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This chapter historicises and contextualises the evolution, production, and development of key Mexican screen melodramas over fifty-two years to understand and mediate Mexico’s ambivalence around socioeconomic background, ranother. Perhaps if Televisa had allowed its various ace and religion, gender and worth, family and duty. The chapter demonstrates the importance of localised scholarly inquiry into Mexican audiovisual media that considers not only narrative discourses, content and textual analyses, but also industrial records and practices, marketing campaigns and press releases, archival research and interviews, multimedia synergy, and comparative analysis. For some time, research on Mexican melodrama has had a strong social focus, with several writings about audience engagement, but it is imperative to have more close readings of the texts themselves to understand their cultural context and industrial histories. This research exposes societal changes within Mexico by utilising one of its most omnipresent forms of popular culture and provides a deeper understanding of Mexico’s primary media productions through the use of genre and remake theory. The representations of young women yield a multitude of tensions and ambiguities placed upon Mexican women, which reveal volumes about wider sociocultural expectations.

First Person Encounters is a series of podcasts presented by Games Studies India, about our first experiences with Games while growing up in India. This our third podcast where we talk with Poornima Seetharaman. She is the first Indian to be inducted in the Women in Games (WIGJ) Hall of Fame and is also the lead game designer at Zynga. Hear as we talk about her foray in the world of gaming.

The transition to digital television referred to as the Digital Switchover (DSO) process or Digital Migration is an agreement of member countries of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) at the Geneva Conference in 2006. The agreement requires changes to national spectrum allocation and redefines national participation in the global digital television and mobile telephony market. While the decision of most African states to embark on the digital migration programme remains independent, the policies and approach to the implementation were influenced by two dominant economic orthodoxies, the neoliberal free market (Becchio and Leghissa 2016; Johnson 2011; Overbeek and Apeldoorn 2012; Peters 2011) which promotes a media environment mainly driven by market imperatives and the Chinese State capitalism (Bremmer 2008; Gu et al. 2016; Lyons 2007; Szamosszegi and Kyle 2011; Xing and Shaw 2013) which is the economic ideology that drives the interventions of the Chinese government in the region’s digital migration.

Until recently, the South African television industry was dominated by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), etv, and Multichoice. The SABC and etv are free to air while Multichoice provides a satellite subscription service through its DSTV bouquet. This status quo was broken with the emergence of subscription video on demand (SVOD). While Multichoice launched its SVOD service, Showmax, in 2015, greater disruption happened in January 2016 when the current most successful global company in SVOD, Netflix, simultaneously launched in 130 countries including South Africa. The coming of Netflix to South Africa was reportedly greeted by excitement as viewers embraced choice of access to premium television entertainment. Considering that prior to this development, Multichoice had had a near monopoly in provision of premium television content through its DSTV and Showmax, the reported excitement came as no surprise.

Despite great heterogeneity, the vast continent of Africa and the diverse people of its countries and diasporas have often been represented through the most reductive, essentialising, and denigrating paradigms— a process that Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi has referred to as “the danger of a single story”. One of the most dangerous of these paradigms is the developmentalist one, which shoehorns Africa into a western, capitalist teleological framework that overlooks and denies Africa’s production of and participation in forms of leisure, pleasure and entertainment.

Colonisation bequeathed classical education, among others, to the African continent. The post-colonial utility, function and status of such a knowledge system have been questioned and resisted, and African knowledgebased institutions are making efforts to decolonise such systems. The decolonial project has also impacted popular culture in the sense that African identity and self-presentation are being interrogated using various methods. Adaptations and productions of classical myths are implicated in this discourse. Implicated adaptations serve as platforms for allegorical cross-cultural conversation on shared experiences of a people group, perhaps of an earlier generation with the assumption of partial or absolute continuities. Continuity discourse is problematic when two cultures are implicated, particularly, when one is a colonial culture and the other colonised. The unity of discourse is either affirmed, violated or reconstituted.

The internet has impacted on how media organisations do journalism. Many media organisations both print and broadcast now have an online presence to reach out to fragmented audiences that have migrated to online platforms. Television stations have increasingly embraced the use of digital (online) media to gain better access to their audiences in terms of content distribution and audience engagement. The rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have given journalists and media organisations the ability to reach their audiences immediately, with the added benefit of audience responses which come almost immediately. The use of new digital media has created platforms for news stations to share digital clips of news items or excerpts of news programmes to keep the audiences informed or enticed by the highlights.

