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An exploration of how issues of race and ethnicity play out in a digital media landscape that includes MySpace, post-9/11 politics, MMOGs, Internet music distribution, and the digital divide.

This chapter analyses a profound transformation of Bengali regional-languagecinema since the early 1980s, a transformation that fundamentally changedthe industry and one that can arguably be attributed at least partly to thecreation of a Bengali television-watching public in the same period. Itfocuses on a trend that emerged in mainstream Bengali cinema during the1980s and was sustained thereafter, and brought into prominence a newconfiguration of elements previously marginal to Bengali films. This trans-formation was to do with mainstream Bengali cinema’s increasing adaptation of what are commonly known as the ‘‘masala’’ or ‘‘formula’’ elementsof Bombay cinema such as racy dialogues, stereotypical villainous char-acters, stylized fights and song-and-dance sequences. This new genre, whichhas commonly been discredited as the Bengali film industry’s totally unim-aginative imitation of the popular Hindi-language cinema of Bombay,completely altered what had been the dominant aesthetic of Bengali cinematill about the mid-1970s. Until this point, Bengali cinema was marked by itsclose relationship with Bengali literature and a Bengali middle-class worldview, greater realism than Bombay cinema or other mainstream regionalcinemas, and naturalistic acting styles, and was radically transformed by agrowing adoption of the ‘‘formula’’ elements commonly identified withpopular Hindi cinema. Industry sources, however, indicate that this newtrend was successful in boosting the Bengali film industry, which had beenswamped by a severe economic crisis since the 1970s. The industry’s crisiswas caused by a host of factors: the most important of these was the Ben-gali middle-class audience’s shift to television as a result of an increasingly unsatisfactory film-going experience in this period. The creation of a Ben-gali television public in the early 1980s shifted audiences from the cinematheatres, thereby significantly reducing film revenues in Calcutta, until then the prime market for Bengali films.

Growing up in England, it never really occurred to me to wonder why Inever saw cricket from India on television. Indian cricket was always insight; we had Bishen Singh Bedi in his mysterious headgear wheeling in forNorthamptonshire, Srinivas Venkatraghavan wrapped in sweaters at Derby,Madan Lal playing in front of handfuls of old men in the Yorkshire leagues.Yet the Packer ‘circus’ largely left India alone, and in England the touringIndian side became an unglamorous pause between the glorious tours bythe West Indies and Australia. Little was I to guess that once I started working in television, India would become central to the world cricketeconomy and crucial to the technological improvements in the coverage ofthe game.

This chapter examines the ideological and structural foundations of Indianbroadcasting policy as it developed from the 1930s to the 1990s. The chapter argues that the failure of Indian governments to make the most of radioand television for economic and social development stemmed from threesources: (i) the restrictive policies inherited from a colonial state, (ii) thepuritanism of the Gandhian national movement, and (iii) the fear, madevivid by the 1947 partition, of inflaming social conflict. The policies andinstitutions established in the 1940s and 1950s shaped Indian broadcasting for the next 40 years and have been significantly subverted only since 1992as a result of the transformation effected by satellite television.

The changing relationship between cricket and satellite television in thecontext of the Indian sub-continent has been a subject of considerablescholarly inquiry. That one nourishes the other is well known. However,what is relatively little known is the degree to which this interdependence hasgrown in recent times. So much so that cricket tournaments, or ratherdesignated TV tournaments, are being planned with alacrity by the Board ofControl for Cricket in India (BCCI). Television rights for these overseastournaments/matches spread over the next 4 years had initially generated $219.5 million for the BCCI.1 On the other hand, satellite channels too havestarted planning cricket programming around these tournaments, program-ming expected to generate millions in advertising revenue.2 While theorganization of such big-money events well encapsulates the symbiotic rela-tionship between cricket and satellite television within a burgeoning Indianeconomy, other local/regional dimensions of this relationship are often noless fascinating. Tele-visual hype generated on the occasion of a regionalcricket body election in July 2006 in West Bengal, especially by the multiple 24-hour Bengali news channels, drew attention to the local variant of thestory involving big-money television and even bigger-money sport. Thischapter, on the basis of two distinct case studies – the implications of the tri-nation 1-day series played in Malaysia in September 2006 involving Aus-tralia, West Indies and India, and Television coverage of the Cricket Asso-ciation of Bengal Elections in July 2006 – will comment on the complex andever-changing relationship between cricket and television in India. At thesame time it will attempt to question the rationale behind this growing interdependence and probe what this means for the Indian nation at large.

