Intersectional Insights (Asynchronous - Online Only)
"Worry Porn" Versus "The Big Lie": Media Portrayals of Damaged Social Relationships in the Wake of Trump View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Margaret Tally
One of the many casualties of American political discourse over the past five years has been the frayed family relations it has seemingly engendered. Especially since the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States, there has been a growing concern which has been expressed in American media about the toll on family and friends of having opposing views of the legitimacy of this election. Accounts of friendships that had been in existence for decades ending after the 2016 election began to spring up in US media. Advice columns began to be filled with strategies for "surviving" family holidays with relatives who refused to believe that Biden had legitimately won the election. Some people believe that January 6th was being portrayed as a form of "worry porn" that was blown out of proportion for media sales. Others believe that Fox News was peddling "The Big Lie," for their own gain. This paper chronicles how the media portrayed the fallout between family and friends, with an emphasis on how "the Big Lie," was perceived and what this did to American social relations. It draws on recent accounts of friendships during the Trump Era to illustrate how the US media was framing the damage that Trump was doing to families and friends during this period. I critically analyze how these accounts themselves helped to shape the discourse around what came to be known as "The Big Lie," which was alternatively understood as "Worry Porn" by Conservatives.
Information and Advertiser's Media Decision: An Empirical Study of Oman Context View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fatma Al Kalbani
The purpose of the study is to investigate the information utilization in advertising media decisions. The study uses content analysis from 135 programs/sections/advertisements of official newspaper, television, and radio. The results indicate a gap between media decision and information about media consumption rates. However, information about advertising function, programs content, target audience, and timing were reflected in advertiser’s media decision. It is recommended that an independent official research center should provide periodic surveys on media consumption in Oman to support advertiser's media decisions.
Corporate Cinema: Glimmers of Critique in a Sea of Commercial Narrations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matteo Ciccognani
This study draws on a brief cartographic analysis of how worldwide corporations have developed, depicted, and promoted their industrial labor processes and outputs, especially in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy. Tremendous employment of financial and logistic resources resulted in vast filmic harvests that, besides shaping corporate identities and their internal circulation among workforces, represented the turning point for the birth of media economics as a geopolitical and ideological instrument for self-promotion. The communicative power of cinema is the means through which mainly documentary and even fictional contents shape manifold techno-industrial, institutional, sponsored and commercial films on behalf of some of the most influential corporations. This whole process of production, comprising over 400.000 samples, materialises a significant aesthetic and affective world-making operation that triggers the formation of an increasingly integrated global industrial-economic architecture. Nevertheless, within this range of perspectively oriented gazes, a growing chorus of critical voices emerges, patently trespassing the cultural and ideological limits of that purely cultic religion named capitalism. Authors like Vertov, Flaherty, Ruttman, Losey, Resnais, Ivens, Olmi and many others displayed the evolution of electrification, radiocommunication, and industrial automation against a backdrop of world conflicts, decolonisation, labour disputes, and environmental risks generated by energy consumption.
Snapshots of U.S. Hegemonic Culture in Memes View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Olga White
Using semiotic analysis as a guide, this paper examines a corpus of memes across several distinct social media subcultures. The purpose of the paper is to identify whether cultural tropes reinforce hegemonic value systems in U.S. digital media communication on social media platforms. Increasing our understanding of memes as cultural communication will contribute to media literacy education of the subject.
