Media & Communication
Material Media-Making in the Digital Age
There is now no shortage of media for us to consume from streaming services and video-on-demand to social media and everything else besides. This has changed the way media scholars think about the production and reception of media. Missing from these conversations though is the maker: in particular the maker who has the power to produce media in their pocket.
How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one's disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging as well as thinking through time editing sound and the stream Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice.
The result is a personal journey through media theory history and technology furnished with practical exercises for teachers students professionals and enthusiasts: a unique combination of theory and practice written in a highly personal and personable style that is engaging and refreshing.
This book will enable readers to understand how a personal creative practice might unlock deeper thinking about media and its place in the world.
The primary readership will be among academics researchers and students in the creative arts as well as practitioners of creative arts including sound designers cinematographers and social media content producers.
Designed for classroom use this will be of particular importance for undergraduate students of film production and may also be of interest to students at MA level particularly on the growing number of courses that specifically offer a blend of theory and practice. The highly accessible writing style may also mean that it can be taken up for high school courses on film and production.
It will also be of interest to academics delivering these courses and to researchers and scholars of new media and digital cinema.
Effective Journalism
This book provides journalists and the public with a broad overview of all the ways modern communication technologies and information approaches make it difficult for people to effectively find and interpret information and what they can do about it. The public may have a general awareness that things like confirmation bias content algorithms and the backfire effect exist and can influence their behaviour but this book will explain them in one place in plain language. Journalists likewise know that their audiences are dealing with some of these issues but continue to operate under the assumption that if they just publish facts the truth will win out in the court of public opinion.
The central argument of the book is that journalists and audiences can no longer afford to pretend that all information is competing on an even playing field and that it is enough for journalists to simply publish “the facts.” Just as behavioural economics provided a new way of thinking about economics one that understood people as non-rational actors this book attempts to explain the reality rather than the ideal of how people seek and process information and what journalists and their audiences can do to try to create an informed public in the face of that reality.
For many American journalists their work and their responsibility to the public is grounded in the concept of a marketplace of ideas. Journalists believe they should just report the facts as neutrally as possible and let the public judge those facts and put them in context. The marketplace of ideas requires individuals to rationally consider the information that is presented to them and weigh it against other available information. Through this process bad ideas will be judged and dismissed and good ideas will win out. We might like to believe that we are all capable of carefully and rationally evaluating information but the evidence is clear that it is simply not true. If it were true we would not observe such things as the continued persistence of flat-Earthers and moon-landing sceptics and others who champion backward social ideas that were dismissed decades or even centuries ago. The fact that these ideas continue to persist tells us that the public is not engaging in a clear-eyed rational consideration of all the available verified facts.
Planetary health: Sickness, the environment and air in film
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that human and more-than-human health is connected to environmental (un)health. This article explores the linkages between health and the environment in cinema. It draws on such issues as pandemics pollution and air to illustrate how films like Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995) Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995) M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008) Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) and Colm McCarthy’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) each in their unique ways address the problem of planetary health. Airborne zoonoses monstrous plants toxic fungi and pollution – the films tackle all these issues to emphasize invisible danger toxicity and sickness that surround humans and more-than-humans alike. Connecting the ideas of health and well-being to the environment and illustrating how this nexus becomes visible in film specifically through air this article calls for justice consideration and care of planetary health. Explicating the tight linkages between pandemics climate change and environmental degradation at large as depicted in the selected cinematic examples this article claims that the recognition of humanity’s dependence on and responsibility for more-than-humans is crucial in times of environmental and health crises.
Status of women in the Ghanaian media: Are women conscious of their own inequalities?
Historical and contemporary scholarship paint a picture of women in media as under-represented misrepresented and lacking the opportunity to influence what happens in media and their own status in media. This is despite years of interventions – including pushing for affirmative action – targeted at improving their status and working conditions. In this study we argue that part of the solution lies in conscientizing women in media to become more aware of the inequalities they face. Through a nationwide survey of women in the Ghanaian media and premised on feminist media theory we show that though progress is visible in the status of women inequalities persist. Respondents were ambivalent about status parity with males pointing to the possibility that they acquiesce to unfair practices because they are unaware of the embedded inequality. We discuss these findings and their implications for scholarship and practice.
