Journal Description
Media, Culture & Society provides a major international forum for the presentation of research and discussion concerning the media, including the newer information and communication technologies, within their political, economic, cultural and historical contexts.
The journal is interdisciplinary, regularly engaging with a wider range of issues in cultural and social analysis. Its focus is on substantive topics and on critique and innovation in theory and method.
All issues of Media, Culture & Society are available to browse on SAGE Journals.
Journal Feed
- by Shani OrgadMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. The article explores the democratic value of listening by examining what listening to radio phone-in programmes and listening more broadly mean to people in times of crisis. Drawing on focus groups with London residents severely affected by the cost-of-living, health and social care crises, the article discusses how participants engaged in listening and discussed its significance. Against what we call a ‘crisis of listening’, namely, a rapid shrinking of the spaces and possibilities for listening and a profound sense among people of not being listened to by the political system, the health system […]
- by Johanna SumialaMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. On the 8th of September, 2022, the world paused as the BBC announced the death of Queen Elizabeth II. After 70 years on the throne, the longest-reigning British monarch had died aged 96. The Queen’s death immediately became a global media event that would eventually culminate in the state funeral broadcasted live and followed online worldwide. While many legacy media maintained the classical ceremonial mode of reporting the media event, the narratives and visuals on social media instantaneously challenged and re-narrated the ‘official’ media event dramaturgy. Through digital media ethnography of the media event, […]
- by Lital HenigMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article explores the influence of digital culture on Holocaust commemoration through the test case of Anne Frank. By carrying out a comprehensive visual and multimodal analysis of three contemporary representations of Frank, I identify three new characteristics of her commemoration: performative engagement, media reconstruction, and narrative adaptation. While performative engagement introduces a new position for commemoration, media reconstruction focuses on the appropriation and use of media for Frank’s remembrance. Narrative adaptation represents a shift from linear storytelling, reiterating established narratives traditionally associated with Frank to new interpretations favoring heightened engagement and non-linearity. […]
- by Yener BayramoğluMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. Over the last three decades, mediatization has been heralded as the new grand theory to explain how social transformations have increasingly become intertwined with media technologies. However, like other grand narratives about historical transformations, it risks failing to take into account the reality of lives in peripheries, not least because they rarely leave their traces in archives. In this article, I explore how media are linked to transformations in queer life course in order to shed light on the significance of evolving media technologies for persons whose lives are shaped by inequalities. Drawing […]
- by Páraic KerriganMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. Food poverty has emerged as public health issues in the Republic of Ireland (ROI) and Northern Ireland (NI) in the last decade. Concurrently, food poverty has emerged as a significant news story across broadcast media in both ROI and NI. While research has emerged in relation to how food poverty is framed in the media, there is a dearth of literature on this in the Irish context. This article seeks to address this gap by setting out to understand the ways in which food poverty emerges as a news story in broadcast media […]
- by Simone NataleMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. A few years after the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, discussions surrounding its impact have become noticeably less frequent within communication and media research. While the pandemic no longer occupies the central place it once held in academic discourse and public debate, it is now more crucial than ever to consider how this unprecedented global event has shaped our societies, as well as its lasting implications for communication and media worldwide. This Crosscurrents themed issue invited scholars to reflect on how the cultural and social implications of this global event solicit a […]
- by Simon LindgrenMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This Crosscurrent contribution presents programmable politics as an emerging keyword for understanding the complex interplay between technology, society and politics in the 21st century. Programmable politics has gained heightened importance in the aftermath of the pandemic that has sped up digitalisation processes that are the preconditions for programmable politics to emerge. Turning increasingly to engagement online, the pandemic constitutes a catalyst for programmable politics. The concept highlights both the potential for enhancing democratic engagement, and the risks of undermining it through the centralisation of control and manipulation of information flows. We discuss the […]
- by Ariel SaiyinjiyaMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article delves into the dynamics of online fandom in China through the lens of LinaBell, a pink fox character introduced as a mascot by Shanghai Disneyland in September 2021. Unlike traditional Disney characters, LinaBell lacks an official backstory or media presence. Yet she has rapidly gained immense popularity among Chinese Disney fans, largely through social media platforms like Weibo. Our study centers on the LinaBell Super Topic Community on Weibo, consisting of over 543,000 members known as “LinaBell’s moms.” Employing qualitative content analysis of posts and comments, this research examines fans’ creative […]
- by Bohyeong KimMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This paper traces Kakao’s corporate strategies—with a focus on conglomeration and valuation—in order to trace how the company’s trajectory led to its current status as a near-monopoly. Starting as a chat app which now has 43 million active users in South Korea, Kakao became a conglomerate by expanding its operations across different business sectors such as transportation, entertainment, fintech, etc. Kakao’s diversification of businesses and conglomeration should be understood in relation to its corporate strategies and forms, not as the natural outcome of technological innovation. Aspiring to become an entertainment conglomerate, not just a […]
- by Monica CrawfordMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. Following Megan Rapinoe’s statement that she would not attend a White House visit under former president Donald Trump, she and the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) have become focal points of right-wing online abuse. To explore the connection between populist style common within right-wing media and the misogynistic treatment of women in sport, this study analyzes the intertwining logics of populist style and popular misogyny within media coverage of the USWNT on two conservative sports media outlets, Barstool Sports and OutKick. The findings indicate that the outlets utilize populist style to construct […]
