Through the years and the mediums Mexican women have been depicted with different
meanings and ways. One very important medium that has been significant in capturing the
experience of Latin America women has been photography. Thus the following essay will
aim to show and analyse the way in which the experience of being a woman has been
depicted in Latin American photography.

To the delight of Disney this year, Rupert Murdoch played a generous Santa Claus. The pre-Christmas announcement of a Disney-Fox deal has much to say about the behaviour of large media corporations during this decade. Following requisite regulatory approvals, Disney will acquire from 21st Century Fox (hereafter, Fox) its movie and television production studios, US cable channels including National Geographic, stake in European satellite broadcaster Sky, and India's STAR broadcast network. Murdoch has retained US television assets including the flagship Fox News and Fox Sports, the Fox broadcast network, Fox Business and regional stations. Disney has tended to own highly remunerating assets, the exception being its broadcast network, ABC. On the other hand, revenues of the movie division of Fox were less than half of their TV divisions'. Through this deal, Murdoch has decided to retain those US assets that have consistently brought him, commercial and political dividend. Despite anxieties of media concentration being voiced, including in distant Australia, the deal smartly manages the US regulatory framework. By not selling its large stations Fox News and Fox Sports to Disney, which owns ABC the other large US network, Disney and Fox sidestepped any immediate objections FCC may have to the deal. Unlike India, the USA has cogent anti-competitive regulation in the media, with current norms baring a company owning stations that together reach more than 39% of the population. As to the cinema business, being two of the big six studios of Hollywood, the Disney-Fox combine is believed to corner almost 40% of the box offices in the USA. However, the onus will be on the US government to convincingly argue and show any adverse impact of this deal either on the business milieu or more widely on public interest. Apart from these regulatory and strategic dimensions of the deal, it has a deeper structural dimension. The coming together of mouse and the fox has been catalysed by two interrelated shifts in the evolving US media economy. First, the reorganisation of Hollywood in response to challenges from up the Californian coast in Silicon Valley. The deal is a response to the shift in the centre of gravity of the entertainment business from 20th-century "media" conglomerates to 21st-century "tech" behemoths. Second, the ascendancy of the subscription model in the media content business over the longstanding advertising model of the mid 20 th century. In the post-broadcast milieu of the US,

This essay posits American journalism as a particular realm of public knowledge production, inflected with its own professional practices as well as the way in which those practices subjugate technologies of representation. Taking the Arab Spring of 2011 as a case study in journalistic knowledge production, this article analyzes three epistemological conditions underscoring the Arab Spring’s development as an object of knowledge: the use of social media tools within the practice of journalism, the representational authority of the individual reporter, and the articulation of journalistic knowledge to broader institutions of liberal democratic power. While these are by no means the only possible themes of investigation, by looking at how journalistic practices rendered the Arab Spring sensible and worthy of public consideration, this essay hopes to reveal them as temporally and technologically contingent, but also linked to the values of liberal democracy that undergird journalism’s role in American public life.

The preoccupation of this paper is to show whether the technological national conditions and situations permit the globalization processes for the media industry. The debate is oriented to digital convergent media, in response to increased user-generated content, and multi-platform content distribution. This context brings changes to communication paradigm that worked until now. New technologies have been facilitating the processes of globalization, and also changed the model of communication for social media networks. This paper searches an answer related to how much are implemented these technologies for Romania in order to participate at globalization, and to set what are the consequences for digital media? The paper demonstrates whether Romania is prepared for global media communication, and in what way.

The article asks how local audience studies are re-framed when seen within a globalisation perspective. Based on a overview of recent theories of media globalisation, I argue for a bottom-up perspective on media globalisation in order to nuance top-down, often normative, approaches. I document the validity of this approach through an audience study of the ways in which 24 Danish children, aged 6-7, and 24 children, aged 11-12, along with their parents articulate and try to understand the complex universe of the Walt Disney Company, one of the oldest and still one of the largest media giants. Key questions addressed are: How do children and adults, respectively, articulate the narrative aspects of the Disney universe in terms of their possible global traits? How do they lay claim to the Disney universe as a a range of imported, material objects? Does language play a part in these negotiations as a discursive identity marker given that Disney’s animated film are among the only media and ICT products in Denmark which are dubbed rather than subtitled? What about audiences’ take on Disneyland Paris as a very tangible example of Disney’s more global extension into lucrative markets? Comparisons between children and adults are discussed in terms of age and in terms of audience perspectives on the Walt Disney Company ’s change of marketing and distribution strategies in view of intensified media globalization.