This chapter makes an empirical contribution to challenges the developing economies, often referred to as the global south, face when it comes to digital migration. This challenge has citizens of what were previously regarded as ‘third world countries’ having to rely on predominantly state and to a limited extent, public broadcast media for current news and information. This contribution, in making a seminal contribution on digitisation in Zimbabwe, demonstrates the challenges the country faces as to allow citizens access to more diversity and not just plurality. Conceptually, digitisation is defined as the conversion of analogue content and production processes into digital format (Manzuch 2009). Seabright and Weeds (2007, 1) observe that digitisation has to do with ‘replacing analogue signals with digital format economises on processing, storage and transmission capacity, reducing costs and expanding capabilities’. Seabright and Weeds (2007) submit that moving from analogue to a digital space brings changes in digital recording and production techniques, digital compression in transmission, proliferation in transmission platforms (terrestrial, cable, satellite and broadband); digital set-top boxes and encryption technologies; and digital personal video recorders. These interventions contribute to lowering of costs, improving of picture quality and improving speed in news gathering and dissemination (Koss et al. 2013). Other than the financial and technical imperatives that come with digitisation, the transition comes with certain cultural and political implications (Gripsrud 2009).

The year 2015 was set by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for most of its member states globally to switch from analogue to digital terrestrial broadcasting. Digital television broadcasting is generally implied as transmission of broadcast content signals in the form of binary data, specifically 0 s and 1 s. Digitisation of television merges broadcasting, computing and telecommunications to transform both the way television content is made and consumers interact with content (Chalaby and Segell 1999). Referring to digital content, Flew (2004) suggested that digitisation of media and communication content grows “informatisation” of society.

There has been a hype regarding the benefits of digital migration, which refers to switchover from analogue to digital broadcasting. Commonly referred to as digital migration, the switchover emanates from a decision made at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in 2006 to release a valuable spectrum, which can be used for other services. Other benefits of digital TV include good sound and picture quality and availability of more channels giving viewers more choice. It has also been said that digital broadcasting will save the broadcasting stations’ cost, as transmitting content via digital platforms is less costly than transmitting via the analogue platform (Muthomi 2012). This implies that media houses can capitalise on this migration as a competitive advantage. Countries across the world have been undergoing this necessary switchover from analogue to digital platforms, with varying degree of success. While the merits of digital television are clear, it is not clear how this digitisation will realistically help in bridging habitual inequalities in developing countries.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the digitization of television has impacted the architecture of television content generation, dissemination consumption in Kenya. Its key motivation is to answer two main questions: How has the digitization shift in Kenya’s television impacted the trends in production, dissemination, reception and consumption of television content; what is the effect of digitization on viewer satisfaction; and how has this shift transformed the role of television medium in the country? The chapter, therefore, answers these questions focusing on the television channels under study, namely, Citizen TV, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) and Nation TV (NTV).

Gender and the contemporary audio-visual landscape of Mexico.

The term digital “disruption” conjures up negative connotations, with implications of disturbance, interference or interruption. Certainly, virtually every aspect of life has been affected by digitisation, but it has been pointed out that it is detrimental “only for those who chose to ignore it or try to fight it” (“Digital Disruption: What Is It?” 2016, para 2). One case in point is the American company Kodak. Where it once dominated the film and camera market for most of the twentieth century, the company recently filed for bankruptcy. Kodak’s mistake was continually opposing the digitisation of the industry and failing to read the writing on the wall (“Digital Disruption: What Is It?” 2016). Digitisation is as much a reality of life in the newsroom as it is in the boardroom.

"This book investigates how telenovelas may be the key to the future of Brazilian television and how this content can survive in an interconnected media landscape. Recognised writer and scholar Rosane Svartman considers the particular characteristics of the telenovela format - number of episodes, melodrama influence, and influence of the audience on future writing - to explore how these can be preserved on multimedia platforms, and the challenges this change may present. Svartman further charts the transformations of the telenovela throughout its history and its major influences and unveils the main storytelling elements and writing processes. Chapters examine the business model of Brazilian corporate television within the current context of hypermedia and analyse how this relationship evolves as it is influenced by the new interactive tools and technologies that amplify the audience's power. Merging empirical practices and theory, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of transmedia storytelling, television studies, and Latin American media, as well as professionals working in these areas"-- Provided by publisher.