- by Diego GarusiMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article introduces and applies a situational, interactional, and processual theoretical framework to explore how folk theories of journalism shape people’s news use and trust decisions in specific, real-life circumstances. Following the “episode method”, 48 semi-structured interviews conducted with Austrian young adults revealed that objectivity and impartiality are regarded as the two cornerstones of journalism, aligning with Austria’s traditional journalistic culture. Thus, for Austrian young adults, informing oneself is a search for the ultimate truth. Whether objectivity and impartiality are thought to be actually found in journalism shapes (dis)engagement with it. Different news […]
- by Cristina MiguelMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. The “digital nomad” (DN) neotribe includes professionals who work remotely from different locations. Despite the benefits of digital nomadism (e.g. work flexibility, high mobility, and leisure-centeredness) and opportunities for meeting like-minded people, one of the consequences of the lifestyle may be loneliness. By using 30 in-depth interviews, this study explores the interaction between digital nomadism and loneliness. We conceptualize the DN lifestyle as a continuum that may, but does not have to, lead to feelings of loneliness. External factors such as lack of social support, often related to the capacity to stay in […]
- by Kun TanMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. Drawing on the triple articulation framework, this study explores the “failed domestication” of online news consumption among young visually impaired people (YVIP), focusing on technological objects, symbolic environments, and individual texts. The findings suggest that “failed domestication” is not merely a consequence of limitations in technical design or social contexts but rather the result of “negotiation” between individuals and media. YVIP develop unique media usage strategies by simplifying operational procedures, foregoing updates, filtering out news irrelevant to their daily lives, and personalizing their interpretation of texts. In contrast to the notion of “failure” […]
- by Sarah Anne GanterMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. In this paper, we analyze and link (limited) versatility, emotionality, and agency in young adults’ pandemic entertainment consumption patterns. Pre-pandemic studies based their conceptualizations on an abundance context, where limited-time perceptions led to versatile and ideologically informed consumption decisions linked to overwhelmingly positive emotions, emphasizing free choice and convenience. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions provide a deep context of limited choice and unlimited-time perceptions, an unusual situation described by Christian Fuchs as the radicalization of time, space, and sociality. In this context, entertainment consumption played a central role in ordering complex […]
- by Aysha AgbaryaMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This case study offers an understanding of the perception and use of social media among social activists as means of collective identity formation. It focuses on the case of a Palestinian anti-violence movement in Israel. To learn about the identity presented by the United Fahmawi movement, interviews with two of the movement’s leaders and its Facebook posts were analyzed. The findings show a multi-layered, complex identity. The identity is presented as Palestinian, mainly centered around the city of Umm al-Fahm. Otherness is a crucial aspect of this identity, as Palestinian identity stands in […]
- by Julian MatthewsMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. How does journalism communicate to audiences who are experiencing crisis? Existing literature suggests that journalists use reporting templates and related practices to report crises with elite narratives and myths (and some ‘disruptive factors’, on occasion). Their news audiences, it follows, are understood as observers of abstracted crisis rather than as those who are experiencing crisis impacts as immediate and affecting. Such thinking becomes challenged by the emerging UK energy crisis. Analysing the corresponding TV journalism shows its reporting responds to several unique disruptive aspects of the crisis (i.e. its ‘seriality’, ‘unpredictability’ and ‘impacts’) […]
- by Enzo ColomboMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article explores how the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is represented through videos circulating on TikTok and how the consumption of this content impacts young people’s imaginary of war. After 2 years since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the centrality of TikTok in the communication around this conflict has become apparent. In this study, we are interested in the ‘domesticating’ effect produced by the circulation and consumption of content circulated on TikTok and the effects this may have on young people – the larger segment of the platform’s user base. Using insights from the […]
- by Yeong Ran KimMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This paper examines the emergence of queer counterpublics in South Korea through a case study on the opening ceremony of the Korean Queer Culture Festival (KQCF) in 2015. Due to an outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), the organizers live-streamed the event via YouTube instead of inviting the participants to the Seoul City Plaza, where they set up the stage. During the opening ceremony, social media platforms momentarily became alternative spaces for queers to interact with each other on a real-time basis. In analyzing a series of concerted actions, such as […]
- by Evan BrodyMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. In the following article I analyze sports bars for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) communities via a combination of semi-structured interviews, field studies, and archival research. In particular, I examine how sports and non-normative sexual and gender identities influence, and are influenced by, media “in situ.” I also seek to better understand how LGBTQ+ sports cultures are constructed by the owners of these bars, by media technologies and rhythms, and by the patrons themselves. Within this approach I address how media and space overlap and inform one another, especially in relation […]
- by Daphne Rena IdizMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. The development of an online screen industry, dominated by a few American and Chinese streaming TV services and video-based platforms, triggers critical questions about the commercial and technological dependence of cultural producers within this industry. Drawing on research in media industries and platform studies, this paper develops a conceptual framework to systematically examine this dependence. Pursuing this aim, we propose to shift the focus from specific video platforms or streaming TV services as the starting point of the analysis to the perspective of cultural producers. Through a discussion of current research, we identify […]