Imagined Realities
Asynchronous Session
Media Culture Case Study of Developing Countries Emphasizing Uganda,East Africa View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rehemah Nabbuye
Uganda has moved from analogue to digital TV broadcasting. Radios used to be dominated by the state until the early 1990s when the first independent radio was licensed. Programming on radio includes music and talk shows, and comedy is also popular. Radio stations in Uganda integrate mobile technology in their programming to increase audience engagement. Internet penetration levels are still low compared to other African countries. The recent Indian Ocean fiber cable project brought a lot of optimism and led to an increased interest in the internet as a media platform, broadband, and GPRS subscription. As of 2014, the Uganda Communication commission put mobile internet subscriptions at 4,196,133 compared to 106,900 fixed internet subscription. Media mass communication includes broadcasting, publishing and internet. Media culture is associated with consumerism, henceforth "consumer culture". Uganda has a vibrant industry but with its unstable political history, media never had a chance to thrive under political upheaval between 1966 to1986. There was censorship of media during the regime of president Idd Amin Daada. Media was used to promote leaders before their subjects. Media rights are still being pressed for by a few activists. Ownership of media has transitioned from government to private ownership. Despite the increased media freedom over the last decade, there are still calls for more actions from government by journalists for freedom. In recent cases CBS radio, Daily Monitor and Red Pepper were shut down by the government. There are many examples of challenges from ongoing government pressure on media to consider.
Primetime Impunity: Cardo Dalisay, the Populist Fantasy, and the Spectacle of State Violence in "FPJ's Ang Probinsyano" View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Philip Magistrado Jamilla
From being praised by the police for supposedly highlighting the successes of the drug war to being slammed by state security forces for allegedly being sympathetic to communist rebels amid an intensified anti-communist crackdown, primetime action soap FPJ’s Ang Probinsyano has emerged as a site of struggle between contending forces—dramatizing, mediating, and staging the intensifying contradictions that define Rodrigo Duterte’s regime. As such, this paper interrogates FPJ’s Ang Probinsyano and its role in the cultural production of state violence, and how the construction of protagonist Ricardo “Cardo” Dalisay constructs the national imaginary towards the Duterte regime’s populist fantasy by constituting the national public sphere as spectators in the spectacle of state violence. Deconstructing Cardo’s character throughout the teleserye as a policeman, fugitive, rebel, and vigilante reveals how his character is constituted as a hyperreal spectacle of violence typifying the struggle of the masses for social justice—inheriting a tradition from the action-hero character of the Philippine action film genre and its neocolonial cinematic roots—thus mediating and rearticulating the Duterte regime’s state rhetoric of populist mobilization and authoritarian rule. By reproducing this fantasy in the symbolic televisual realm in dramatizing the infliction of state violence, Cardo fulfills the ideological role of hailing the national mass audience to the populist fantasy as imaginary participants in the spectacle of state violence. While a site of struggle which allows the articulation of contesting imaginations, this spectacle becomes complicit to its own hegemonic processes in negotiating contradicting imaginations that allow the populist fantasy to reassert itself.
Crowdsourced Cinema and Contemporary Hollywood Film Distribution View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Simon Hewitt
This paper explores how crowdsourced cinema platforms like OurScreen, Tugg, and Gathr enable the audience to participate in the film distribution process by programming film screenings and then promoting them through social media. This exploration evokes what scholars like Iordanova call ‘a new film circulation environment’ in which the traditional mechanisms of film distribution are being radically undermined by new technologies. However, this paper argues the power practices and power structures of the contemporary Hollywood film industry are not threatened by this more participatory audience. They are instead ceding a small measure of control over the film distribution process in order to standardise participation through pre-existing mechanisms of distribution. The paper analyses the distribution processes of several films that were programmed through these platforms. It finds that crowdsourced cinema platforms enable the audience to participate in the film distribution process by employing social capital to promote film screenings. This social capital is thus interchangeable or ‘fungible’ with the economic capital a distributor uses to identify audience demand and promote their films. This fungibility demonstrates how the contemporary Hollywood film industry is ameliorating the threat of greater audience participation by incorporating their participatory practices into a new standard by which the industry operates. It also contributes towards bridging the gap between the gift economy, which places greater emphasis on social motives, and commodity culture, which places greater emphasis on economic motives, as both the audience and the industry are following the same capitalist logic, i.e. to accumulate capital.
Featured The Multimodal Annotation of Sex Scenes in Ghanaian Home Video Films: Aggregating Qualitative Questions and Quantitative Results View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Edem Adzovie
There are mixed reactions and notions regarding the overt or covert discussion sexual intercourse, particularly, sexual intercourse portrayals in films/movies owing to the cultural underpinnings of most societies. Sex is a major issue in society because it is part of human existence. Films reflect society; hence how sexual intercourse is portrayed in films must be analysed. Aggregating both qualitative and quantitative methodological standpoints, this study describes an approach to the multimodal annotation and analysis of the portrayal of sexual intercourse in popular Ghanaian home video films through the use of ELAN annotation tool. The aim of this study is to present a conceptualised annotation scheme for the multimodal analysis of how sexual intercourse is depicted in Ghanaian home video films against the Ghanaian cultural tenets regarding sex. Various modes and aspects are considered so as to make apparent, how meaning is constructing regarding the conveying of sexual intercourse in scenes of Ghanaian home video films. The proposed annotation scheme deconstructs the sex scenes in order to make meaning. This would further the efforts of multimodality in audio-visual artefacts.
