Votre recherche

The kingdom of Bhutan drew the international spotlight in 1999 when it became the last nation on earth to introduce broadcast television. It was a deliberate and strategic move by a country that for centuries had chosen to isolate itself from the rest of the world, turning inward to nurture its own culture. The small Himalayan country, whose population in 2013 was estimated at just 733,000, 1 sits uneasily between two feisty behemoths  – China and India – each with over a billion people and an ongoing history of border disputes. Bhutan has long been wary of being swamped, either politically or culturally, by these larger neighbours, as well as the world beyond (Penjore  2004 ).

In the three decades after 1980, major changes took place in the ways in which culture in Tibet was produced, transmitted, and consumed.¹ These changes, however, were not evidence of the radical transformation often claimed as the result of digitization, but were brought about by earlier forms of technological development. In terms of music and radio, it was the arrival of cheap cassette players and recorders in Tibet in the late 1980s that allowed Tibetans to choose for the first time when to listen and, within the limits allowed by the market and the government, what to listen to (Dhondup

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

Similar to the other countries discussed in this volume, elite dominance over mass media has been a main characteristic of Filipino history. Foreign-educated Filipino intellectuals from wealthy families founded the early periodicals that demanded reform and/or independence from Spanish colonization in the late nineteenth century (Anderson 1983 ). Today, ‘old rich’ landowning families own and operate television networks, radio stations, and newspapers not only as part of prestigious and profi table media conglomerates, but also in connection with their interests in industries as varied as oil and agriculture to insurance, shipping, and mining.

Incisive analyses of mass media - including such forms as talk shows, MTV, the Internet, soap operas, television sitcoms, dramatic series, pornography, and advertising-enable this provocative third edition of Gender, Race and Class in Media to engage students in critical mass media scholarship. Issues of power related to gender, race, and class are integrated into a wide range of articles examining the economic and cultural implications of mass media as institutions, including the political economy of media production, textual analysis, and media consumption. Throughout, Gender, Race and Class in Media examines the mass media as economic and cultural institutions that shape our social identities, especially in regard to gender, race, and class.

On 19 September 2006, the fi rst indication many people in Thailand received that the country was undergoing another military coup d’ é tat, the eighteenth such putsch since 1932, was when the nation’s six free-to-air television networks suddenly suspended regular programming and, channel by channel, started to broadcast a generic mix of royal news and light entertainment (Connors and Hewison 2008). Final confi rmation came again via television later that evening in the form of an offi cial announcement, broadcast at regular intervals across all stations from a central feed, in which the armed commanders in chief behind the coup – the awkwardly titled ‘Administrative Reform Group under the Democratic System with the King as the Head of State’ – explained apologetically that they had temporarily taken control of the nation’s airwaves, as indeed of the nation, exhorting viewers to remain calm and reassuring them that normalcy would soon be restored, at which point broadcasting reverted to the same steady flow of innocuous entertainment programming. For all its exceptional gravity, the 2006 coup’s strategic blend of direct state interventionist control of broadcasting combined with a more indirect use of escapist entertainment as populist pacifi er is arguably a structural characteristic of Thai television history writ large.

My chapter looks at Chinese independent cinema as an institutionalizing enterprise. In other words, although many filmmakers keep emphasizing the individualistic quality of their agenda or the idiosyncrasy of their film works, independent films have developed things in common, such as certain thematics, addresses, formalistic styles, and modes of production. Their survival is also predicated more and more on shared infrastructures of film communities, distribution agents, and exhibition networks. Of course, this does not mean that the institution of Chinese independent cinema is settled and finalized; it isn’t like a breed of crops circled by impermeable ideological or physical fences.

