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In 2019, the World Wide Web (www) celebrated its 30th anni- versary, However, the internet had not yet asserted itself as a right in the “network society” (Castells, 2009), and its balance points to the expansion of both opportunities and threats. Another fact that deserves to be highlighted in the year was the drop in the rating as a global phenomenon that challenges the television industry. It means change of habits and search for new business models. The integration of platforms and the generation of quality content appear as pillars of thetransformation of audiovisual worldwide. And the changes are manifested with a certain degree of diversity, according to the economic and cultural characteristics of each society, with disruptive processes.

Serial fiction released in Argentina in 2019 continues to fall. Only one telenovela had more than 200 chapters. To a lesser extent than the previous year, the supply of serialized fiction incorporated themes from the social agenda, especially feminist struggles and the visibility of sexual dissidence. The channels found in the co-produc- tion and in the production for platforms one of the ways in which fic- tion survives. Some of these programs are now on the open television screen. New fiction releases from Ibero-America are also falling.

During the last decade, popular television formats have been replicated across the globe for local or regional consumption as program imports, adaptations, clones or imitations, raising questions on the possible ramifications of such cultural inflows. For Africa the international program flow and the influence of Western media content has been a contentious issue for decades, underlying the cultural imperialism thesis of the 1970s and 1980s, and the centre– periphery paradigms which conceptualized the series of dependency relationships. In African media research concepts like cultural colonialism, media imperialism, neocolonialism, Americanization, homogenization, have been used to denote the unequal flow and influence of Western media products in Africa. Within the framework of media globalization some scholars have even propounded a scenario of the emergency of a global culture mediated by the dominant Western media. The central issues in African media discussions have mainly revolved around the flow of finished media programs and their perceived detriment to local cultures and identities. What is missing in the African research literature is the attention to television formats, a phenomenon described by Keane et al. (2002) as a vehicle for localization, since what is imported is not the content itself, but a recipe for creating a local version. Global reality format shows thus create a new picture.

Three seasons of NZ Idol , the New Zealand adaptation of the global Idols format, were aired on public broadcaster TVNZ’s channel TV2 in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The final episode of the first season was the most-watched television programme in New Zealand in 2004, with 1.4 million people, a third of the New Zealand population, tuning in (South Pacific Pictures, 2004). In terms of ratings NZ Idol has been one of the most successful locally made television programmes of the last decade. At first glance, NZ Idol has also been very successful in representing ethnic and cultural diversity. In the auditions phase of the show young New Zealanders of 16 years plus from a range of backgrounds are featured, and in the subsequent phases the audience gets to know a selection of them intimately. The winners of all three seasons (Ben Lummis in season 1, Rosita Vai in season 2, and Matt Sounoa in season 3) have Pacific Island roots, and as a result three young “brown” people were crowned “New Zealand Idols.” This is remarkable, since according to a previous study by Misha Kavka (2004: 231) non-white people have largely been absent from New Zealand reality TV programmes. A closer look suggests, however, that featuring contestants from different cultural backgrounds in NZ Idol generally serves a particular nation building agenda that New Zealand is heavily involved in as a postcolonial society, in which ethnic minorities are subjected to representations that favour the interests of dominant cultural groups. The aim of this nation building agenda is to establish a new and distinct sense of national identity which will set New Zealand apart from Britain, the former colonial power, and other English-speaking nations.

The worldwide success of the Idol format may not require any explanation. We live under the ubiquitous sign of globalization; and hence it should come as no surprise that mass media— which together constitute an ecumenical vehicle of culture with an insatiable appetite for profit— would generate forms (or formats) of art that travel with ease and are translatable into every context. The reception of these formats is, at one level, as unproblematic as its dissemination. To be global (and who isn’t?) is to be eagerly accepting of certain languages, technologies, discourses and styles. The craze surrounding competitive singing can then be explained as one more instance of borders proving permeable to the formulas of international popular culture. It is my argument that in order to understand the unique valence and significance of global formats, we need to go beyond issues of production, distribution and reception, and focus instead on the phenomena that arise from their instantiation . This is so because implementing a format in a specific context has consequences that are neither written into the “program” nor purely derivable from local conditions. Let me provide an illustration. The call-in talk show has recently become a staple on Indian television. The format and content of these shows would be familiar to most Western viewers— a regular host, one or more “experts” discussing politics and culture, and a final segment devoted to phone calls from the public.

