Asians, Hispanics, Blacks, Bi-racial, Whites and other) to deconstruct a popular film text, Far from Heaven (2002), and to examine how students process otherness within this film, as well as construct communication strategies to talk about issues of sexuality, race and gender. The goal of this study is to encourage students to reflect on and think critically about how characters were stereotyped and positioned in the film, and also to address the need for educators to incorporate critical media literacy into their pedagogical strategies so that students can become more critically aware. We begin this study by offering a literature review of the tenets of critical media literacy, and then reconceptualizing otherness within critical communication studies by redefining otherness in structural terms. Consequently, we describe student interpretations of otherness within the film, their capacity to enact rules for characters in the film, as well as their personal use of metaphors that presumes knowledge of history. We conclude by sharing implications and suggestions for applying critical cultural skills to ideas of otherness in an effort to train students in the development of using critical media literacy skills in the classroom. We argue that the use of film texts in the classroom creates an approachable climate to scrutinize sexual orientation, gender roles and race.
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