Media Studies Colloquium

Sam Woolley, Institute for the Future
CMA 5.136 - Part of Digital Media Speaker Series, co-sponsored with the Media Ethics Initiative
*Note new time: This talk is on a Tuesday, 1:30-3:00 pm
"The Ethical Operating System: How Not to Regret the Things You Build"

Summary:
The current wave of computational propaganda has taken the world by surprise. Technology firms, policy makers, journalists and the general public are scrambling to respond to the societal threats posed by disinformation and politically motivated trolling. This talk outlines one method for responding to these issues. It describes and presents the Ethical Operating System (ethicalOS.org), a toolkit for anticipating future uses of technology. Jane McGonigal and Samuel Woolley, with support from Omidyar Network, constructed this guide to help a wide variety of groups think about how to design technology with democracy and human rights in mind. The toolkit has been used by major companies in Silicon Valley, by legislators at the state and federal level and by students in Stanford's design school and intro to computer science courses. It's time, however, to put into the hands of the U.S. public so that they can help in the fight against disinformation and manipulative technology.

Assistant Dean, Queensland University of Technology
BMC 5.208 - Part of Global Media Industries Speaker Series
"Globalization, Neo-Globalization and Post-Globalization: New Challenges for Global Communication Studies"

In this presentation, I will discuss the three major paradigms of global communication studies: modernization theories; critical political economy; and globalization theories. I will particularly focus on globalization theories, as these are not only conceptual approaches, but claim to be underpinned by an increasingly global economy, culture and communications system. I will argue that these claims need to be approached with some caution, as nation-states, national cultures and national economies continue to be very significant – we have not moved to a post-national, globally cosmopolitan era. I will discuss alternative frameworks for reforming globalization and global institutions (neo-globalization) and the rise of populist nationalism (anti-globalization). I will conclude with a discussion of whether we are heading towards a post-global era and what implications this may have for the field of global communication studies.

BMC 5.208 - Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Washington
Ralina Joseph is an associate professor at UW-Seattle's Department of Communication. She is the founding and acting director of the University of Washington’s Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity. Dr. Joseph is also affiliated with UW Departments of American Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. Her latest book is "PostRacial Resistance" (2018).

"Postracial Resistance"

Abstract:
From Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Shonda Rhimesto their audiences and the industry workers behind the scenes, Ralina L. Joseph considers the way that Black women are required to walk a tightrope between calling out racism only to face accusations of being called “racists” and responding to racism in code only to face accusations of selling out. Postracial Resistance explores how African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences use the tools of postracial discourse—the notion that race and race-based discrimination is over and no longer affect people’s everyday lives—to refute its very tenets. In a world where they’re often written off as stereotypical “Angry Black Women,” Joseph offers that some Black women in media opt into a phenomenon of “strategic ambiguity,” using the failures of post-racial discourse to nameracism in order to resist it. As these women are required to perform and negotiate their race in strategic ambiguity, Joseph listens to and watches Black women from three different places in media culture: textual analysis of the media’s representation of these women; interviews with writers, producers, and studio lawyers; and audience ethnography to consider how Black women viewers negotiate the limited representations available to them. In doing so, Joseph maps the tensions and strategies that all Black women must engage in to refute the racialized sexism of everyday life, on- and off-screen.

11:00 am • BMC 5.208
“Beyond the Written Text: Visual Communication and Academic Research”
Sponsored by the Technology Information Policy Institute

Nico Carpentier is Docent at Charles University in Prague, Professor at Uppsala University, and Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB – Free University of Brussels). Moreover, he is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of Technology and Loughborough University. Earlier, he was ECREA Treasurer (2005-2012) and Vice-President (2008-2012), and IAMCR Treasurer (2012-2016). Currently, he is Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section at IAMCR. His latest books are The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation (2017, Peter Lang, New York); Cyprus and its Conflicts. Representations, Materialities, and Cultures (2018, co-edited), Critical Perspectives on Media, Power and Change (2018, co-edited) and Respublika! Experiments in the Performance of Participation and Democracy (2019, edited).

This talk touches on the possibilities of communicating academic research through non-written texts. Methodologically and analytically grounded in Arts-Based Research (ABR), a series of experiments has investigated the possibilities of communicating communication and media studies research through the use of photography, installation and exhibition. Two main case studies will be discussed.

