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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • When scholars and policy makers contemplate the Arab “media revolution,” they mostly think of Al-Jazeera and its news competitors. They are guided by the assumption that all-news satellite television networks are the predominant, even the single, shaper of the Arab public sphere, a perspective exacerbated by the September 11, 2001 attacks. Drawing on a larger work (Kraidy, 2009, forthcoming), this chapter presents an alternative view, emphasizing instead the combined impact of Arab entertainment television and small media such as mobile phones on Arab governance. It explores how entertainment television is an active contributor to shaping what Arab publics discuss and do in both the social and political realms. As local (in this case regional/pan-Arab, reaching two dozen Arabic-speaking countries) adaptations of global television formats, Arab reality television shows exhibit a combination of signs and practices from several worldviews. As such, this chapter will show how Arab reality shows are open to multiple processes of appropriation and redeployment. Though numerous scholars have for years studied the differentiated “reception” of television texts in various contexts, this chapter focuses specifically on television formats in a context of growing media convergence and protracted political instability and social upheaval. Specifically, it focuses on reality television’s social and political impact, which stems primarily from its activation of new communication processes between a variety of information and media technologies creating what I call “hypermedia space.” In the new Arab information order, reality television activates hypermedia space because it promotes participatory practices like voting, campaigning and alliance building, via mobile telephones and related devices.

  • Livre : For decades, television scholars have viewed global television through the lens of cultural imperialism, focusing primarily on programs produced in the US and UK markets and exported to foreign markets. This book explores how, thanks to recent technological innovation and globalization, television is now finally becoming truly global. Global Television Formats aims to revise the place of the global in television studies. The essays gathered here explore the diversity of global programming and approaches, and ask how to theorize contemporary

Dernière mise à jour depuis la base de données : 20/07/2025 05:00 (EDT)