For almost three decades, “global culture” has been a significant area of inquiry for communication studies researchers. A portmanteau of “global” and “culture,” “global culture” can be conceived as a whole way of life of the world’s people, and also, cultural works that are produced and commonly consumed by people who live within and across many countries, not just one country. Taking this broad definition of global culture as a useful heuristic, this chapter contextualizes, summarizes, and critically assesses three narrower meanings of “global culture.” These articulations of global culture include: 1) mediated sociality as a whole way of life (e.g., the “global village”); 2) an Empire’s  universalization or trans-nationalization of a particular way of life (e.g., “cultural imperialism”); and, 3) cultural works that are financed, produced, circulated and consumed by people across the borders of nation-states (e.g., “global popular culture”).

Mano interrogates the evolving role of the state in public broadcasting, which he argues remains strong.  He is interested in the emerging local and global forces that are undermining the centrality of nation-states to broadcasting. The challenge to state power is emanating from new power relations involving local and global actors. In the African context, the state-led broadcasting frameworks are still significant but are now under negotiation due rival power centres using more effective strategies. The chapter considers Sparks’ elite continuity theory and examines the case of Zimbabwe to analyse the role of the state in public broadcasting in historical and contemporary terms. It is shown through continuity and change of state control over broadcasting that to some extent Zimbabwe fits in with elite continuity theory.

Unlike cultural studies, media and communication studies is yet to make big
strides in critiquing global knowledge production that is skewed in favour
of the North and imbues Northern narratives with implicit superiority
(Tomaselli 1998, 2005). Willems (2014) argues systematically and clearly
for the need to go beyond the idea of making the Global South more rep-
resentative empirically and to centralize the theoretical perspectives of the
periphery which have long been introspective and created alternative tax-
onomies that challenge Eurocentrism. For example, feminist literatures—
from the Global North and South—have offered comprehensive critiques
of the Northern colonial male gaze but not looked at how media usage
compounds and augments de!nitions of gender (Mohanty 2013; Columpar
2002; Mahmood 2006; Moore 1998, 2013). I argue that gender studies
literature is very helpful in understanding how media is used in everyday
life as media usage is gendered and so are media themselves. Drawing on
ethnographic literature from Africa and Europe, gender studies and the
postcolonial canon, this chapter examines where agency is manifest, and
moves away from (Northern academic) normative, prescriptive dialogues of
what agency ‘should be’. Instead, I discuss what role old and new media play
in the ‘everyday’ (Sabry 2010; Asad et al 2009; Bayat 2010) lives of women
in Zanzibar. Applying a feminist post-colonial lens (Mahmood 2006; Spivak
1988; Hill-Collins 1999; Mohanty 2013), and carrying out an intersectional
reading (Crenshaw 1991) of empirical work conducted in Zanzibar, I exam-
ine the extent to which ‘new’ media shift the balance of power to female
consumers of media in formations and iterations of their own agency. New
media change the nature of agency for ‘ordinary’ women and allow them to
adopt new ways of communicating with each other, and negotiating exte-
rior spaces. Women as consumers, users and audiences of new media have
blurred and now adopt multiple roles, thereby changing and adapting new
media to !t their private worlds and renegotiating public spaces.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of transactional forms of
the digital across Asia by studying the platforms and infrastructures that
shape the digital experience. It provides a definitive account of the core
features of the ways the digital economy in Asia is transforming everyday
lives.
Transactional relations between digital media platforms and new
forms of sociability are remediating social relationships for the digital
age. In capturing the digital revolution through case studies from across
the larger Asian region, the book offers a richly contextualised and comparative account that firmly situates the frontiers of the digital within
the Asian experience.

Previous studies have noted the dominance of official sources within the news process and their unique ability to shape media narratives. This research addresses the role and implications of news sources in contributing to the overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the anti-Mubarak opposition protesters within British and American newspaper coverage of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Furthermore, this paper will assess how the position of global political elites towards the protests in Egypt possibly opened up the editorial space within the news coverage of the revolution for the anti-Mubarak opposition movement to emerge as the dominant voice within the reporting.