In this chapter, I would like to consider how interactive reality television contributes to the negotiation between national particulars and transnational media flows. Specifically, I want to look at the successful franchise So You Think You Can Dance , a dynamic global media flashpoint and a remarkably adaptable format that serves as a site of pleasurable and contradictory engagement with the sense of national culture and community that television manufactures. But what makes the show of particular interest to me is that it allows audiences, in an increasing number of television markets around the world, to collectively determine their ideal national performers through a competition that requires mastery of a virtual international smorgasbord of popular dance forms and styles, the vast majority of which originate elsewhere, or from within the national, racial, and ethnic cultures of others. Second, in choosing to examine dance shows, I join with a growing number of scholars who have, over the past 15 years, argued for increased attention to dance as a primary site of knowledge production concerning bodies, identities, and representation.

I was about 10 or 11 years old when I, together with my parents, religiously tuned in weekly to the situation comedy ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? While I do not recall the specific year the show aired in Puerto Rico, I do remember that it was broadcast on WIPR-Channel 6, the island’s public television station. Watching one of my favorite sitcoms on what I then considered the boring channel was rather odd. However, I never thought it strange that the Peñas, ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? ’s working-class three-generation Cuban/Cuban-American family, resided in Miami or that some of the characters communicated bilingually in English and Spanish. For me, ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? was a show that resembled other locally produced situation comedies broadcast on commercial television, with the difference that the Peña family were Cuban immigrants who, instead of residing in Puerto Rico (like some of my childhood friends), lived in Miami (like many of my friends’ relatives). Probably as a result of the principal characters’ cultural references and their accents in Spanish, I decoded ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? as a Cuban sitcom. Fast-forward to 2004. I was invited to write a 500-word encyclopedia entry on ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? Without having any information on the show at hand, I immediately accepted. This was an opportunity to revisit a program I loved. After conducting the research I realized the uniqueness of ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? Sponsored by the U.S. Office of Education Emergency School Assistance Act– Television Program (ESAA-TV), ¿Qué pasa U.S.A.? —considered the first bilingual situation comedy broadcast on U.S. television— addressed the culturalgenerational misunderstandings and the socio-cultural adjustments endured by the Peñas, a 1960 Cuban exile family.

In 2017, the American game designer Momo Pixel released the single-player, browser-based game Hair Nah. In this game, you play as Aeva, a Black woman taking trips to locations that include Osaka, Havana, and the Santa Monica Pier. As you move through levels on your journey—taking a taxi ride, traversing airport security, sitting on an airplane—you must slap away increasingly aggressive white hands that reach into the frame to touch your hair. Though Hair Nah taps into the genre of a casual button-mashing game, this interactive experience also explores the topic of microaggressions via unwanted hair touching. If you slap away enough hands on your travels, you reach a screen welcoming you to your destination with the message “YOU WIN!” but the caveat, “The game is over, but this experience isn’t. This is an issue that black women face daily. So a note to those who do it STOP THAT SHIT.”

This article discusses the popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games, which follows Arthur Morgan, a white outlaw, during the decline of the “Wild West” in 1898 and 1899. Taking up conversations of fugitivity in critical ethnic studies, this article maintains that fugitivity operates as a rhetorical trope that stands in for racial identity where the logic of postracialism denies investments in race. Analyzing the narrative, spatial, and kinesthetic elements of the game, this article argues that Morgan, and by extension the player, is aligned with historically and geographically racialized others through a fugitive relationship to space. While Rockstar, as a video game studio, may not see itself explicitly intervening in a racialized and racializing political imaginary in its fictional worldbuilding, the kinesthetic, narrative, and cartographic strategies the studio employs respond to a set of cultural assumptions rooted in the rhetoric of postracialism. As such, Red Dead Redemption 2 serves as a multifaceted text through which to interrogate the dynamics of that rhetoric as it is mobilized in representations of fugitivity and identity.