The Middle East is watching: Iranian and Saudi Arabian newspaper framing of the 2020 US presidential elections
Despite its importance there has been little research into how Middle Eastern news outlets cover American politics. This content analysis uses framing theory to explore coverage of the 2020 US presidential election in two Middle East dailies Iranian Hamshahri and Saudi Arabian Al-Watan. Because Iran and Saudi Arabia are rivals and take different approaches to American politics hypotheses predicted meaningful framing differences. While some findings were consistent with researcher expectations most findings were not. As predicted Al-Watan was less likely to frame Trump negatively. However contrary to expectations the examined newspapers did not differ in terms of how they framed Biden the 6 January breach of the Capitol or allegations of voter fraud. The newspapers also did not differ in terms of how likely they were to use pro-Trump and pro-Biden sources. The unexpected findings suggest a cautious approach by Al-Watan which may not have wanted to show strong support for a US president Trump who was likely outgoing. More generally and as the ‘Discussion’ section explains Al-Watan’s approach likely reflected the Saudi government’s perceptions about ongoing developments on the US political scene. In one sense then Al-Watan’s editorial line was an extension of Saudi foreign policy towards the United States. The ‘Discussion’ section also attempts to make sense of Hamshahri’s framing patterns which seemed to reflect larger Iranian distrust in the American political system.
Data Dating
What does it mean to love with technology? Does data improve our emotional interactions? The collection approaches the query with critical essays and works of new media art to look into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships. With expertise coming from recognized researchers critics and artists in the field of media and cultural studies it analyses relationship trends and affect cultures that have emerged from technological acceleration.
Data Dating: Love Technology and Desire is a comprehensive study of love and intimacy under digitalism that reflects on the structure of feeling(s) and libido environments in the high-tech and media-bound landscapes of contemporary technocracies. Organized around ten chapters and ten works of new media art the collection offers an extensive critical analysis of technologized romance (and other emotional relations) as well as provides an insight into the codification execution deployment and evolution of the patterns of togetherness in the so-called Tamagotchi era.
The chapters engage in the problems of new material planes that have emerged from the abstraction of networked communication and dispersion of traditional notions of physicality. They close-read the templates of contemporary fantasy fetish and eroticism as shaped by platform capitalism datafication and new commodity cultures in which self-promotion for bonding relies on the new possibilities that are coming in with new media self-mediation formats. Central to the analysis is the carbon-silicon dynamics of love’s contemporary DNA and libidinal techne – practiced in the environment where screens interfaces algorithms data protocols and non-organic objects of affection and affect delineate organize and program the trajectories of encounter limerence and erotic pleasure. All the chapters are authored by recognized researchers in the field of love emotion media technology and cultural studies and they critically explore various aspects of love/intimacy under technocracy approaching them with expertise the goes beyond the typical high-modernist and post-structural reading of the media-ridden life practices and environments.
More importantly the collection includes landmark works of new media art coming from prominent new media artist gathered around 'Data Dating' – new media art exhibition curated by Valentina Peri (co-editor of the collection) and presented in Paris Tel Aviv and London. As such the collection proffers a unique and original critical approach – one that combines artistic practice and cultural criticism – to comment upon the transformation of human relationships and emotional standards under technological development with reference to the social change and cultural condition.
The collection of essays each accompanied by a work of media art that provides a comprehensive insight into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships.
Primary readership will be among educators researcher and students in disciplines including cultural studies media and communications philosophy sociology psychology and gender LGBTQ+ and sexual studies. It will be an extremely valuable resource for those in these fields.
It will be of interest to other groups including art curators online platform designers social media content managers and designers and data specialists.