Mohammad Reza Shajarian - the Voice of a Nation and Over-Politicization: How the Media Distorted One of the Most Famous Musicians of Our Time View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mehdi Rezania
This paper explores how Mohammad Reza Shajarian (1940-2020), arguably the most celebrated Iranian musician in recent times, was eulogized in the media after his death. Shajarian was a vocalist, calligrapher, and instrument innovator who refined āvāz-the traditional art of singing Persian poetry. A recipient of many prestigious international awards for his music, he was active during the 1979 Revolution and the 2009 Green Movement (Siamdoust 2017). Considered -beyond music- “an icon of contemporary Iran” (Simms 2012), Shajarian died on October 8, 2020, after fighting cancer for many years. News of his passing appeared in all Persian-language media, as well as in most major English media outlets (e.g. NYT, CNN, BBC, ABC, CTV) in a variety of tones in the titles and descriptions. By analyzing over twenty publications in both English and Persian languages I demonstrate how Shajarian was over-politicized in Western media; how was given credit for works he did not compose, and how his many artistic endeavours were overshadowed by his political significance. Drawing on interviews with musicians who worked with Shajarian in different periods, and referring to scholarly works on music and politics (e.g. Street 2012; Siamdoust 2017) I elucidate how musicians and scholars perceive his political activities in the field of Persian music differently from media representations. In so arguing, my work contributes to scholarship (e.g. Dabashi 2007; Simms 2012), which advocates for the understanding of Iranian art within a socio-political context, as well as to the scholarship of media and politics (e.g. Craig 2004, Frishkopf 2010).
May We Meet Again: The Role of Fandoms in Identity and Active Media Consumption View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jessilyn Gale
This paper explores the fandom culture of the tv series "The 100," a post-apocalyptic science fiction drama. An ethnographic study of this fandom provides insights on the importance of fandoms on identity, culture, and active media consumption. The study closely follows the final season of The 100 building up to the series finale and the long-awaited return of Lexa, a beloved LGBTQ character who fell victim to the "bury your gays" trope in 2016. Through the theoretical frameworks of pop culture, participatory culture, self-categorization, and social identity, this paper demonstrates how fandoms can create spaces of belonging and empowerment through social media platforms. Online communities become spaces where fans can express themselves freely, share a meaningful identity within the fandom, and—in cases such as “The 100”—have a direct impact on the outcome of the show. Although the series has ended, the impact of the fandom remains a powerful reminder of the importance of representation in the media.
Guilt and the Migrant Experience in Australia: Narratives of Happiness and Hatred View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Macpherson
This paper investigates the role guilt plays in Australia’s construction of its outsiders by focusing on contemporary migrant experience. I build off Sarah Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotion by reading migrant interviews in relation to media: films, political speeches, and other discursive structures that facilitate social organization in Australia. In the first part of this paper, I argue that a “multicultural narrative” positions the nation as a “happy home,” and examine how this can displace feelings of guilt and shame in the migrant by rendering possible social transgressions positive steps toward attaining a greater social good. In the second section of this paper, I discuss Australia’s “hatred narratives.” I do not define hatred as a necessarily aggressive emotion, but instead, demonstrate the way particular words can be affectively charged because of the histories they invoke, and show how this affect can be mobilized to create outsiders who are not welcome in the national imaginary and Australian society. These narratives however, are not fixed: political parties can appeal to tropes that have accumulated in affective value – such as the “home” – in order to achieve different political goals, and to organize social groups by aligning individuals with or against affectively charged objects. Similarly, these narratives remain available to subjects as possible identifications that can shape how we feel about ourselves, how we imagine our past actions and our futures, and who we align ourselves with.
Re-calibrating the New Media Use of Solano Methodist Congregations: Adaptation in the Landscape of New Normal and Beyond View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kevin John Maddela
This study focuses on the development of new media resources for sustainable use that will craft an agile organization with an efficient business model of new media utility. This study is in line with findings of Maddela (2018) making the Solano United Methodist Church Congregation as the respondents of his research. Based on the findings, the respondents grouped into “generational categories” show a “significant” perception on the adaptation of new media use with the F-value on Worship (9.12), Church Programs (4.64) and Ministries (46.98) making it significantly adaptive in the influx of new media resources. With the recent expansion of the research locale while maximizing its new media resources in the context of new normal and its continuing effort to build more networks in consonance to a highly commercialized community, the new media perception and its continuing utility effectiveness is in question. This research uses the Participatory Action Research Framework of Lune & Berg (2017) with several social and cultural approach and paradigms to communication science to reassess the locale context before coming up with agile solutions. The results will be treated as a significant basis for the intention of creating an agile model of an institution utilizing new media resources located in a commercialized while expanding its network by reaching nearby rural areas advancing its interest of meeting and inviting people.