This article considers the cultural politics of frustrated potential for diverse representation in games by examining developer comments on the 1995 digital game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, adapted from Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction story of the same name. While Ellison’s story featured a gay man named Benny among the protagonists, the game developers adapted Benny without his original sexual identity. In a 2012 Game Informer magazine article, however, the developers reflected on their version of Benny as a “lost opportunity” for exploring gay identity. Rooted in discussion of this frustrated potential for a gay in-game Benny, this article interrogates a logic of lost opportunity for diverse representation present in game-development discourse, which manifests in a longing for more diverse characters that could have been but never came to be. This logic suggests particular ways that developers might conceive of diverse representation as simply a design issue under neoliberal logics of economic opportunity, commercial risk, and fetishized innovation—without meaningful consideration of political significance. Opposing this instrumentalization of frustrated diverse representation, this article draws on queer game studies and speculative design and literature to explore the possible contours and implications of diverse characters that never were more seriously than such comments typically do. Doing so demands more than romanticized longings for lost opportunities for diverse representation that treat this longing as the end in itself.

This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-racially-identifying North American designers—Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee—and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence.

This article addresses the seeming absence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in video games from the 1980s and 1990s, the height of the US AIDS crisis. As Adrienne Shaw and Christopher Persaud have noted, stories about HIV/AIDS were pervasive across American popular media during this period, which also represented a boom in video game development. However, documentation remains of only a handful of early video games that mention HIV/AIDS. This article argues that, far from being absent from video game history, HIV/AIDS and the US AIDS crisis were actually influential in shaping a number of the design elements and narrative genres that have become important to contemporary video games. Scholars like Cait McKinney have demonstrated how people living with HIV/AIDS in America played a crucial part in the evolution of internet technologies that now form the backbone of video games. Through a comparative reading of two games by C. M. Ralph, Caper in the Castro (1989) and Murder on Main Street (1989), this article demonstrates how HIV/AIDS has also manifested in the content and form of video games, even (and perhaps especially) when it seems absent. Derritt Mason has explained how Caper in the Castro, widely celebrated as the first LGBTQ video game, contains clear echoes of the AIDS crisis. Yet, as this article demonstrates, HIV/AIDS remains a powerful presence even in Murder on Main Street, Ralph’s “straight version” of the game. Together, these games offer a microcosm through which to explore larger tensions between HIV/AIDS and video games, with the AIDS crisis representing a key element of what Cody Mejeur has termed the “present absence of queerness in video games.”

Cet article propose une étude comparative de la première saison de la série policière québécoise primée 19-2 (Ici Radio-Canada Télé, 2011-2015) et de son adaptation canadienne anglophone (Bravo, 2014-). L’étude des deux séries 19-2 permet d’investiguer, à travers un exemple récent, le processus d’adaptation télévisuelle au Canada. Les similitudes narratives et esthétiques entre les deux séries sont tout d’abord brièvement présentées: l’histoire et les arcs narratifs sont quasi identiques, la plupart des personnages conservent les mêmes noms, sans compter que les stratégies narratives marquantes de cette œuvres ont été pour la plupart reproduites dans la nouvelle version. Ces deux œuvres, appréhendées en tant que « performances » distinctes, sont ensuite analysées à travers le prisme du genre. L’analyse de quelques scènes clés et arcs narratifs permettra de démontrer que ces deux productions sont très différentes en ce qui concerne leur construction narrative de masculinités télévisées – particulièrement leur négociation différentielle de conceptions hégémoniques des identités – et leur représentation des rapports hommes-femmes.

Globalization has intensified interconnectivity among television industries worldwide. Interconnectivity happens through structural and institutional linkages among television systems and industries worldwide, resulting in an increasingly integrated global business governed by similar practices and goals. The dynamics are reflected in the popularity of television formats. On the surface, global dissemination of formats may suggest not only the global integration of the economy of the industry but also the standardization of content. A dozen media companies are able to do business worldwide by selling the same idea, and audiences seem to be watching national variations of the same show. At a deeper level, however, formats attest to the fact that television still remains tied to local and national cultures. Bringing up examples of Latin American cases, this article argues that television is simultaneously global and national, shaped by the globalization of media economics and the pull of local and national cultures.