This book examines the phenomenon of prime time soap operas on Indian television. An anthropological insight into social issues and practices of contemporary India through the television, this volume analyzes the production of soaps within India’s cultural fabric. It deconstructs themes and issues surrounding the "everyday" and the "middle class" through the fiction of the "popular". In its second edition, this still remains the only book to examine prime time soap operas on Indian television. Without in any way changing the central arguments of the first edition, it adds an essential introductory chapter tracking the tectonic shifts in the Indian "mediascape" over the past decade – including how the explosion of regional language channels and an era of multiple screens have changed soap viewing forever. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, the book traces how prime time soaps in India still grab the maximum eyeballs and remain the biggest earners for TV channels. The book will be of interest to students of anthropology and sociology, media and cultural studies, visual culture studies, gender and family studies, and also Asian studies in general. It is also an important resource for media producers, both in content production and television channels, as well as for the general reader.

L’auteure soutient que le documentaire de 2016 d’Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, Angry Inuk (Inuk en colère), crée, grâce au cinéma, des espaces de « souveraineté visuelle » centrés sur l’« agentivité sensorielle » inuite (Raheja, 2010 ; Robinson, 2016). La réalisatrice propose un recadrage, selon un point de vue inuit, de la rhétorique dominante entourant la chasse aux phoques, pratique décriée violemment par des groupes de défense des droits des animaux. Plus qu’une simple réfutation de ces discours sudistes, ce film met de l’avant les connaissances inuites en lien avec le territoire et la gestion des ressources et remet en question les argumentaires libératoires soutenus par ces organismes, dont les raisonnements reconduisent des dynamiques coloniales plutôt que de les ébranler. Comme l’évoque son titre, le documentaire riposte à l’ire des protestataires anti-chasse aux phoques (dont la voix s’impose souvent au détriment des voix inuites, généralement tues), en créant un espace d’expression pour la colère inuite, présentée à la fois comme carburant et comme point de départ légitime et valide de la lutte contre les organismes en question. De façon centrale, le film met en scène des récits de chasse aux phoques s’appuyant sur une « agentivité sensorielle » inuite qui, aux yeux de Dylan Robinson, se manifeste sous la forme de « modes d’expression qui, à la fois, affirment une force culturelle et exercent une puissance affective auprès des personnes présentes ». Arnaquq-Baril propose ainsi des représentations de rires partagés, d’un froid ressenti, de sons joyeux de consommation communautaire de diverses parties du phoque, de même que des photos tirées de la campagne Twitter menée autour du mot-clic #sealfie ; cette campagne médiatique, ancrée dans une célébration humoristique et fière de la chasse inuite aux phoques, se veut en ce sens un contre-point au discours affectif simpliste et méprisant des organismes anti-chasse. En s’articulant autour de la résilience complexe propre aux Inuits, Inuk en colère incarne en soi une forme de souveraineté inuite, s’imposant au sein des récits qui participent à la sensibilisation du public quant aux enjeux entourant cette chasse. En outre, le film invite l’auditoire à réfléchir aux avenirs autochtones et à envisager de quelles manières l’activisme pour la défense des droits des animaux peut être décolonisé afin qu’il ne mène pas à la reconduction de dynamiques violentes d’extractivisme et de colonisation.

The 1990s’ popular televised journalistic/history documentaries have played a vital role in the making of political television culture, society of political spectacle, and the production of popular history and memory in Turkey. Despite their importance, these documentaries did not attract enough scholarly attention. By focusing on arguably the most popular and impactful journalistic/history documentaries of Turkey’s history, developed by Mehmet Ali Birand in the 1990s, I will assess the role of television in teaching, telling, and writing the political history. In doing so, I will also contextualize the form and discourse of these documentary series within historical juncture of globalization and neoliberalization of television as well as the country’s political economy.

This book provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao's discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the "Chinese" idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary. This book is a must for anyone exploring the cultural history of Chinese tongzhi/queer through the lens of transcultural media.

This article looks at videogames about politics within the theoretical framework of Giorgio Agamben’s states of exception and argues that while videogames can reveal political issues by implementing rules into the gameplay, they simultaneously render the in-game rules and consequences inoperative in regard to real-world politics, which can be described as states of exception in Agamben’s sense. Agamben distinguishes between the fictitious and the real state of exception, and this distinction leads to his proposal of a politics of pure means in which he considers play as a means of profanation that renders what has been played with inoperative and free. Drawing on this discussion, the article looks at the parallel between the rules in videogames and the laws in states of exception and re-examines the concepts of game rules and play under the rubric of Agamben’s political philosophy. In so doing, it explores how playing with rules in videogames about politics can turn these games into states of exception to talk about and reflect on various political issues.