The first experiment is the Iconoclastic Controversies. A visual sociology of statues and commemoration sites in the southern regions of Cyprus photography exhibition, which analyses how statues and commemoration sites narrate and frame the Cyprus Problem, and the struggle between antagonist nationalist discourses and their contestations. The second experiment is Respublika!, an art project that ran between November 2017 and January 2018, focusing on participatory arts and art about participation, originating from community media affiliated artists. Both experiments allow for an investigation of the possibilities and limits of "other" academic genres, and the opportunities of enriching our academic practices.

BMC 5.208 - Doctoral candidate, research presentation

"Transition Game: The National Basketball Association, Sports Television, and the Multi-Channel Shift"

Abstract: Historical accounts of the U.S. television industry have long suggested that sports are a safe programming option for outlets seeking a homogeneous “national” viewership. My study of sports television during the 1970s complicates this narrative of homogeneity and offers a new perspective on the U.S. television industry’s transition from network oligopoly to multi-channel media environment. As technological, regulatory, and cultural changes confronted the media industries in the 1970s, a television industry that had increasingly embraced sports television as a draw for “mass” audiences over the past three decades intensified its programming of sports to attract ever more nuanced audience segments. Through a historiographical analysis of the evolving relationship between the television industry and the National Basketball Association, the chief institution set to oversee what many predicted would become the U.S. nation’s “sport of the seventies,” I inquire when, why, and how different television outlets struggled until the 1980s to achieve “national” mainstream success with NBA programming. Using archival research, discourse analysis, and textual analysis, I show how the television industry shifted its sports/basketball programming practices in order to appeal to audiences who were increasingly fragmented in both their entertainment choices and their political perspectives. Through such a study, the first to analyze this major American team sport from a media studies perspective, I uncover the changing practices of the television, sports, and advertising industries as they and the American public negotiated national identity and the boundaries of race during a time of intense cultural and industrial transformation.

BMC 5.102 - Professor, Department of Media & Communication, London School of Economics
Part of Digital Media Speaker Series

"Injustices of Digital Disruption: More Tepid Policy or a Radical Democratic Turn"

This lecture examines a fundamentally important question for the future of society. Is there ever likely to be an effective challenge to the pursuit of wealth through inequitable mass individualization? The ‘platformization of everything’ – by Google, Baidu, Facebook, Amazon and a few others - is implicated in the spread of misinformation and in the deepening of many kinds of inequalities. This lecture explores reasons for the persistence of cautious and relatively weak policy responses to platform power and whether a turn to radical democratic theory and practice might help to promote policy responses that work as a counterpoint to platform dominance.

BMC 5.102 - Eric Dienstfrey, Postdoctoral Fellow for the Center for American Music

"The Time the Telephone Company Broke the Talkies"

\In the 1930s, the newly formed Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences did something puzzling. It implemented an industry-wide technical standard—nicknamed “Academy Mono”—that dramatically impaired the sound quality for all talking pictures. Why exactly industry leaders thought such impairments were a good idea remains unclear. At the time, the Academy claimed that its standard would correct the problems with sub-par sound systems, and thereby improve the reproduction of films in smaller theaters. My presentation, however, provides a different explanation. Drawing upon studio contracts, court filings, FCC reports, and the surviving correspondence of audio engineers, I argue that studios adopted the technical standard in order to kneecap the Hollywood office of AT&T. In the years leading up to Academy Mono’s creation, the telephone company had been widely accused of “throttling” films and extorting exhibitors into installing AT&T-licensed loudspeakers. The solution to this power grab was to implement acoustical restrictions that undercut AT&T’s equipment advantages and weakened the company’s stranglehold on the industry. This presentation, in turn, reconsiders the value of technical standards within media industries. Contrary to scholarship that sees standardization as a means to bolster cooperation and efficiency, I contend that industry leaders exploit technical regulations in order to restrict competition, consolidate power, and maximize profits. In other words, standards are designed to benefit those in power, often at the expense of aesthetic quality and intra-industry cooperation.

Anchor and Executive Producer, Latino USA; CEO, Futuro Group
Part of Latino Media Arts and Studies Speaker series

BMC 5.208 - Briana Barner, Kathy Cacace, Kelsey Whipple, and Kyle Wrather

BMC 5.102 – Lennart Soberon, Doctoral Researcher, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, Ghent University, Belgium

“The Structures of Antipathy: Enemy Image Construction and Moral Indignation in the American Action Film”