After four decades of state monopoly over television Indian viewers gottheir first taste of private television in the early 1990s. By 1998, the first of India’s private 24-hour news channels was on the airwaves and by 2007more than 300 satellite channels were broadcasting into Indian homes. Ofthese, 106 broadcast news in 14 languages and as many as 54 of these were24-hour news channels in 11 languages.1 These are conservative figures thatdo not include many foreign and local cable networks that also broadcastnews.2 Even so, the numbers are a stark illustration of how the Indian statelost control over television broadcasting despite its best efforts to the con-trary. No other country in the world has such a concentration of private news channels as India. The creation of a television public has significantimplications for democracy and this essay focuses on what 24-hour newsmeans for India. It argues that the emergence of television news networkshas greatly enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy.Commercial mass media stands at the junction of politics and the economy,enabling the entry of citizens onto the stage of politics, while simultaneouslyseeking to appropriate that energy for its own commercial benefit (Rajago-pal, 1999: 133). This is a claim that needs to be differentiated from the usual journalistic self-image of the fourth estate acting as vigilant defenders ofdemocratic ideals. That notion should not be romanticised too muchbecause news production itself is a cultural process that cannot be separatedfrom its social environment. News producers always function under certaininstitutional constraints that are endemic to the news-gathering process.Leftist and liberal scholars of the media differ in their emphasis but allagree that news production is always circumscribed by institutional filters.3News is ‘more a pawn of shared suppositions than the purveyor of selfconscious messages’ (Schudson, 1995: 15). Yet, the media are important,and while it is difficult to draw direct causal linkages, there is no doubt thatthey initiate and create a new sphere of political action.

The role of television in democratic politics has been a subject of politicalcommunication studies at least since John F. Kennedy’s performance ontelevised debates supposedly turned around his electoral fortunes and wonhim the 1960 US presidential election. In India too, the potential of themedium in political communication has mostly been analysed in the contextof how television coverage of political leaders and parties, or the lack of it,affects voting behaviour. This chapter differs in its approach. In analysing television’s role in electoral politics in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, it does not look at discourses prevalent on television. Instead, itunderscores how the medium itself has become a part of political discourse,particularly during elections. It points out how television acquired centre-stage as an electoral issue in the 2006 Tamil Nadu assembly elections, evengoing to the extent of dictating poll alliances. Tamil Nadu offers an inter-esting case study to understand the interface between television and Indianpolitics not only because Tamil films and state politics have been inex-tricably intertwined for decades, but also because the two notable political parties in the state have a stake in the private satellite television business.

For any exposition of the television news medium to hold merit itbecomes imperative to glide into the past to recover its earliest antecedent –the newsreel. Newsreel presentation involved an intimate relationshipbetween its producers and events that print reporters had never faced: it wasentirely dependent on pictures that required the camera to be in positionbefore they unfolded (Montague, 1938: 49). Thus, the early producers ofnewsreels discovered that at times when there was a lack of any worthwhileor pictorial news it was possible to create it. It was also possible to ‘experiment’ with news. Newsreels in the United States, therefore, experi-mented with everything: news borrowed from newspapers, studies by collegeprofessors, animated diagrammatical representations of a volatile stockmarket, and so on. Since newsreels were exhibited before drama perfor-mances and film shows in theatres, a great degree of dramatisation andsensationalism was not deemed out of place. They too became part of theentertainment media.

Video games have become a limitless and multifaceted medium through which major corporations and Hollywood visionaries alike are reaching broader global audiences and influencing cultural trends at a rate unmatched by any other media. This book traces the growth of a global phenomenon that has become an integral part of popular culture.

Launched in 1980, cable network Black Entertainment Television (BET) has helped make blackness visible and profitable at levels never seen prior in the TV industry. In 2000, BET was sold by founder Robert L. Johnson, a former cable lobbyist, to media giant Viacom for 2.33 billion dollars. This book explores the legacy of BET: what the network has provided to the larger US television economy, and, more specifically, to its target African-American demographic. The book examines whether the company has fulfilled its stated goals and implied obligation to African-American communities. Has it changed the way African-Americans see themselves and the way others see them? Does the financial success of the network - secured in large part via the proliferation of images deemed offensive and problematic by many black communities - come at the expense of its African-American audience? This book fills a major gap in black television scholarship and should find a sizeable audience in both media studies and African-American studies.