This study examines the complex, multidirectional process of media transnationalization and online fandom within the new media environment, focusing on the transnational media flows from the East to the West. Based on an online ethnography examining the fan culture surrounding Korean television drama (K-drama) in the West, this study explores the appeal of K-drama to Western fans and its impact on fans' identities and worldviews. The analysis suggests that scholars should take a closer look at transnational media fandom as a key site for identity creation and embrace of pop cosmopolitanism.

Part one of this issue are papers presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art invited-panel “Passing and Peril in the Information Super Highway” held in late July in Singapore. ISEA, “initiated in 1988, is the world’s premier media arts event for the critical discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in interactive and digital media. Held biannually in various cities throughout the world, this migratory event is being held in Asia for the second time in its history...”1As “escalating numbers and increasing awareness of online sting operations, videogaming avatars, and social networking websites, have come under hard scrutiny.” the panelists were tasked to discuss “issues of identity and race in cyberspace within the contrasting perspectives of their own diverse cultures.”2 The panel was chaired by independent curator Kóan Jeff Baysa, who invited the four panelists, three of whom decided to read papers. Often presentations given in such events are almost always never made public beyond the panel discussion itself. It is for this reason that these papers are being published in this issue. Jiayi Young reflects on Chinese contemporary society by focusing on representations of identity found in Internet games. Mina Cheon writes on “Kenkanryu, the Hate Korea Wave” First found in Japanese mangas, it is now deeply rooted and alarmingly gaining ground in cyberspace. Roopesh Sitharan focuses on self-representations of Malaysian political bloggers. Issue editor Judy Freya Sibayan also took part in this panel. Not having done any studies on self-representation and identity construction in Asian websites, Sibayan stayed close to home and discussed how Ctrl+P has represented itself thus far as an online art journal. (Judy Freya Sibayan)

KenKanRyu (The Hate Korea Wave): Images of Hatred and Racism in Japanese Manga
As an artist research paper, the paper looks at images of racism and hatred found in popular culture and media of Asia. Mass media and the Internet have contributed to racial hierarchy and prejudice that are laden amongst neighboring Asian countries and this paper looks specifically at Japanese manga Kenkanry that has to do with the hatred of Korea. While the book first came out as a web comic on the Internet, it is now a cultural icon and one of Japan’s best sellers. The presentation seeks to convey how techno-Orientalism exists in cyber culture and how media has contributed to nationalism bent imperialism in Asian countries. (Mina Cheon)

The book explores east-central European media industries (namely those of the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary) through the lived realities of producers as key initiators, facilitators, and cultural intermediaries. Based on a broad set of in-depth interviews, it looks closely at how their agency is circumscribed by the limited scale and peripheral positioning of the markets in which they operate, and how they struggle to come to terms with these constraints through their business strategies, creative thinking and professional self-perceptions.
Each of the seven chapters discusses a specific producer type and area of producer practice: independent producers circumscribed by the smallness and/or peripherality of their home markets; a prominent arthouse producer who managed to overcome the limits of the peripheral market; the ‘service producers’ working on large Western projects in Prague and Budapest, vitally dependent on financial incentives introduced by their national governments; the ‘minority co-production’ that serves national policymakers as a measure of internationalizing local producers and gaining more festival recognition; in-house producers of public service television, whose agency is limited by the broadcast organization; the regional operation of HBO Europe, which uses original local content production as a vehicle of its transnational corporate strategy; and finally, short-form online video production, which is an extremely diverse and volatile field, but promises dynamic growth in the era of mobile, ‘procrastination’ viewing. However diverse, all these cases illustrate how producers in east-central Europe are affected by and act upon the transformative forces of digitalization, globalization and Europeanization.

The sustained achievement of the Kimetsu no Yaiba film in the number 1 spot at the box office and claim to the highest grossing film of all time in Japan marks an important achievement for late-night TV anime. While two other anime, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi and Kimi no Na ha, have reached similar levels of sales and popularity, neither of these works were based on an established late-night TV anime like Kimetsu no Yaiba is. This may invite questions of what makes Kimetsu no Yaiba so special as to achieve this degree of fame. However, instead of pursuing the question of Kimetsu no Yaiba’s uniqueness, this presentation will instead explore how conventional the anime actually is, through an examination of its media-form, exploring how Kimetsu no Yaiba performs as an anime. Such an exploration will examine some of the recent trends in anime that are employed in Kimetsu no Yaiba, including certain character types, narrative tropes, and character designs. In addition, I will examine some of the patterns of production, and, in comparison with the manga, reveal how the media-formal elements of both mediums reveal divergent types of transnationalism.

