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Stuck between the political economy of the larger domestic television production industry and global market imperatives, I argue that Turkey’s TV industry executives and professionals had to develop and implement a number of tactics to achieve a locally based transnational cultural industry able to withstand both global and domestic pressures. In this chapter I identify three main tactics employed by Turkey’s TV industry executives and professionals to combat the socio-economic and political challenges they face: These tactics are: (1) carefully managing the content to skirt government restrictions; (2) adopting the government’s soft power discourse and public diplomacy aspirations by cooperating with government officials and businesses in their cultural promotion and nation-branding efforts; and (3) adapting to global TV trends by undertaking rigorous marketing and branding campaigns. A discussion of these tactics in the Turkish case can help us understand how culture industries in the developing world, which had to integrate into a neoliberal media environment after the 1980s due to market- and state-driven policies propelled mostly by US-based global media giants, negotiate being locally based transnational culture industries in the face of increasingly authoritarian and right-wing domestic political climates.

This chapter discusses how Chinese television has been refashioned by the digital entertainment industry, and contends that new genres, identities, and representations have emerged in recognition of youths as the most valuable and desirable category of audience. It does so by way of three case studies. The first illustrates the symbiotic relationship between online literature and television drama production, and how the former contributes to the fantastical turn of Chinese television. The second seeks to understand the emergence of new cultural figures of “supreme heroine” and “sweet males” in the context of the rise of female fandom in contemporary Chinese popular culture. The third reveals how traditional television content, or in this case a political drama, may be recreated by online distributors and influencers so as to be aligned with the habits, attitudes, and preferences of the younger audiences. The chapter concludes that to understand contemporary Chinese television culture, the Internet and social media must become an integral component of inquiry because of their powerful remediating role in the public communication of any cultural text.

This chapter examines the intersection of popular culture and populism in Turkey by focusing on the TV show Payitaht Abdulhamid. Our motivation to analyze the recent TV series Payitaht Abdulhamid stems from our interest in the instrumental mobilization of popular culture for the Turkish government’s dual desire to both establish cultural hegemony and consolidate its populist style of government. Our analysis reveals that television, especially in the Global South, still plays a central role in governments’ desire to reconstruct history and establish cultural hegemony. This is particularly important as Turkey is going through a crisis of hegemony since the public is completely divided in its support for the government. Within the context of this hegemonic crisis, televised popular culture is vital, perhaps more than ever. Specifically, the show reduces a complicated history into easily understandable dichotomies and projects them on to contemporary politics in order to consolidate support for the government. Through televised popular culture, the government mobilizes history for purposes of cultural hegemony and populist politics flavored with nationalist, Islamist, and anti-Western motifs. Ultimately, the TV show presents yet another moment for understanding the mediated nature of 21st-century politics outside Western contexts.

African television is at the crossroads. This chapter surveys, describes, analyzes and explains the major changes that have taken place in the African television landscape since the 1990s. It focuses on three major developments that have marked the African television landscape: (1) liberalization of the television space to keep abreast of international developments, and the tension between entrenched governmental public broadcasting systems and newly licensed “independent” TV stations, (2) the process and impact of the analogue to digital TV switchover shepherded by the International Telecommunications Union, and (3) the diffusion of Chinese electronic technology, television, and film content on the African television market as part of the Asian giant’s “soft power” diplomacy and State capitalism. African television is constrained by political regimes that restrict freedom of expression, and regulatory agencies that preside over systems in which the law takes precedence over rights.

This chapter provides an overview and analysis of emerging alternatives in the context of Arab television production, programming, and distribution. Media convergence and the access to digital technologies have accentuated the fragmentation of audiences, revenue streams, and forced alliances and competitions between previously discrete sectors of the media business. Yet, alternative practices are closely associated with changing political, economic, and cultural vectors in the Arab region and the increasing integration of its television industries in global media. The chapter argues that these alternatives constitute a set of continuities with the history of Arab television. Taken together, they also demonstrate some level of transformation in production practices, programming strategies, and distribution operations.