Today’s media are vast in both form and influence; however, few cultural studies scholars ad-dress the video gaming industry’s role in domestic maintenance and global imposition of U.S. hegemonic ideologies. In this study, video games are analyzed by cover art, content, and origin of production. Whether it is earning more “powers” in games such as Star Wars, or earning points to purchase more powerful artillery in Grand Theft Auto, capitalist ideology is reinforced in a subtle, entertaining fashion. This study shows that oppressive hegemonic representations of gender and race are not only present, but permeate the majority of top-selling video games. Finally, the study traces the origins of best-selling games, to reveal a virtual U.S. monopoly in the content of this formative medium.

The history of gay and lesbian cinema is a storied one, and became that much larger with the recent success of Brokeback Mountain. But the history of gay and lesbian filmmakers is its own story. In The View From Here, queer directors and screenwriters speak passionately about the medium, in particular their personal experiences navi-gating the often cynical and cruel film industry. All of them offer fascinating anecdotes and ideas about cinema, and speak candidly about their attempts to combat studio apathy and demands of “the market” to create films that are entertaining, engaging, and truthful.

This volume is divided into three parts: 'Adaptation and Local Production in East Asia', 'Formats, Clones, and Generic Variations' and 'New Television'.

This dissertation is about gay and lesbian film festivals, the first of which was founded in San Francisco in 1977 and subsequently served as a model for their international proliferation over the next thirty years. While the films programmed in these festivals have received a great deal of attention from scholars and critics, the festival institution itself has received less consideration. This dissertation narrates the history of gay and lesbian film festivals through an economic lens, asking how fundraising practices have been deployed in the community building projects of festivals, how the administrative structures of festivals as nonprofit organizations have been leveraged by the state toward the management of new social movements, and how these nonprofits have participated in the identification and cultivation of populations as niche markets by the commercial sector. This historical schema will offer an alternative model for understanding queer image production, not through a textual analysis of those images, but through an examination of the material circumstances of their circulation and distribution. This dissertation is not simply about the ways that community organizations like film festivals have been strategically engaged by the state and the market in the management and exploitation of gays and lesbians, it argues that gays and lesbians themselves have articulated their politics, artistic practice, and discourse of community within (and against) the parameters defined by the demands of organizational sustainability. Furthermore, this dissertation will illustrate why taking economic activity seriously as a part of the material practices of queer image production answers crucial questions about the ways that sexuality operates as a category of governance. The history of gay and lesbian film festivals, and their regulation through the administrative structures of the nonprofit sector, is part of a much larger history of political struggle and the development of new social movements over the past three decades.

"This study sketches some of the various trajectories of digital games in modern Western societies, looking at the growth and persistence of the moral panic that continues to accompany massive public interest in digital games. The book continues with a new phase of games research exemplified by systematic examination of specific aspects of digital games and gaming"--Provided by publisher.

Considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a unique interpretive framework. This book analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces how the "algorithmic culture" created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde.

Notwithstanding the presence of extreme racialized tropes within the world of videogames, public discourses continue to focus on questions of violence, denying the impor-tance of games in maintaining the hegemonic racial order. Efforts to exclude race (andintersections with gender, nation, and sexuality) from public discussions through its era-sure and the acceptance of larger discourses of colorblindness contribute to a problematicunderstanding of video games and their significant role in contemporary social, political,economic, and cultural organization. How can one truly understand fantasy, violence,gender roles, plot, narrative, game playability, virtual realities, and the like without ex-amining race, racism, and/or racial stratification—one cannot. This article challengesgame studies scholars to move beyond simply studying games to begin to offer insightand analysis into the importance of race and racialized tropes within virtual reality andthe larger implications of racist pedagogies of video games in the advancement of Whitesupremacy.

This volume presents a series of papers concerned with the interrelations between the postmodern and the present state of art and design education. Spanning a range of thematic concerns, the book reflects upon existing practice and articulates revolutionary prospects potentially viable through a shift in educative thinking.