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 Sae ShimauchiMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This study elucidates the concept of ‘official’, frequently used as a counterpart to fans in pop culture fandom using the case of Thai Boys Love drama fandom in Japan. It is necessary to examine the relationship between fandom and hegemony without assuming the potential of participatory culture and fandom as a counterculture. Therefore, this study focuses on how fans construct norms based on the concept of ‘official’ and internalise this power. Furthermore, it explores the meanings and respective boundaries of ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ as constructed by fans. The results of the participation observations […]
- by Derek DuboisMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. The emergence of 24/7 cable news channels within the US revolutionized news consumption, offering viewers accessibility beyond fixed broadcast schedules. While the phenomenon began with CNN, competitors quickly emerged, targeting different political ideologies and mirroring the heightened polarization that has altered American society. Cable news channels must market themselves effectively to their audiences through distinctive product differentiation strategies. Understanding these approaches provides insights into information dissemination, political communication, and audience engagement dynamics. This paper aims to conduct a formal media analysis of current self-promotional advertisements across the big three cable news networks within […]
- by Luke MunnMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. From pandemics to political campaigns, online misinformation has become acute. In response, a plethora of interventions have been offered, from debunking and prebunking to fact-checking and labeling. While the technical efficacy of these “solutions” are debatable, I suggest a more fundamental failure: they rely on a humanlike caricature, a rational and ethical figure who only needs better facts to disavow misguided misinfo practices. Instead I argue that misinformation studies must incorporate a more holistic human. Drawing from the broader humanities, this article conceptualizes the actually-existing human who can be emotional, factional, and bigoted […]
- by Domenico NapolitanoMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. In this paper we prompt a re-reading of Assistive Technology (AT) as a media system that organizes disability in the framework of digital health-care and the platform society. Drawing on disability media studies and organization studies, we investigate how the arrival of big tech and digital platforms in the field of AT reconfigures ways to account for, classify and potentially discriminate against disability. We argue that this new configuration can be explained as a shift from a biopolitical model – oriented toward disability normalization – to an ethopolitical model, oriented toward optimization and […]
- by Xiqing ZhengMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. Using the term “queerbaiting,” I describe a set of media industry tactics that suggest queer relationships between fictional characters (or real-life celebrities) by intentional hints and jokes to attract audiences. Such tactics are used to encourage online participation by fans of female danmei (literary writings describing homoerotic relationships among male characters, generally written by female authors for a female-dominated audience) in China. By analyzing this strategy, I examine the intersection between three different cultural forces in the Chinese mediascape: the censorship of queer themes, the media industry’s attempts to profit from popular danmei […]
- by Miglė BareikytėMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. After Russia’s war against Ukraine destroyed people’s ability to move and communicate freely in Ukraine, many Ukrainians turned to social media and messenger apps, especially Telegram, to produce and share information. The vast amount of this digital data is privatized, ephemeral, and difficult to utilize for research, raising urgent questions about its sustainable accessibility and usability. In this article, we explore a specific aspect of digital archive sustainability – the use of digital archives to preserve platform data related to Russia’s war against Ukraine – by focusing on data integrity, usability, and ethics. […]
- by Sabina LissitsaMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. The current study reveals the mechanisms used by both media and news consumers for domesticating distant threatening events. To this end, the study applies thematic analysis to textual and visual content presented in media items (Study 1) and media content reception from the perspective of news consumers (Study 2). Study 1 sample included 209 Israeli media items in Hebrew, covering asylum seekers in Europe from 2014 to 2019. Study 2 is based on semi-structured interviews with 30 Jewish Israeli heavy news consumers. The study was inspired by framing, priming, and media reception theories. […]
- by Banafsheh RanjiMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article is about the role of the media in the phenomenon of contemporary racism. More specifically, it outlines the discursive mechanisms through which insidious, hidden forms of racism are able to exist “invisible in plain sight,” even in the media and public discourse of countries, like Norway, that regard themselves as democratic and tolerant. The study is part of a broader investigation into the role of the media in the life-experience of immigrants. It addresses the question: How did Norwegian media portray immigrants during the Covid-19 pandemic? Based on a discourse analysis […]
- by Ignatius GD SugloMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. Graffiti is widely used in social movements globally, yet media and communication research disproportionately focus on the role of social and new media technologies in protest movements. In this paper I ask why university students – a tech-savvy generation – resorted to graffiti and why campus graffiti were not widely circulated on social media during the Hong Kong anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) protests. I argue that graffiti enables dispersed resistance and is one way to mobilize, voice dissent, and preserve memory in an increasingly surveilled and evolving repressive media environment. I pursue […]
- by Vivien NaraMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. Across its history, K-pop has put traditional Korean elements to a diversity of uses, including in music, dance and visual style. This article investigates the use of traditional elements in the sub-genre of Korean hip hop and rap performance. In this strongly masculine sub-genre, the cultural meanings invoked in the incorporation and remediation of traditional Korean elements take on a more particular generic significance, one that highlights the hegemonic masculinity enjoyed by the referenced figure of the ‘gentleman scholar’ (seonbi). With this narrower scope of investigation, I argue that the use of traditional […]