This thesis maps all 110 news agencies that currently belong to sovereign states of the Global South by analyzing their operational structures, placement of correspondents, services, technologies, languages, news topics, relations with the State, and cooperation with and dependency on other news agencies. Instead of being concerned with content, this research is concentrated on the economic dimension of news agency journalism, the institutional networks they form, and the role they play within the Communication-World, the world-system of International Communication. The perspective taken in this research moves away from the transnational news agencies headquartered in the North (Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Kyodo, DPA, EFE, ANSA) and focuses on news agencies based in the peripheries of the world (TASS, Xinhua, Tanjug, TTXVN, Antara, Notimex, Télam, MAP, Bernama, APS, NAN etc.), which practice journalism under precarious and adverse conditions, immersed in the Coloniality of the modern world-system. Firstly, the thesis reconstructs the longue durée history of the international news trade, underlining its intrinsic relationship with the modern-colonial project. Then, by using the theoretical framework of Boyd-Barrett, Mattelart, Wallerstein, and other authors from Political Economy (both International Political Economy and the Political Economy of Communication) and Geographies of Media and by taking a decolonial perspective, it seeks to prove that the key to understanding the current center-periphery media gap in the age of digital convergence is less in information production than it is in information circulation. Therefore, the concept of information-commodity is presented as essential to understanding the dependency of Southern news agencies towards transnational news agencies. In order to achieve this, the thesis establishes an anthology of news agency journalism in five regions of analysis: Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In each region, the strategies of the State to overcome the information dependency inherited from colonial-imperialist order set up by the transnational news agencies since the 19th century shall be emphasized. Finally, the thesis analyzes the data obtained in the survey for the whole Global South, leading to the conclusion that the State is the driving force behind the circulation of information in the global peripheries.

This article examines how the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Hollywood collaborated to manufacture the blockbuster films Transformers (T) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (TRF) to sell in global markets and to sell a positive image of DoD personnel, policy, technology, and practice to the world. To show how, the article's first section defines the " DoD-Hollywood complex, " presents a brief 20 th-century history of its formation, and describes the current DoD institutions, policies, and practices that fuse DoD publicity agencies to Hollywood filmmakers. The second section highlights how DoD assisted T and TRF's production and contemplates why Hollywood solicited DoD support. The third section shows how T and TRF put DoD in a positive light. The conclusion addresses some of the consequences of T and TRF with regard to democratic theory.  This article  sheds light on how DoD interacts and partners up with Hollywood studios to make militainment.

Tanner Mirrlees 


From Katy Perry training alongside US Marines in a music video, to the global box-office mastery of the US military-supported Transformers franchise, to the explosion of war games such as Call of Duty, it's clear that the US security state is a dominant force in media culture. But is the ubiquity of cultural products that glorify the security state a new phenomenon? Or have Uncle Sam and Hollywood been friends for a long time?

Hearts and Mines examines the rise and reach of the US Empire's culture industry -- a nexus between the US's security state and media firms and the source of cultural products that promote American strategic interests around the world. Although the US government and media corporations pursue different interests on the world stage (the former, national security, and the latter, profit), this book documents how structural alliances and the synergistic relationships between them support the production and flow of empire-extolling cultural goods.

Building on and extending Herbert I. Schiller’s classic study of US Empire and communications, Tanner Mirrlees highlights the symbiotic geopolitical and economic relationships between the US state and media firms that drive the production of imperial culture.


Table of Contents

Preface: The Personal is Geopolitical

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The US Empire’s Culture Industry, circa 2012

1. The US Empire and the Culture Industry

2. Public Diplomacy and Selling the American Way to the World

3. The US Culture Industry: Still Number One

4. The DOD--News Media Complex

5. The DOD--Hollywood Complex

6. The DOD--Digital Games Complex

Conclusion: US Empire, Cultural Imperialism, and Cultural Policy, at Large

References

Index


Reviews

"A great achievement and timely contribution to the field, Hearts and Mines will rise to the top of all reading lists on the subject of media and empire, US hegemony, and the political economy of communication."