From the 1967 live satellite program "Our World" to MTV music videos in Indonesia, from French television in Senegal to the global syndication of African American sitcoms, and from representations of terrorism on German television to the international Teletubbies phenomenon, TV lies at the nexus of globalization and transnational culture. Planet TV provides an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of global television, combining previously published essays by pioneers of the study of television with new work by cutting-edge television scholars who refine and extend intellectual debates in the field. Organized thematically, the volume explores such issues as cultural imperialism, nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, ethnicity and cultural hybridity. These themes are illuminated by concrete examples and case studies derived from empirical work on global television industries, programs, and audiences in diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts. Developing a new critical framework for exploring the political, economic, sociological and technological dimensions of television cultures, and countering the assumption that global television is merely a result of the current dominance of the West in world affairs, Planet TV demonstrates that the global dimensions of television were imagined into existence very early on in its contentious history. Parks and Kumar have assembled the critical moments in television's past in order to understand its present and future. Contributors include Ien Ang, Arjun Appadurai, Jose B. Capino, Michael Curtin, Jo Ellen Fair, John Fiske, Faye Ginsburg, R. Harindranath, Timothy Havens, Edward S. Herman, Michele Hilmes, Olaf Hoerschelmann, Shanti Kumar, Moya Luckett, Robert McChesney, Divya C. McMillin, Nicholas Mirzoeff, David Morley, Hamid Naficy, Lisa Parks, James Schwoch, John Sinclair, R. Anderson Sutton, Serra Tinic, John Tomlinson, and Mimi White.

"Addressing both the scope and the significance of television program format transferthe practice of using the basic idea of a program to produce a new version of that programthis book details this rapidly growing area of the international television distribution system. Also addressed is the remaking of a program by the television industry of another nation, highlighting issues of meaning and cultural identity of national audiences."

This text provides readers with useful summaries and evaluations of key arguments relating to the development of television as an industry across the globe and its potential cultural impact. There is a continual insistence in the book on the need to connect issues of industry with those of culture.

Today’s explosion of Swedish films made by and about transgender people is sometimes considered in a vacuum. This article explores the long history of cross-gender performance in Swedish cinema and the relationship of these new films to older traditions. In this article, I will outline the contours of cross-gender performance in Swedish films from the 1908 to today, using some exemplary films to display the variety of styles, genres, and meanings that can be found: the short dance film Dances Through the Ages ( Skilda tiders danser , Walfrid Bergström, 1909); the swashbuckler Lasse-Maja (Gunnar Olsson, 1941); the romantic comedy Up With Little Märta ( Fram för Lilla Märta , Hasse Ekman, 1945); the dramatic art film The Magician ( Ansiktet , Ingmar Bergman, 1958); the recent romantic comedy Cockpit (Mårten Klingberg, 2012); and the trans art film Everything Falls Apart ( Nånting måste gå sönder , Ester Martin Bergsmark, 2016). I will show that the two main shifts in Swedish cinema’s representation of cross-gender performance occurred in the mid-1950s and in the 1990s, due to social changes and changes in the structure of the Swedish film industry. In Swedish cinema, as elsewhere, cross-dressing has never meant any one thing, so we must attend to the specific contexts of its expression in order to understand what it meant.

Undercurrents engages the critical rubric of "queer" to examine Hong Kong's screen and media culture during the transitional and immediate postcolonial period. Helen Hok-Sze Leung draws on theoretical insights from a range of disciplines to reveal parallels between the crisis and uncertainty of the territory's postcolonial transition and the queer aspects of its cultural productions. Leung explores Hong Kong cultural productions -- cinema, fiction, popular music and subcultural projects -- and argues that while there is no overt consolidation of gay and lesbian identities in Hong Kong culture, undercurrents of diverse and complex expressions of gender and sexual variance are widely in evidence. Undercurrents uncovers a queer media culture that has been largely overloo... Source: Publisher