- by Zhou YangMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article explores the progressive potential of commercial industry-oriented channels (IoCs), an emerging form of media produced by and addressed to workers of specific industries, on China’s digital platforms. Juxtaposing textual analysis with worker-audience interviews and participant observation, I found that despite the collusion of state surveillance and platform governance, IoCs prove instrumental in fostering resistive labour subjects and collectives among ordinary workers. This is due to IoCs’ genre convention and discourses, but more importantly, to worker-audience’s bitter and precarious structure of feeling that mediates their collective reception processes. The findings complicate our […]
- by Daniel JosephMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article draws from an ethnographic investigation of YouTube to argue the significant and specific role of advertising in the governance of platformised cultural production. We pursue this investigation in a critical dialog with theoretical approaches drawn from platform governance, platformisation and political economy communications, foregrounding the concept of the audience commodity. In our analysis of official and unofficial YouTube content, the role and desires of advertisers were discussed in depth. Community commentary videos publicly argued that YouTube cared about advertisers more than a content creating community; marketing-orientated entrepreneurial growth content advised creators […]
- by Jean K. ChalabyMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article defends the thesis that game shows were a key influence in the development of reality TV, and understanding the latter depends on our knowledge of the former. The first section addresses the knowledge gap about game shows and asks the following questions: What are they made of, and what are the core elements that distinguish them from any other genre? The second part examines the relationship between game shows and reality programming. This article highlights the similarities between the two genres and demonstrates that the latter adopted many of the storytelling […]
- by Maja Sonne DamkjaerMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article introduces the life-transition perspective as a novel conceptual framework for mediatization research. By examining individuals’ media engagement during significant life transitions, this perspective illuminates the interplay between media-communicative practices and transitioning social roles. The article argues that the life-transition perspective offers methodological advantages and fosters integration between audience research and mediatization research. It enables in-depth analysis of lived experiences of media-related social change in the context of digital everyday life and provides a comprehensive concept for synthesizing existing research on the evolving role of media across diverse domains.
- by Omar SayfoMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. The increase in clandestine migrants to Italy following the 2010 Tunisian uprising has been an issue of popular and political concern in both countries. This article investigates Harga (2021, 2022), a top-rated and critically acclaimed drama series. Produced and aired by Tunisian national television as a vehicle of entertainment-education, Harga strove to make a geopolitical intervention in the process of irregular migration. Combining textual analysis with interviews conducted with the production’s producers and participants, the article explores how local and transnational actors came together to create a counternarrative to the popular success stories […]
- ‘Telling China’s Story Well’ as propaganda campaign slogan: International, domestic and the pandemicby Jian XuMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. The article critically examines ‘Telling China’s Story Well’ (TCSW), a popular propaganda campaign slogan proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. Drawing on theories about storytelling and propaganda and using the COVID-19 as a contextualised example, the paper discusses how the slogan was adapted into ‘Telling China’s Anti-pandemic Story Well’ to mobilise domestic and external propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the pandemic. We argue that TCSW should be understood as a well-crafted political watchword which promotes and commands strategic narratives of doing propaganda. It has the rhetorical power to […]
- by Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-SantosMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. In recent decades, a revolutionary transformation has substantially altered the way people access information. Online social media platforms have become a significant facet of our daily lives. The intersection of political discourse with the proliferation of what is commonly termed as “fake news” on these platforms has given rise to an environment that does not necessarily foster independent and critical thinking, thereby posing substantial risks to individuals, industries, and governments. While Facebook has implemented novel strategies to counteract this challenge, their efficacy remains questionable. Drawing from an analysis of fact-checking activities conducted during […]
- by David DeaconMedia, Culture & Society, Volume 46, Issue 4, Page 874-885, May 2024. It is frequently claimed that mainstream news organisations are in crisis and becoming ever more marginalised in the contemporary high-choice media environment. Such claims frequently conflate different challenges facing the industry, resulting in over-generalised claims about the prospects for established news brands. In this article, we identify four related crises: reach, resource, reputation and relevance. Through the analysis of each, we show that many claims about the displacement of mainstream news are overstated, but that the interactive aspects of these crises are presenting particularly significant challenges for local […]
- by Anne O’BrienMedia, Culture & Society, Ahead of Print. This article examines film and television workers’ experience of mothering in Ireland and argues that not only are mothers constructed as a ‘problem’ in these Creative Industries workplaces because of their care work duties, but the ‘problem’ of work’s incompatibility with motherhood is presented as one to be ‘solved’ by mothers themselves. Drawing from the scholarship on motherhood in film and television work and 12 interviews with workers in the film and television Creative Industries sectors who are mothers, we undertake a thematic analysis to uncover common experiences and insights that are reflective […]
- by Yaron MeronMedia, Culture & Society, Volume 46, Issue 4, Page 863-873, May 2024. This paper presents a reflective examination of challenges to design and communication from the current digital revolution, using the prism of a 1980s television advertisement for the Yellow Pages. Originating at the same time as the height of the desktop publishing revolution, the advert illuminates a transitional period in the evolution of digital technology and media communications, marked by changing user practices and experiences. The advert’s storyline follows a young man’s quest to convert an old cine film (of his father) to videotape for his mother’s birthday, in […]