The construction of a problem, be it a crisis or a moral panic, is an attempt of policing and control, for the maintenance of hegemony and authority (Hall et al. 1978 ). A problem emerges as a problem only when it is out of its proper place, just like dirt becomes dirt only when it is not properly placed in the earth. The elimination of dirt is necessary in maintaining the cleanliness of the social order (Douglas 2002 ). In other words, it is the need for a particular social arrangement that constitutes the existence of a problem. Taiyu, the lingua franca of the Taiwanese, became a problem of dialect (called Minnanyu) to be eliminated when the KMT colonial regime moved to Taiwan, building it as a Chinese nation and instituting Mandarin as the national language. Television is central to the building of the Chinese nation. Taiyu serial dramas were broadcast soon after the fi rst network was established in 1962, but have been constructed as the most problematic and debased genre since the early 1970s when the second TV station, CTV (1969), and the third, CTS (1971), were established and used serial drama to compete for profi t. Accusations directed at the poverty of its quality and the vulgarity of the audiences have characterized mainstream criticisms and constructions of Taiyu serial dramas as problems from the 1970s to the present. This chapter investigates not only the how and what but also the why of this problem-construction, as an attempt to understand the power mechanisms at work in struggling for hegemonic control. It charts two historical moments – the 1970s and from the 1990s to the present – when language has played a signifi cant role in the articulations of serial dramas as problems and explores the changing political, economic and cultural forces that situate them as problems worthy of discussion. I argue that the history of this problem-making demonstrates the centrality of Chinese culture in political domination through cultural means, with ethnic/class politics playing a central role in the maintenance of a hierarchical social order. In the 1970s, Chinese culture was used to create ethnic/class divisions within Taiwan while simultaneously creating the illusion of a symbolic whole under the name of the Republic of China. However, since the 1990s, and intensifying after the 2000s, with the entanglement of democratization and neoliberalization in Taiwan and the rise of China, the ethnic/class tension is not just complicated by confl icted national identifi cations and Chinese culturepromoted by both the KMT Party’s Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, but also for unifi cation purposes. While democratization, which involved the search for Taiwanese identity, led to the rise of Taiyu-based Hsiangtu drama, the neoliberal defi nition of culture as economic resource, which consecrates Chinese culture through capital investment, facilitates this unifi cation process while creating further ethnic/class/national identity divisions within Taiwan. The result is a disparaging of Taiyu-based culture in general and, in particular, Taiyu serial drama as a problem to be reformed.

Korea was the fifteenth country in the world to start television broadcasting when it first launched in Seoul in 1956. Since then, the structure, content and policies concerning Korean television have continuously transformed, due largely to changing contextual circumstances such as wide-ranging socio-political democratization and the rise of the neoliberal global economic system and digital technologies. Up until the 1980s, the oligopolistic structure of the two public broadcasting networks  – Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC)  – dominated the broadcasting market. However the landscape has dramatically changed since the early 1990s, with 11 newly launched commercial terrestrial broadcasting channels (including Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) in December 1991) and 153 cable channels when the multichannel television era began (Jin 2005 : 1). A digital satellite television system called Skylife was launched in March 2002, and airs 176 channels at the time of writing. Such changes stem from the shift in the domestic political climate where liberalization and privatization were promoted in assertively practiced neoliberal reform movement in the early 1980s, as well as changes in the global cultural industry environments based largely on globalization and the development of digital technologies. This chapter explores democratization, transnationalization and digitalization, three active factors within Korean television broadcasting by analysing changes and shifts in popular music programmes.

"Though the television industry in China is enormous, fewer people are watching television screens. In this groundbreaking study, Michael Keene shows how television content is changing, how the Chinese government is responding to the challenges presented by digital media, and how businesses are brokering alliances in both traditional and new media sectors. Keane outlines the process of making content in China, focusing on regulatory institutions, ownership, censorship, programmes and channels, copygright, formats and the role of media bases. Spanning a wide variety of genres, the book examines four models of content internationalisation: licensing of programmes, formats, co-productions and online media. Written in an accessible style by one of the world's leading experts on China's media, this book explores how streamed online content is impacting on the state's control of ideas and management of the traditional broadcasting sector. This is the authoritative text for scholars, students, businesses and policy makers wanting to understand how the rapid evolution of Chinese media aligns with the nation's soft power initiatives"--Back cover.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of media and change in postcolonial Malaysia, a South-East Asian nation of 29  million multicultural people, with a focus on the role of television in the nation’s transformation following independence from British rule in 1957. Despite having inherited the basic democratic institutions of the British political tradition, Malaysia continues to debate the transition from soft authoritarianism to democracy (Means 1996 :  103). Since 1957, Malaysia has been led by a single political party, the Barisan Nasional (BN). While the BN is a coalition of three major ethnic-based political groups, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), it is, in effect, a symbol of Malay-Muslim supremacy (Ketuanan Melayu). UMNO, the dominant group within the party, has, since its formation, aspired to uphold Malay culture as national culture and Islam as the offi cial religion for the country. From the fi rst general elections in 1959 until the 2008 general elections, the BN held two-thirds of the 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat (House of Representatives). Malaysian media scholar Karthigesu ( 1987 , 1994 ) contends this was largely due to the role of public television, which was launched and promoted by government itself, broadcasting in its colonial service model. In fact, the arrival of state television in 1963 coincided with the formation of the Federation of Malaysia (Moten and Mokhtar 2013 ). In this chapter I argue that television has been pivotal in shaping and transforming the political and cultural landscape of Malaysia as the medium evolved from a strictly national to a loosely global and then fluidly trans-local orientation. While television fi rst enabled the BN to hold its two-thirds majority and build the nation premised on Malay supremacy policies, it subsequently played a part in weakening the BN’s grip over the multiethnic electorate as the UMNO Ketuanan Melayu ideology, layered deep beneath the powdered face of television, surfaced in the digital media era.