Television is predisposed to the perception that it is the opposite of art and politics and that it is a time-consuming means for “dumbing down,” placating, disempowering and benumbing the citizenry. Through a discussion of the place of art and that of television, I use, as a conceptual framework, the convergence of the white cube and the black box to interrogate dynamics of postcoloniality, vision and power and how this forged divergent modernisms. Television in Africa did not, as with postwar America, create a sense of collective communities of spectatorship that would be brought closer to art appreciation through television. Rather, television, as the political, social and cultural phenomenon of modernization in various African countries, seemed to corrupt what was regarded as “pristine” cultural practices. However, since it coincided with colonial independence and the emergence of postcolonial nations, it became intertwined with various modes and mediums through which new forms of social consciousness aimed at self-definition and self-representation could be disseminated. The convergence of the white cube spaces of art and the black box of television enables an engagement with the colonial spatio-temporal distanciation of Africa from the global stage.

Television delivery throughout the world has changed rapidly over the past two decades. Within South Africa, much of this global narrative is repeated. The last 25 years saw a move from a single monopoly broadcaster within the ‘public service’ tradition (but later subsumed into the apartheid political agenda), to the present situation of a multi-company, multi-platform, increasingly digital delivery, calling into question even the very definition of ‘broadcasting’. ‘Global difference’ in South Africa plays out through a relatively late start but surprisingly short catch-up period, emphasizing a demographic/socio-economic specificity that has resulted in a highly skewed television market in which the uptake of high-end technology is less widespread than in other more ‘developed’ markets, and where the taste of local programming dominates even the technologically advanced sectors. The move toward a digital system, together with the introduction of competition, has provided challenges to the regulatory regime. The majority of the audience share, however, remains with local programming, regardless of its delivery.

The chapter traces the evolution of Chinese television since 1958 from a state propaganda organ to a profit-generating media juggernaut, with China Central Television (CCTV) as the only network TV responding to both market principles and party directives. Commercialization and marketization played a major role in the rapid development of the Chinese television industry. In recent years China’s TV industry has witnessed the rise of private media companies and the rapid expansion of digital media and the proliferation of over the top (OTT) content. The chapter further provides an overview of China’s overall TV structures and teases out the relationship between CCTV and local stations. The most popular genre on Chinese TV is serial drama, which developed from predominantly single-episode anthology dramas in the 1980s to chiefly multi-episode serial dramas. Talk shows and reality TV became fashionable since the late 1990s.

As a case study, this article examines the development of China’s online game industry and how China responds to the forces of globalization. Based on in-depth interviews, ethnographic research, and the analysis of archive documents from the past few years, this study identifies China’s evolving strategy of neo-techno-nationalism. In the Chinese context, this national strategy manipulates technology to create a version of popular nationalism that is both acceptable to and easily censored by the authorities. Therefore, cultural industries that adopt this strategy stand a good chance of prevailing in the Chinese market. This success explains why the regional competitors of Chinese online games—Korean games—are more successful in China than most of their Western counterparts. By providing a snapshot of the current ecology of China’s online game industry, this article also discusses the influence of regional and global forces in a concrete context and argues that the development of China’s online game industry depends more on political factors than economic factors.

This article presents the ways in which Japanese survival horror employs video games as a tool for cultural representation. First, it analyses the main differences between American and Japanese horror, and how the historical relationships of competition/collaboration between both have led to a constant exchange of cultural references present in their games. This relationship of domination/submission traces back to the post-war period in which the United States began exercising control over Japan. It is as a result of this period that Japanese terror begins to take shape and take its first steps towards the current J-Horror. Second, it analyses the work of game designer Keiichiro Toyama, namely Silent Hill and Siren, as a well-known example of the construction of a cultural identity halfway between the devotion to the Other and the respect for tradition. Finally, the article addresses other examples of Japanese survival horror to analyse more deeply which stance Japanese industry takes in this era of cultural globalization, or hyperculturality, which is seriously transforming our conception of culture in digital media.

Qualifié parfois de « dixième art », après que les jeux de rôles sur table (comme Donjons & Dragons) eurent commencé à céder du terrain dans les loisirs de la jeunesse à partir du mil…

The article provides a comparative account of two paradigms of independent videogame production: the Japanese dojin (doujin) games and the increasingly global indie games. Through a multilayered analysis, it expounds the conceptual metaphors associated with indie and d jin games, traces the two movements respective histories, situates them in wider media environments, and compares their characteristic traits.

