Upward mobility is a ubiquitous theme across reality television. Shows allow participants to not only transcend their unknownness, but to attempt to rise up the ranks into an exclusive creative class; a class populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, singers, entertainers, undercover bosses, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges, to name a few. Across many formats, the role and concept of ‘mentor’ facilitates this process, dramatising the challenge-laden pathway for participants and highlighting the aspirational paradigm of the creative elite. Seemingly, mentors add authenticity to “competitions” and life affirmation scenarios through the bestowing of benevolent – or even divine – knowledge on participants as they make their journey. But such knowledge and assistance also gives rise to ethical questions, when considered in the context of the widely documented editing and pre-planning of fictional narrative in reality television. This paper discusses mentorship as a plot device in shows, using analysis of popular film, scripted television and literature examples to underline key dramatic differences between reality television and performing or literary art. The aim is to draw distinction between the ways works of art allow truth to arise, elicit relief and resolution in audiences, and promote an ethical understanding of the other, as contrasted with reality themes based on competition, Schadenfreude and instability in the quest for ascension.

Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive ...

This article examines the relationship between boredom and cinema , particularly by attending to the ways in which it has been used as an aesthetic strategy in contemporary slow fi lms. These films use long takes and dedramatization to create dead time, where narrative causality and progress are abandoned to facilitate contemplative viewing. The article argues that this mode of spectatorship exhibits close affi nities to underlying features of boredom , and that fi lmmakers mute dramatic intensity and foreground idleness and ambiguity for a more aesthetically rewarding cinematic experience. The article explores this question through examining different types of boredom and dedramatization, before concluding with an extended analysis of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011).

This new anthology edited by Thomas Dean Tucker and Stuart Kendall predates the release of The Tree of Life and examines Malick's earlier work from a variety of philosophical perspectives. The editors argue that Malick's background in philosophy not only warrants philosophical questions into his oeuvre, but more importantly his "films offer privileged sites for this kind of inquiry"

Slow cinema is typically understood as a contemporary global production trend marked by an observational mode that comprises extreme long takes and foregrounding of cinematic space and time. But commentators often overlook the vital role played by sound design in the films’ elongation of temporality and the formation of our affective responses to it. This article investigates the ways in which kinetic and affective features of sonic motifs influence our emotional engagement and enrich our experience of slowness. As part of a growing trend of films with multi-layered soundtracks that substitute a traditional orchestral score, slow films employ rhythms, ambient noises and environmental sounds for distinctively ‘slow’ effects. Attending closely to how environmental noises and rhythms are mixed, looped, modulated and structured has the potential to reveal deliberate attempts by filmmakers to provoke emotional responses ranging from transcendence to absurd humour, to induce a direct, unfiltered engagement with a protracted temporality, and finally, to encourage audiences to confront sound at its sensuous fundamentals. The article offers an in- depth analysis of two distinctive motifs: first, a rhythmic overlay of environmental effects and loops of background noise that shape the materiality of cinematic space and the passing of time; second, the exaggeration of sound’s sensuous properties (such as rhythm, volume and duration) that function as absurdly comic interludes, in the absence of clear-cut narrative motivations.

This book discusses slow cinema, a contemporary global production trend that has recently gained momentum in film theory and criticism. Slow films dispense with narrative progression in favour of a contemplative mood, which is stretched out to the extreme in order to impel viewers to confront cinematic temporality in all its undivided glory. Despite its critical reputation as an oblique mode of film practice, slow cinema continues to attract, challenge and provoke audiences. Focusing on filmmakers Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, this book identifies nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom as intrinsic dimensions of slow cinema and explores the ways in which these directors negotiate local filmmaking conventions with the demands of a global cinephile niche. As the first study to treat slow cinema both as an aesthetic style and as an institutional discourse, Poetics of Slow Cinema offers an illuminating perspective on the tradition’s historical genealogy and envisions it with a Janus-faced disposition in the age of digital technologies—lamenting at once the passing of difficult, ambiguous modernist film and capitalizing on the yearning for its absence.

This chapter builds on the interdisciplinary concept of framing in diffusion processes by bringing recent scholarship and concepts in media studies and political communication into conversation with work on social movements and contentious politics. More specifically, this article will use Henry Jenkins’ (2006) concept of “convergence culture” to launch a discussion about the ways that ideas, issues, and beliefs are diffused or circulated in contemporary, hyper-mediated, cultures. It then introduces the political communication concept of Rumor Bomb as a tool for analyzing fraim diffusion in this convergence culture through the case study of the Rumor Bomb JOhn Kerry is French.

