Media,Culture & Society

In settler-colonial countries like Aotearoa New Zealand, television programmes about rurality are fundamentally entwined with the nation’s colonial history, but how this context impacts on locally made, public service television content and production is seldom examined. Utilising data collected from interviews with programme makers and a novel bi-cultural friendship pair methodology, we examine how a high-rating mainstream programme, Country Calendar, conceptualises and delivers stories about Indigenous Māori and consider the extent to which these stories represent a decolonising of television narratives about rurality. The findings highlight the importance of incorporating Indigenous voices and values, the impact of structural limitations and staffing constraints on public service television’s decolonising aspirations, and challenges reconciling settler-colonialism with the show’s well-established ‘rosy glow’. While rural media are often overlooked by communication scholars, our study demonstrates the contributions they might make to the larger task of decolonising storytelling about national identity.

This research scrutinises the strategies that three of South Africa’s largest mainstream media companies, namely, Media24, Independent News and Media, and Arena Holdings use to attract younger audiences, particularly Generation Z. The main question under focus is: Are South African media companies innovating adequately in their news media content and platforms to attract young audiences? The research examines the issue from both the discourses of the digital news editors of the media companies and a sample of young people interviewed about their news consumption. The rationale for this study is that Generation Z as active users of the various forms of the media have the potential to influence the way in which the media package and disseminate news. Therefore, it is important to study this rising segment of audiences as young people’s consumption behaviour and spending patterns shape the businesses of media institutions to adjust their news strategies quickly.

There is extensive literature on how expectations and imaginaries about artificial intelligence (AI) guide media and policy discussions. However, it has not been considered how such imaginaries are activated when users interact with AI technologies. We present findings of a study on how users on a subreddit discussed ‘training’ their Replika bot girlfriend. The discussions featured two discursive themes that focused on the AI imaginary of ideal technology and the gendered imaginary of the ideal bot girlfriend. Users expected their AI Replikas to both be customizable to serve their needs and to have a human-like or sassy mind of their own and not spit out machine-like answers. Users thus projected dominant notions of male control over technology and women, mixed with AI and postfeminist fantasies of ostensible independence onto the interactional agents and activated similar scripts embedded in the devices. The vicious feedback loop consolidated dominant scripts on gender and technology whilst appearing novel and created by users. While most research on the use of AI is conducted in applied computer science to improve user experience, this article outlines a media and cultural studies lens for a critical understanding of these emerging technologies as they become embedded in communication and meaning-making.

Music listening is one of the most popular leisure activities in our lives, and it can also be found in prisons across the globe. However, most research on music in prison are concerned with its rehabilitative functions and not as an everyday activity. This study collected qualitative questionnaires and interview data from 14 prisons to illustrate the soundscape of music listening in Chinese prisons. The main access to music listening happens at the workspace and it is only available in the form of background music. This study considers the various functions of background music for both prisoners and officers. Music curation and access are about power and control, and it reveals a mostly hierarchical yet also dynamic pattern in the Chinese staff–prisoner relationship. Listening to music has also been found to be one of the coping mechanisms for officers and prisoners who share similar working conditions where conformity to authority is inevitable for all.

Danmu has been gaining increasing popularity in Chinese video-sharing platforms where users can project their comments directly onto the original video. Its popularity resonates with the general trend where user-generated content plays an increasingly important role. This article investigates possible meaning-making shifts produced by danmu from the perspective of resemiotisation. By deploying the Appraisal framework, particularly the attitude system, this study examines the attitudinal meanings expressed in a video and its danmu version. Comparisons between the two sets of attitudinal meanings reveal two patterns of meaning-making shifts. One is a shift in perspective, that is from whose perspective a certain scenario is presented. The other is a shift in the characterisation of one participant in the video. These findings raise our awareness of the possible manipulation of meaning afforded by danmu, which allows viewers to contribute directly to the meaning making of the danmu video. Danmu’s enablement of viewers’ co-production greatly extends the meaning and the meaning potential that could be afforded by the original video, which calls for a reconsideration of the purpose of video sharing, and the relationship between the original producer and viewers.

Critical to managing a crisis such as COVID-19 is the propagation of information to all vulnerable populations. Despite guidelines regarding communicating with people with differing accessibility needs during crises, some often find their needs unmet. Following a lack of assisted communications for d/Deaf people during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Twitter hashtag campaign, #WhereIsTheInterpreter, was launched in the UK, protesting the lack of accessibility during official press briefings around the epidemic. The campaign received support from across the globe. This study analyzes the discourse around the campaign in tweets published from March 1st, 2020 and September 30th, 2021 (N = 27,021) and analyzed the corpus using the Analysis of Topic Model Network (ANTMN) approach. We identified four major themes of discourse: discrimination, accessibility challenges, communication gaps and barriers, and Deaf rights. We analyze the discourse through the perspective of Critical Disability Theory (CDT) and hashtag activism, and discuss practical and theoretical implications.

In March 2019, Ensaaf, a transnational, non-profit organization, launched the project of daily posts on their social media pages consisting of remains or traces of disappeared Sikhs (an ethnoreligious minority community in India and the diaspora), that is, their photographs and biographical details. In this paper, I reflect on the meanings implicit in Ensaaf’s daily work of remembering and circulating remains of the disappearance on social media, specifically Facebook. By creating an archive that circulates regularly and frequently in and through social media, Ensaaf is performing what I call digital melancholia: continuous and ongoing grief work. The medium in which Ensaaf enacts its melancholic attachment with the disappeared leaves its imprint on the meaning of the performance itself. The daily work of melancholia performed in the constantly evolving space of Facebook is a form of “epistemic resistance” against the Indian state’s “necropolitics.”

