Media Studies

Producing Queer Youth challenges popular ideas about online media culture as a platform for empowerment, cultural transformation, and social progress. Based on over three years of participant action research with queer teen media-makers and textual analysis of hundreds of youth-produced videos and popular media campaigns, the book unsettles assumptions that having a "voice" and gaining visibility and recognition necessarily equate to securing rights and resources. Instead, Berliner offers a nuanced picture of openings that emerge for youth media producers as they negotiate the structures of funding and publicity and manage their identities with digital self-representations. Examining youth media practices within broader communication history and critical media pedagogy, she forwards an approach to media production that re-centers the process of making as the site of potential learning and social connection. Ultimately, she reframes digital media participation as a struggle for--rather than, in itself, evidence of--power.

This book identifies the converging socio- cultural, economic, and technological conditions that have shaped, informed, and realised the identity of the contemporary virtual influencer, situating them at the intersection of social media, consumer culture, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and digital technologies. Through a critical analysis of virtual influencers and related media practices and discourses in an international context, each chapter investigates different themes relating to digitality and identity: virtual place and nationhood; virtual emotions and intimacy; im/ materialities of virtual everyday life; the biopolitics of virtual human-production; the necropolitics of pandemic virtuality; transmedial and mimetic virtualities; and the political economy of virtual influencers. The book argues that the virtual influencer represents the various ways in which contemporary identities have increasingly become naturalised with questions of virtuality, mediated by digital technologies across multiple realities. From practices relating to AI- driven, invasive data profiling needed for virtual influencer production to problematic online practices such as buying digital skin colour, the author examines how the virtual influencer's aesthetic, social, and economic value obfuscates some of the darker aspects of their role as an extractivist technology of virtuality: one which regulates, oppresses, and/ or classifies bodies and datafied bodies that serve the visual, (bio)political, and digital economies of virtual capitalism. In the process, the book simultaneously offers a critique of the virtual influencer as a representational figure existing across multiple digital platforms, spaces, and times, and of how they may challenge, complicate, and reinforce normative ideologies surrounding gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and ableism. As such, the book sheds light on some of the more troubling realities of the virtual influencer's existence, inasmuch as it celebrates their transformational potential, exploring the implications of both within an increasingly AI- driven, digital culture, society, and economy. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and students working in the area(s) of: Popular Culture and Media; Internet, Digital and Social Media Studies; Data justice and Governance; Japanese Media Studies; Celebrity Studies; Fan Studies; Marketing and Consumer Studies; Sociology; Human- Computer Studies; and AI and Technology Studies.

What does the phrase "ubiquitous media" actually mean? Individual definitions are just as varied and ubiquitous as the media to which they refer. As a result, there is to date no large-scale theoretical framework through which we can understand the term. The goal of this volume is to provide a diverse set of critical, theoretical, and international approaches useful to those looking for a more diverse and nuanced understanding of what ubiquitous media means analytically. In contrast to other existing texts on mobile media, these contributions on mobile media are contextualised within a larger discussion on the nature and history of ubiquitous media. Other sections of this edited volume are dedicated to historical perspectives on ubiquitous media, ubiquitous media and visual culture, the role of ubiquitous media in surveillance, the political economy of ubiquitous media, and the way a ubiquitous media environment affects communities, spaces, and places throughout the world.

Taking readers from media students to media professionals, Introducing Media Practice brings together the ′why′ and the ′how to′ of media studies. It explains how adding theory to practice improves students′ media projects, and shows them how to develop the kind of project skills they need for a career in the creative and media industries. With a clear, easy-to-follow structure, the book:   Covers the full range of media practice skills, from building production teams and writing briefs, through audience research and scripting, to production, distribution and evaluation. Offers a range of exercises for both the classroom and independent learning, helping students put their learning into practice, build their confidence and establish a portfolio. Includes a glossary of key terms, helping students to get to grips with the concepts they need to know to succeed. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, this book provides students with a richer understanding of both. It is the ideal guide to succeeding in a media degree, enhancing their employability, and preparing for a career in the creative and media industries.  

The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology provides a broad overview of the widening and flourishing area of media anthropology, and outlines key themes, debates, and emerging directions. The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology draws together the work of scholars from across the globe, with rich ethnographic studies that address a wide range of media practices and forms. Comprising 41 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into three parts: Histories Approaches Thematic Considerations. The chapters offer wide-ranging explorations of how forms of mediation influence communication, social relationships, cultural practices, participation, and social change, as well as production and access to information and knowledge. This volume considers new developments, and highlights the ways in which anthropology can contribute to the study of the human condition and the social processes in which media are entangled. This is an indispensable teaching resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and an essential text for scholars working across the areas that media anthropology engages with, including anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, internet and communication studies, and science and technology studies.

As individuals incorporate new forms of media into their daily routines, these media transform individuals' engagement with networks of heterogeneous actors. Using the concept of media practices, this volume looks at processes of social and political transformation in diverse regions of the world to argue that media change and social change converge on a redefinition of the relations of individuals to larger collective bodies. To this end, contributors examine new collective actors emerging in the public arena through digital media or established actors adjusting to a diversified communication environment. The book offers an important contribution to a vibrant, transdisciplinary, and international field of research emerging at the intersections of communication, performance and social movement studies.

Black Girl Autopoetics maps the everyday digital practices Black girls, showing us what their digital content reveals about their everyday experiences and how their digital production contributes to a broader archive of Black life. Ashleigh Greene Wade coins the term "Black girl autopoetics" as a way of describing how Black girls' self-making creatively reinvents cultural products, spaces, and discourse in digital space. By contrast to the pre-internet era, Black girls can seize the means of representation for themselves with a speed and flexibility enabled by smart phones. Throughout the book, Wade analyzes the double bind Black girls face when creating content on-line: on one hand, their online activity makes them hyper-visible, putting them at risk for cyberbullying, harassment, and other forms of violence, and on the other hand, Black girls are rarely given credit for their digital inventiveness, rendering them invisible. Using ethnographic research into the digital cultural production of adolescent Black girls in Richmond, Virginia to illustrate Black girl autopoetics, Wade draws a complex picture of how Black girls navigate contemporary reality, and she urges us to listen to Black girls' experience and learn from their techniques of survival.

One of the realities characterizing the globe is the exclusion of marginalized communities in digital transformation. Their exclusion has resulted in a lack of participation in the digital space, which has catastrophic consequences on the digital economy. To promote digital inclusiveness in marginalized communities, there is a need to deconstruct the illusion that digital transformation is an urban phenomenon. Digital Transformation for Promoting Inclusiveness in Marginalized Communities discusses how digital transformation can be utilized to promote inclusiveness in marginalized communities by exploring opportunities and challenges and determining change mechanisms required to enhance digital transformation in marginalized communities. Covering a range of topics such as augmented reality and remote communities, this reference work is ideal for government employees, technologists, policymakers, industry professionals, researchers, scholars, academicians, instructors, and students.