-- Richard Maxwell, co-author of Greening the Media

"A fascinating, provocative book that invigorates our understanding of the relationship between the culture industries and US empire. Mirrlees detonates prevailing myths about the ‘liberal bias’ of popular culture through a meticulous excavation of how imperial political interests, values, and objectives are woven into the production of news, cinema, and digital gaming. Hearts and Mines will change how you think about the politics of culture."

-- Shane Gunster, author of Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies

"Clear, concise and easy to read, this book explores key debates around global studies today. It examines the processes and dynamics of globalization that impact on our modern world through clear explanations of complex theories.

The book:

- Presents 8 key models of global change
- Brings together the ways in which sociology, politics and economics think about global studies
- Covers a diverse range of major theorists in the field, from Giddens to Huntington, from Wallerstein to Fukuyama
- Brings to life contemporary issues, including the global financial crisis and the war on terror

Theorizing Global Studies is essential resading for all students of Sociology, Politics, International Relations and Global Studies."

One highly prominent aspect of ISIS’s program of destruction in Syria and Iraq that has come to the media attention recently is their program of cultural heritage destruction that took the form of smashing artifacts in archaeological museums, iconoclastic breaking and bulldozing of archaeological sites, dynamiting of shrines, tombs, and other holy sites of local communities, and burning of libraries and archives. In this paper, I focus on ISIS’s destruction of archaeological heritage. I argue that this destruction can be seen as a form of place-based violence that aims to annihilate the local sense of belonging, and the collective sense of memory among local communities to whom the heritage belongs. Therefore, heritage destruction can be seen as part and parcel of this scorched-earth strategy described above. I also argue that the Islamic State coordinates and choreographs these destructions as mediatic spectacles of violence aimed at objects and sites of heritage, and these spectacles take place as re-enactments or historical performances that are continuously and carefully communicated to us through ISIS’s own image-making and dissemination apparatus that increasingly utilizes the most advanced technologies of visualization and communication. I will also pose questions about the relatively weak responses from the archaeological community around the world that rarely went beyond the stereotypical expression of “dismay” to ISIS’s heritage destruction. At the same time, I will try to answer the why and how of ISIS’s dislike of archaeological heritage in the context of late capitalism.

The introduction to this special issue traces the interactions between the rise of media archaeology and the field of cinema and media studies. Arguing that media archaeology provided a necessary corrective around the question of media, I aim to show how its focus on historical narratives—especially on models of temporality—has led to a critical stagnation and a blind spot with regard to non‐Western media. Drawing on the resources in film studies for thinking about the trans‐ or international movement of media, I set out the need for and terms of a globalizing media archaeology.

The ten chapters that make up the volume are the results of the 2018-2019 biennial research project of the Obitel Brasil Network of Television Fiction Researchers. From production to reception, through narrative, they try to answer how is World Building in Brazilian TV Fiction.

Wark describes and critiques the global media information flow that made the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987 part of everyday experience. She calls this phenomenon telethesia. This is a new geography: we are everywhere in the world at once, a place constructed entirely by the convergence of mediated flows of information—virtual geography. She does not condemn this third reality, but instead establishes the grounds for a new form of cultural studies that follows the contours of the media event and does not force the event into existing disciplines. The author's capacity to grasp and interpret these events is astounding, and her ability to provide insights into a world where unbounded information is circling the earth with the speed of light is startling. Her language at first seems forced and contrived as she pours out abstract and speculative explanations of vectors, nature, telethesia, etc. However, in the end she comes close to making the linearity of print project a world of global electronic information in which traditional modes of rationality are inadequate to explain what happens when information passes out of the orbit of one community into another. She demonstrates that the unstoppable rush of electronic information not only makes everything in the world knowable, but also carries with it the possibility of disinformation and discontrol. Recommended for upper—division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.R. Cathcart, Queens College, CUNY, Choice, May 1995