Writing a history of Indian television immediately begs the question, how do we want it read? Exhaustive chronological treatments anchor the field (Kumar 2000 ), ideological examinations reveal a Hindu-centric nation with serious consequences for religious and gender minorities (Rajagopal 1996 ; Mitra 1993 ; Van der Veer 1997 ), development analyses demonstrate the failures of a socialist state (F ü risch and Shrikhande 2007 ), and audience studies reveal complex negotiations among multiple identity positions (Mankekar 1999 ). These critical approaches to the study of television in India rightly expose power differentials that facilitate, through the centuries, the inequities of interwoven structures of imperialism, colonialism, casteism, and capitalist patriarchy. Most importantly, they highlight the chronic condition of distrust in postcolonial societies, making it highly challenging to legitimize profi table connections to global circuits as they modernize under the very conditions that once constrained them.

This chapter contemplates the ethical dimensions of the specific brand of observational cinema found in China. Because there is no popular understanding of independent documentary—and also because filmmakers almost invariably use amateur video cameras and shoot alone—many subjects are oblivious to the fact that their images are being captured for films being screened around the world. It is in this sense that, while their cameras are perfectly visible, they are also hidden. This enables directors to capture “life unawares,” as if people were being shot by a hidden camera. In this context, directors make the films they want, ignoring the ethical implications of shooting people without being upfront about their intentions or asking for consent. The chapter closely examines a set of films to explore the axiographics of the documentary, in other words how ethics is rendered in the time and space of the moving image.

Taking Hao Jie’s Single Man as a case study, this chapter discusses the effect of globalization on independent DV production—a home-grown phenomenon born out of the availability of DV cameras and computer editing software and the spreading of the internet. Starting as a marginalized practice without access to the domestic market, and expressing a desire to saturate the visual field with obfuscated images and to create a counter-archive (a counter-memory of the Chinese people), it attracted international attention, which in turn allowed it to have access to alternative forms of financing as well as the input of foreign talent. The fluidity of digital modes of production also contributed to an eradication of the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Instead, the real divide lies between “the desire for cinema” and “the desire for documentation.”

Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter. In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates. Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

One may argue that Chinese television has already received more than its fair share of attention in the study of Chinese media. As compared with radio and cinema, which developed in the socialist era (1949-78), television has been seen as the dominant medium in the decades of marketization and economic reforms since the late 1970s (Zhu and Berry 2008 ). Television has been studied as a metonym for the ongoing tension and complicity between the Chinese state and the market (e.g., Zhao 1998 ; 2008a) and as a metaphor for the contradictions between a legacy of socialist rhetoric and ethos and a neoliberal market agenda. It is precisely these contradictions that make up what is often referred to as the ‘Chinese characteristics’ (Zhao 2008a; Sun and Zhao 2009 ) of China’s television culture.

Since its beginning in the early 1990s, independent Chinese documentary has steadily built a reputation with its unflinching presentation of the underbelly of China’s economic boom and social sea changes. Individuals and groups whose experiences register the drastic costs of this process have become the most natural and common subject matter of independent documentaries. From the struggling artists who were among the first to quit state employment and go independent in Bumming in Beijing (Wu Wenguang 1990) to the art-aspiring young migrants from the rural area in The Other Bank (Jiang Yue 1995), from the homeless youngsters in Along the

This paper looks at five documentaries on activism around ending the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in Africa. All were made by or in partnership with UK and US producers and are distributed by the New York-based non-profit media arts organization Women Make Movies. By tracing changing political and representational strategies in feminist documentaries on the issue and the varying terms on which the films engage their subjects and address their viewers, the chapter aims to put the specificity of independent documentary formats, practices, and institutions in dialogue with feminist theoretical critiques of the wider discourse on women's human rights. The chapter looks at Kaplan and Grewal's critique of the neo-colonialism of Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar's Warrior Marks, the observational strategies of Kim Longinotto's The Day I Will Never Forget, the diasporic dimensions of Mrs. Goundo's Daughter and Sarabah, and the visual rhetoric of human rights models in Equality Now's Africa Rising. The cultural field of documentary constitutes a public sphere in which activist and theoretical debate, contested reception, and continually renewed cultural production articulate the productively shifting terms of transnational feminism.