International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 10, Issue 3, 2014

As contemporary media of communication increasingly rely on computer mediation there is a concomitantly increasing amount of algorithmic intervention utilizing expressions between users and between users and machines to create, modify or channel communication and interaction with digital agents. This article addresses the consequences of human-machine communication for the field of communication.

This discussion presents a brief overview of the establishment and expansion of the study of the political economy of media and communications, followed by attention to some of current directions of this approach. Themes and concepts developed by political economists of the media are reviewed, as well as internal and external critiques of the approach. Recent developments are discussed, including the growth of integrated studies, the return to classic Marxist themes, integration of digital technologies, and attention to policy and activism.

In this article, I consider how WikiLeaks has gone through a series of metamorphoses: from a small, relatively unknown website devoted to giving whistleblowers space to release their material to one of the best-known activist organizations in the world. In addition, it has gone from being an organization that began by operating as an alternative to the mainstream media, to one that worked with the mainstream, and then to a group that devoted a fair degree of energy to attacking the media. I argue that during this tumultuous period of change, WikiLeaks needs to be understood in relation to its impact upon a number of fundamental relationships central to the study of media and journalism. I use WikiLeaks to consider the importance of studying sites and organizations as cultural artefacts, and to examine the idea that ‘everything which has been collected on it, becomes attached to it-like shells on a rock by the seashore forming a whole incrustation’. Academic research itself is, of course, part of this incrustation.

The article will argue that American independent cinema became increasingly polarized in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, ‘indiewood’, a very particular iteration of independent film-making that, for some critics, comprises ‘features associated with dominant, mainstream conventions and markers of “distinction” designed to appeal to more particular niche-audience constituencies’, continued to be the most commercially successful and visible expression of American independent cinema. On the other hand, however, a low-key, low-budget cinema practised primarily through the means of digital technology and exhibited mainly away from the theatres in various online and other digital platforms, became also a representative of American independent cinema, despite its relative absence from the Academy Awards and other platforms that provide recognition. Both these expressions of independent film-making in the United States have engaged with a variety of issues and subjects, though the wealth of resources at the film-makers’ disposal in the first case and the relative absence of financial and other support in the second means that each type of independent film-making has engaged with its subject matter in distinct ways. In this respect, the article will also provide examples through which indiewood and more clearly independent films have approached their topics, paying particular attention to openly political issues – in this case, the impact of the global financial crisis and the ways in which it has been handled by the films.

What methodological, ethical or other issues arise in ‘media development’ projects that are collaborations between practitioners and scholars? This article uses as a case study a project led by Radio La Benevolencija (RLB) that sought to address inter-ethnic conflict in Rwanda through a radio drama programme – a Romeo and Juliet story of a forbidden love between members of two conflicting tribes. The intervention was unique in its attention to theories of communication and psychology in its design and implementation, and in its efforts to bring in academics throughout the course of the project to aid in design and evaluation. The authors, commissioned to conduct an evaluation of RLB’s past ten years of work, analyse the intervention in the context of Rwanda’s history and the organization’s use of theory, research and evaluation in their programmes. The authors find that, based on the RLB experience as well as evidence provided by communication and media research, the RLB model for peacebuilding through the media can be usefully adapted to other contexts, given particular parameters. The article concludes by arguing that the collaboration provides evidence of the fruitful ground that can and should exist between practice, theory and research, while problematizing challenges involved in such collaborations.

This article examines the referential aesthetics of constructing the self by some prominent actresses in Egyptian television drama series (musalsal). More specifically, it explores how the self is mediated through the roles these actresses assume, the doubling back of the role on the self and the final conflation between the two. Oscillating between the self as a spectacle (a fetishized object of visual pleasure) and the self as transgressor (the female as a monster or femme fatale), these constellations of selfhood should prompt us to query whether it is at all possible to conceive of an Egyptian female role not rooted in a patriarchal symbolic order or an androcentric fantasy. What these Egyptian actresses dramatically/visually seem to be demanding is to be seen and perceived as the same as the roles they are playing, a coherent self that both underlies/defines and unifies the role with the actress playing it. This article will demonstrate that such conflations have often led to disempowered gender formulations on the screen in the case of Egyptian drama series. Conversely, the absence of the cult of the superstar actress/actor in Syrian drama has allowed for more positive portrayals of women, not necessarily by banishing the female as a spectacle or transgressor, but by problematizing those elements within the textual politics of the script.

Articulating Dissent: Protest and the Public Sphere, Pollyanna Ruiz (2014) 1st ed., London: Pluto Press, 232 pp., ISBN: 9780745333052, p/bk, £17.50

Talking Dirty on Sex and the City: Romance, Intimacy, Friendship, Beatriz Oria (2014) 1st ed., Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 214 pp., ISBN: 9781442235809, h/bk, £44.95/$75.00, ISBN: 9781442235816, e-Book, £44.95/$74.99

Climate Change in the Media: Reporting Risk and Uncertainty, James Painter (2013) 1st ed., London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 128 pp., ISBN: 9781780765884, p/bk, £12.99