The COVID-19 pandemic that struck the world and forced Catholics to go online to celebrate the Eucharist is the greatest logistical challenge to Catholic sacramental theology in recent times. This article aims to clarify whether technology-mediated presence or telepresence in Masses is real and acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church especially during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that due to the lack of updating of its sacramental theology, which is still based on scholastic philosophy, Catholic theology continues to view physical presence as the only valid way of fulfilling religious obligation despite the growing influence of telepresence in religious life. If seen from a more sociological and holistic perspective, telepresence in online Masses is real and not "artificial" as participants usually lose their awareness of their immediate surroundings and become one with Christ in the virtual celebration. It further argues that the validity of telepresence in the reception of the Eucharist should not be judged solely on a theological framework that was appropriate during the Medieval and Tridentine cultures. Applying the Actor-Network Theory, it contends that technological and human networks are inseparable in today's digital culture. Thus, the digital Eucharist is as real as participating in a physical Eucharist. The Catholic Church must therefore update its sacramental theology to better respond to the needs of the times.

In 2016, Bob Dylan, was awarded the 113th Nobel Prize for Literature, the first musician to receive this internationally prestigious award. Amidst debates about whether or not this decision erased the longstanding divide between ‘high’ art – classical art music and popular, commercially successful ‘low’ art – folk/pop music , Dylan’s media silence signalled a seeming indifference to the iconic status of this Nobel Prize.  This scenario encapsulates some of the complexities of any discussion about the interplay between arts and culture (music in this case) and (world) politics today.

This essay explores these relationships through an example of how a song travels through different, even competing musical cultures and political sensibilities. This example helps shed light on the uneven cultural geographies of musical meaning-making, within the commercial capriciousness of a global music industry that, nonetheless, cannot completely control the ways in which music travels. Nor can these economic sovereigns (the so-called Music Majors) completely dictate to whom broader cultures of musical practices ‘belong’, or how people respond as these practices circulate through diverse locations of entitlement and experience.

This study explores Jamaican popular music’s changing engagement with globally networked media technologies.  I combine ethnographic analysis of the street dance as a site of urban poor and Black resistance to colonial institutions with an analysis of song lyrics about video cameras at street dances. These newly networked technologies for circulating visual media in global networks affect how Jamaicans perform identity and also affect street dances’ social function. Globally networked digital media generate specific race- and gender-related pressures that reinforce existing and historic inequalities. This global visual media circulation can reshape and limit the ability of the street dance to function as site of autonomy and resistance. A better understanding of local practices can offer an alternative conceptual framework to help practitioners, scholars policy and technology designers avoid reinforcing those inequalities.

Sometime in May 2018, a Twitter user responded to a fellow Twitter user by sharing a GIF of a cartoon cat slapping a table, which was edited into a short video, while putting in a picture of a bongo as well as adding Super Mario World soundtrack as its music (Caldwell, 2018). Afterwards, there had been various remixes, including one where the animated cat is tapping a yellow cartoon buttocks figure, along with Bruno Mars’ tune (9Gag, 2018). While the origin of this particular rendition might be more obscure, those who had seen it before somewhere, and wanting to share it with their colleague would go to various possible social media sites where they would have to try to search for it among other irrelevant animated cat visuals, or they could possibly go to a platform that caters towards similar humorous preferences, like 9Gag.

While memes have been established as a complex and creative product that emerged in the era of media convergence (Shifman, 2014 p. 2-7), the popularity of it in video form could be seen as an unconventional kind of art movement of the virtual world. In an effort to see the relation of society and cultural product, this essay would be looking at the ubiquity of Meme Videos as a cultural product in the form of artistic movement created within a transnational virtual form of a public sphere.

Given its cultural and economic significance, there is much about television drama in China that requires study. This paper is an attempt to survey Chinese television dramas in historical and institutional dimensions. It highlights the roles of commerce and politics in the development of this popular cultural genre.
Specifically, it examines how in the 1990s and beyond, television stations, production companies, and the government redrew the map of television dramas by redefining the rules of production in the commercialized environment.
This paper is a survey of television drama series in China, with a special focus on the production context and the major drama genres. Implicit in this largely descriptive account is the argument that Chinese television dramas should be
seen as a product of intertwined state-market relationship that cannot be neatly defined as antagonistic or collusive. As Chinese drama series are largely unknown to the rest of the world, I will start with a series of formal characteristics
that distinguish them from the more familiar western soap operas and dramas, as well as Latin American telenovelas. Then I will provide a brief historical account of Chinese television dramas leading up to 1990. Following this is a survey
of the political economy of Chinese television dramas in the 1990s. In this period, television dramas came under the dual control of the party-state and the market. Finally, I will illustrate audience preferences in contemporary China by surveying the popular genres and looking at several of the most popular drama series in the past decade.