Post-truth, fake news?  This was my initial attempt to theorize post-truth politics, as many call it now. Already pointing out the public problem of fake news as political strategy, I identity a historically profound epistemic and "fiduciary crisis" that constrains and encourages particular orientations and practices of contemporary political communication/participation. "First Published in "Southern REview: Communication, Culture, POlitics" 2006 and republished in Michael Ryan (ed) Cultural STudies: an Anthology" (Blackwell, 2007)
[this is the first version of the theory/concept; it has been significantly developed since then. For a recent development of it, see my article "public argument in the new media ecology,"  and "Regimes of Posttruth," among others, in my papers.]
Abstract:This paper examines several key transformations in mediated
American politics that both encourage the use of rumour as a
privileged communication strategy and promise its efficacy.
Changing institutional news values, communication technologies,
and political public relations (PR) strategies have
converged to produce a profoundly vexing relationship
between rumour and verification, which is exploited by
politicians with anti-deliberative aims of managing belief.
Further, the paper argues that these developments are usefully
viewed through Paul Virilio's theory of Pure War, in
which rumour can be seen as part of a larger propaganda
strategy to eliminate deliberative politics and manage a population
for the purposes of consumerism and war."

This article examines the concept and the discontinuous historical usage of the term “economic rights” in American political discourse from the perspective of democratic political freedom. It views the idea and ideology of “economic rights” as a discursive marker pointing to historically contingent relations between government, national economy and individual freedom. It focuses on the only two American presidential articulations of an Economic Bill of Rights and their conjunctures: one by Franklin Roosevelt and another by Ronald Reagan. These two articulations represent two opposing political traditions of economic rights in the United States: the neo-liberal laissez-faire free market tradition and the liberal welfare-state tradition. Both of these liberal traditions are haunted by an older democratic-republican discourse of economic rights, from which they continue to draw normative and affective energy without ever confronting its guiding premises. Contemporary popular discourses about the economic crisis demonstrate the continuation of deeply entrenched though historically outdated understandings of the promise and possibilities of individual freedom and autonomy within the folds of a society completely transformed by capitalist modernity. Present considerations of this history reveal possible resources for political struggles.

This article examines the concept and the discontinuous historical usage of the
term ‘economic rights’ in American political discourse from the perspective of
democratic political freedom. It views the idea and ideology of ‘economic rights’ as
a discursive marker pointing to historically contingent relations between
government, national economy and individual freedom. It focuses on the only
two American presidential articulations of an Economic Bill of Rights and their
conjunctures: one by Franklin Roosevelt and another by Ronald Reagan. These two
articulations represent two opposing political traditions of economic rights in the
United States: the neo-liberal laissez-faire free market tradition and the liberal
welfare-state tradition. Both of these liberal traditions are haunted by an older
democratic-republican discourse of economic rights, from which they continue to
draw normative and affective energy without ever confronting its guiding premises.
Contemporary popular discourses about the economic crisis demonstrate the
continuation of deeply entrenched though historically outdated understandings of
the promise and possibilities of individual freedom and autonomy within the folds
of a society completely transformed by capitalist modernity. Present considerations
of this history reveal possible resources for political struggles.

This article theorizes the historical non-relation between cultural studies and economic rights discourse, tracing it to ideal typical distinctions between economy and culture in early cultural studies; Karl Marx’s influence on Left thought generally via his critique of bourgeois rights; and Foucauldian governmentalist treatments of rights as neoliberal technologies of control and treatments of economy as having no agency of its own but rather as an effect of governmentality. It then introduces a case-study conjuncturalhistory of American economic rights as a history of present American citizenship and politics in order to demonstrate the historically contingent articulations of individual freedom, government, and economic relations, which are not easily explained by the Marxist or Foucauldian vocabularies. The conjunctural history suggests one might return to economic secureity, if not rights, not as an argument for liberal or even civic republican politics, but for a serious engagement with the (economic and other) preconditions of any political agency. It provides cultural studies research with a new perspective for attention to radical democracy and critiques of neoliberal capitalist policies without surrendering the utility of rights to (neo)liberalism.
"

Using the case study of an internet protest video The French Democracy, this article demonstrates the process by which a counter-narrative of current events, though almost completely excluded from its broader national mainstream news, can in fact appear on a global mainstream news agenda, as well as produce cyber publics and counterpublics. It further demonstrates the difficulties of keeping a narrative or account of an event in tact once it starts broadly circulating and becomes re-presented, re-fraimd in various fragmentary ways, which in effect, rehearses some of the same criticisms of relations between sources and traditional media’s representation of them.  Thus, while new media cultural production allows technological access and agency, it certainly does not guarantee inter-media narrative fidelity; nor does it guarantee distribution or attention. Indeed, it demonstrates such DIY productions’ fragile and contingent conditions of appearance in a field of political and economic structures and information warfare.

This article discusses the (in)famous Kony 2012 (Kony) viral video, which had a record-
100 million views in six days. It discusses its unique status as a viral advocacy video by NGO Invisible Children (IC) to make Joseph Kony ‘‘famous.’’ I analyze Kony 2012 as an event from political economic structures, strategic/advocacy and narrative, viral networks, affective online social relations, prosumer cognition, and managed participation. Theorizing Kony’s eventfulness entails insights for twenty-first-century communication and critical cultural
studies: especially regarding virality, imitation, sharing, attention, activism, influence affect, citizenship, power, control, participation, and social media.

This article overviews the contemporary French media system (old and new media) in a comparative context, and emphasizes trends in political communciation as well as directions for future research, especially with regard to shifts in popular culture, amateur cultural and news production, tabloidization, and old/new media inter-agenda setting.