"Examining a wide range of Japanese videogames, including arcade fighting games, PC-based strategy games and console JRPGs, this book assesses their cultural significance and shows how gameplay and context can be analyzed together to understand videogames as a dynamic mode of artistic expression. Well-known titles such as Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Street Fighter and Katamari Damacy are evaluated in detail, showing how ideology and critique are conveyed through game narrative and character design as well as user interface, cabinet art, and peripherals. This book also considers how Japan' has been packaged for domestic and overseas consumers, and how Japanese designers have used the medium to express ideas about home and nation, nuclear energy, war and historical memory, social breakdown and bioethics. Placing each title in its historical context, Hutchinson ultimately shows that videogames are a relatively recent but significant site where cultural identity is played out in modern Japan. Comparing Japanese videogames with their American counterparts, as well as other media forms, such as film, manga and anime, Japanese Culture Through Videogames will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, as well as Game Studies, Media Studies and Japanese Studies more generally."-- Provided by publisher.

Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ StudiesA profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom.Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra's 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

In the Togelese game Origin - the Rise of Dzitri that was developed in Lome, the character Edoh takes you on a journey to historic places in the city to revive the spirit of Dzitri. Deyfou-lah Sani Bah-Traore, programmer and game developer, spoke with Lisa Kienzl about his and his Teammate s work on Origin - the Rise of Dzitri

Chinese Television and Soft Power Communication in Australia discusses China’s soft power communication approach and investigates information handling between China and its targeted audiences in the eyes of key influencers – intermediate elites (public diplomacy policy elites in particular) in China and Australia. It explores CGTN (with staff from several professional cultures) and conducts a systemic test of how successful/unsuccessful China’s soft power message projection is in terms of congruence between projected and received frames as a pivotal factor of its power status. The analysis is based on a case study of frames in the messaging on Chinese international TV about China’s Belt and Road Initiative and in the minds of Australian public diplomacy policy elites. The question raised is whether and how Australia is listening.

This chapter examines the structural changes that can be identified in Ibero-American television in the first 15 years of the 21st century. Taking as a reference the main TV markets in the region (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Spain) and their peculiar historical developments, a brief introduction and overview describes their characteristics, potentials and limitations, underlining their strengths, weaknesses and challenges. The analysis, framed in the globalizing phase that cultural products and services are undergoing jointly with their increased digitization, suggests two fundamental drivers of change, summarized in the notions of concentration and convergence. To conclude, policies and recommendations for action are explored, with a view to promote and protect audiovisual diversity.

From its humble beginnings as a video game launched in the mid-90s, Pokémon has become a global entertainment franchise, even reaching into the world via "augmented reality" with the mobile game Pokémon GO. In the work, Nakazawa Shinichi argues that the Pokémon worldview is the best contemporary example of Claude Lévi-Strauss's "savage mind" (la pensée sauvage), suggesting that computer games can often be viewed as attempts to reconnect the human unconscious with the true, hidden essence of nature.

Redefines games and game culture from south to north, analyzing the social impact of video games, the growth of game development and the vitality of game cultures across Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, Oceania and Asia.

Fist-fights in television studios, dwindling media autonomy, sensationalism, fake news, religious hate, abusive trolls, political spin ... How did we get here? Three decades ago, before economic liberalization, came the expansion and privatization of Indian television. Technological innovation and easing of government controls offered the prospect of journalistic independence, artistic creativity and an empowered citizenry. This was rendered illusory by runaway growth and untrammelled commercialization. In that thwarted promise of the late 20th century lie the seeds of Indian democracy's current crisis. Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India tells the story of how technology was usurped, first by propagandists, then by the market. Going behind the scenes of the world′s greatest media explosion, this book describes the impact of consumerism on the newsroom, the shaping of a new cultural politics and the rise of a new politics of seduction. In a landscape of technological innovation, blurred boundaries and sensory overload, Amrita Shah paints a picture of the Fourth Estate′s challenging future.