Civilian victims of aerial warfare too often go uncounted and unrecognised by the belligerents. Myriad images and video of attacks against Syrian civilians did little to end their suffering, for example. The UK-based not-for-profit Airwars has had tangible impact on civilian harm disclosures and reparations because they have been able to shape such representations in a form that will be recognised by those with the power to enact change. Building on established theories of media witnessing and their extension to what Gray calls ‘data witnessing’, we argue that Airwars reveals the operative role of framing in open-source investigation and the forms of it witnessing it produces. Through interviews with key team members and detailed analysis of Airwars published methodology and other materials, this article shows how open-source investigations broadens the frame for witnessing civilian harm and in doing so generates relational, multi-scalar accounts of state violence that remain open to contestation and confirmation. In doing so, Airwars claims an epistemic authority via its distinctive framing of emergent practices of witnessing that depend upon the assembling of roles, standards, spatialities and techniques.

Situated within the field of platform governance studies, this paper shares findings from an ‘autoethnography of automated powerlessness’, drawing from the researcher’s disempowering experience of being a heavily moderated social media user. Using theoretical frameworks blending affordances and World Risk Society theories, this paper contextualises my experiences of moderation of my pole dance instructor, activist and blogger account @bloggeronpole from February to October 2021 within social media’s broader de-platforming of nudity and sexuality, finding fallacies within platforms’ own affordances, which lack mechanisms to aid or rehabilitate de-platformed accounts. With little to no information from platforms about the details of their moderation, qualitative, ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations of their governance are all users currently have to fight and understand their puritan, patriarchal censorship of nudity and sexuality, which are often conflated with risk. This study concludes with recommendations for different options for better, more equal and community focused moderation.

Extant research on data journalism in Africa has focused on newsroom factors and the predilections of individual journalists as determinants of the uptake of data journalism on the continent. This article diverts from this literature by examining the slow uptake of data journalism in sub- Saharan Africa through the prisms of non-newsroom factors. Drawing on in-depth interviews with prominent investigative journalists sampled from several African countries, we argue that to understand the slow uptake of data journalism on the continent; there is a need to critique the role of data politics, which encompasses state, market and existing media ecosystems across the continent. Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond newsroom-centric factors that have dominated the contemporary understanding of data journalism practices. A broader, non-newsroom conceptualisation beyond individual journalistic predilections and newsroom resources provides productive clarity on data journalism’s slow uptake on the continent. These arguments are made through the conceptual prisms of materiality, performativity and reflexivity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured every social, political, economic and cultural aspect of modern society. Millions of people have been stuck in lockdown within and across borders, national and regional terrains, in their homes and worse places. At this time of unprecedented change and ‘stuckedness’, digital communication technologies have served as a lifeline to forge and nurture communication, intimate ties and a sense of continuity and belongingness. But being stuck and simultaneously virtually mobile has brought many difficulties, tensions and paradoxes. In this paper we discuss first insights from a study with 15 members of the older Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) population in Victoria, Australia to explore experiences of being physically stuck and virtually mobile. We find practices of translocal care – ways of caring for distant others through digital technologies, has been made more complex by the pandemic and shaped by two dynamics: networked collective ‘existential mobility’, and a quantification of feeling that we call ‘intimacy 5.0’.

The enduring effects of COVID-19 have called into question many of the assumptions upon which media and cultural studies rest, including a fundamental mode of perception: the sense of smell. In dialog with the field of sensory studies, this paper traces digital smell loss (anosmia) communities from pre-pandemic Facebook groups to mid-pandemic TikTok challenges. This article considers digital smell loss communities on TikTok as imitation publics characterized by repetition. Via replicable TikTok challenges, digital smell-loss communities reckoned with the unmooring effects of a seemingly mild symptom. By exploring how formulaic smell-loss challenges generated support and facilitated community-building, this article demands greater attention to a sense often considered ‘disposable’.

In this crosscurrent contribution, we approach the notion of welfare through the lens of the data welfare state. We, further, suggest that datafied welfare can be fruitfully studied with the capabilities approach to better understand how ideas and values of data welfare intersect with and may allow for the ‘good’ life and human flourishing. The main aim is to highlight the deep-seated changes of the welfare state that emerge with the delegation of care and control tasks to algorithmic systems and the automation based on datafication practices. Welfare provision is undergoing major shifts that imply fundamentally rethinking the role of technology that supports and enhances welfare with the help of data.

Following the marked increase in the use of digital technologies during the recent pandemic, the article reconsiders the concept of social telepresence, in the sense of interpersonal connection at a distance, locating it in the longue durée and within media studies. It reminds the reader that, for centuries, when people were separated from one another by the force of various circumstances, including pandemics, they resorted to technologies at their disposal to experience telepresence, long before the term itself was coined by scholars. Foremost among these has been the epistolary, a vitally important interpersonal media largely overlooked by media and telepresence researchers. Rather than competitively evaluating the performance of various technologies, the article proposes a framework to compare them, along with the practices of social telepresence, in the course of history. This comparative program employs the following criteria: embodiment, synchronicity, the space of the encounter, the ontology of entities other than humans actuated by telepresence and the social preferences for different forms of telepresence.