All rights reserved!!

Globalization of politics, economics and culture requires a global
communication network. Although it is assumed that global communication network connects various parts of the globe, global media are often criticized as collateral of globalization. Another criticism points out the widespread assessment that global media serve to the interests of the powerful in international politics and therefore having control of global communication network means having a political, economic and cultural mastery. 

Mentioning the historical background of international communication, the
paper is going to review how international media have been evolved to today’s global media. Reviewing international communication theories and their relations with international politics, it is going to be argued that media in the global scale have been closely connected with the struggle for power in international relations and the societal models the powerfuls’ interests necessitate.

The first article in this section, by Eileen Meehan , updates critical political-economy research on the audience commodity. Television networks, advertisers, and ratings firms continue to trade commodity audiences. But Meehan argues that there are many varieties of viewer experience: "[W] e approach television as users, drop-in viewers, channel surfers, multiple screeners, casual viewers, focused viewers, engaged viewers, members of interpretive communities, fan consumers, and selfprogrammers"(165). Meehan's discussion of these novel TV viewer experiences contrasts with the old notion that TV viewers are "passive." Since the channels of mass TV broadcasting only allowed TV shows to flow in one direction, from a dominant sender (TV network) to a passive receiver (TV viewer), the audience was often institutionally constructed as mass of passive receivers of TV shows. Though one-way transmission is still a component of contemporary TV, many TV scholars are now less interested in making arguments about what TV networks are ostensibly doing to the audience (whether that be brainwashing them or engineering their pleasure) and more interested in exploring what people are actively doing, saying, and expressing in relation to their favourite TV shows. Using Web 2.0 technology and social networking platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), millions of TV lovers ritualistically and collaboratively talk about TV shows, create fan websites full of fan fiction, blog about characters, spoil revelations of reality TV shows, and vote for their favourite "idol." Television's mass audience of the network TV era is quickly morphing into groupings of very interactive TV show users.

This article develops a temporal framework for analyzing television's role in shaping the formation of a new and powerful urban middle class in 1980s India. Focusing on the first sitcom produced in India, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi [Such Is Life], we argue that the unique temporal affordances of broadcast television facilitated a broader shift in the national imaginary. Not only did broadcast television, via the vehicle of such neglected genres as sitcoms, synchronize the rhythms of daily life to its schedules, but sitcoms also recast the daily lives and experiences of the middle classes as ordinary, relatable, and achievable. Casting the 1980s as the time of television illuminates a critical period and medium of communication in Indian cultural history.

This paper responds to Kraidy’s (1999) proposal to communication scholars, specifically international and intercultural communication researchers, to utilize the “glocalization” concept to investigate global-local communication. This plea resonates with the views of certain international communication scholars (Straubhaar, 1991; Harindranath, 2003), who, despite acknowledging the limitations in the media imperialism thesis to analyze contemporary complex global-local communication, argues for a modification of the thesis. I deem the “glocalization” idea as such a corrective in that it allows for a holistic approach in investigating the nuanced juncture of contemporary global-local interactions. I utilize the glocalization concept to examine hiplife music, a Ghanaian re-appropriation of U.S. rap music. Specifically, I investigate two Ghanaian-based discourses (verbal indirection and naming practices) that artists combine with this global music phenomenon in creating a distinct local music genre. The overall aim of this paper is to fill the research lacuna on hiplife music, as well as an attempt to demonstrate the utility of the glocalization concept.

One of the most visible examples of the growing importance of BRICS economies is their emergence as hosts of the world's top sport mega-events. These countries have become the frontline for the " global sports industrial complex, " which, furthering the mutually beneficial interests of sports organizations and governing bodies, media corporations, and transnational brands, has transformed global sport into a cultural and economic force. India is alone among the BRICS countries in that it has not hosted—or bid to host—an Olympics or Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup, and is the least athletically accomplished in such venues. This article situates India within the wider political economy of global sport by analyzing media debates around the country's potential to host a mega-event. This case demonstrates how global aspirations are articulated through sport, and addresses commercial and development implications stemming from the adoption of sport as a global benchmark.

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.