Media Studies Colloquium

BMC 5.208 - Senior Advisor, Research and Evaluation, U.S. Department of State and Assistant Professor, Georgia State University
Part of Global Media Industries Speaker Series

”Big Data ®evolution: Datafication, Media, and Power”

Arsenault’s talk will focus on the evolution of big data in the media industries and the implications for global media ownership and power.  The demand for more data-financial or otherwise- has long been a driving force in the media industries. The datafication of media and the application of big data services to that data, however, are facilitating the digital realization of networks of competition and collusion on a much larger scale than those previously witnessed in the analogue form of joint ventures and the trade of goods and service. Her talk will focus on the key ways that “big data” is being leveraged to normalize the convergence of new and old media networks. She will highlight how the conflation of production, distribution, and marketing functions has allowed for new economies of scale and synergy amongst formerly integrated, but largely disparate departments and spheres of influence, and further complementary connections between traditional information companies like IBM, media content driven players like Time Warner, and companies like Amazon and Microsoft that control the hyperscale networks through which media data flows.

Amelia Arsenault is Assistant Professor of Communication at Georgia State University. She is currently on a two-year leave from GSU serving as Senior Advisor in the Public Diplomacy Research and Evaluation Unit in the Office of the Under Secretary of Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy in the Department of State where she provides guidance on long-term research strategies on subjects related to international communication. She has an extensive record of academic and professional publications related to media industries, global media ownership, network theory, new media, and public diplomacy. She was previously a non-resident fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School for Communication, a resident fellow at the Center for Media, Data, and Society and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University, and the Media and Democracy Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School. She is a member of the Editorial Collective of the open-access journal, Media Industries and served as co-Managing Editor (with Alisa Perren) from 2012 to 2017.  She holds a B.A. in Film and History from Dartmouth College and an MSc in Global Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD from the University of Southern California Annenberg School.

CMA 5.136 - Doctoral candidate, research presentation

“Playing in Licensed Storyworlds: Games, Franchises, and Fans”

Embracing the inherent playfulness of transmediality, my dissertation examines digital and analog games based in popular storyworlds, surveying both the underlying worldbuilding creativity of these licensed media extensions and how players use these extensions to (re)enact, (re)work, and (re)experience the storyworld. Although widely deployed, the framework of “transmedia storytelling” is ultimately inadequate to fully account for the creative, cultural, and economic processes that encompass the production and consumption of transmedia franchises. My research instead aims to build upon the complementary frameworks of transmedia worldbuilding, transmedia play, and transmedia affect. In adapting and remediating an existing world into an interactive media text, licensed games are uniquely situated to demonstrate how popular storyworlds are built and shared, expanded and sustained, explored and negotiated, experienced and felt.

http://www.flowjournal.org/flow-conference-2018-main/

BMC 5.102 - Professor, UT Butler School of Music

"Toward a Vococentric Cinema: Conceptualizing the Sound Track in the Early 1930s.”

Coined by Michel Chion and developed by David Neumeyer, vococentrism is the concept that the sound track is structured by the voice in a similar way that the image is structured by the face. Vococentrism is basically the classical system as manifest on the sound track. But vococentrism is not inherent in the idea and technology of sound film, and indeed the early sound film was structured around another principle that I call “the rule of mimetic synchronization” that emphasized the unity of image and sound. Focusing on the audiovisual figure of the reaction shot, I examine how vococentrism emerged out of and in contradistinction to the rule of mimetic synchronization. I also consider how the enforcement of the production code helped solidify and indeed codify commercial sound film as vococentric.

BMC 5.102 - Doctoral candidate, research presentation

"A Promised Land? Examining the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem of Game Industry in Shanghai"

Chinese game industry has demonstrated unprecedented vitality and competitiveness as measured on industrial value chain, R&D standard, financial system, workforce management, and other key industrial metrics. In this regard, gaming entrepreneurship is indispensable to the formation and growth of Chinese game industry. Many of today’s major indigenous content providers stem from the early entrepreneurial endeavors grappling with in-house game development. Besides, Chinese gaming startups have been pushing the boundaries of domestic game industry through inventive game products and services.

However, limited game industry studies have systematically articulated how environmental factors influence entrepreneurs running new game ventures, let alone any Chinese cases. This presentation thus examines the relationship between gaming entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystem in Shanghai, one of the key Chinese game industry locations. Drawn on network theories, it sheds light on gaming entrepreneurs ‘constrained space to begin and thrive against an established network of pro-entrepreneurship organizations/institutions (e.g., startup incubator, university, government). Regarding the aspects of policy, finance, human capital, social support, and culture, I argue that the local entrepreneurial ecosystem fails to provide a feasible environment to gaming entrepreneurs for its myopic vision of and uncoordinated intervention in game industry.

Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts &
Media Arts, Emerson University
Part of Global Media Industries Speaker Series

”Power and Privilege on the Road to Hollywood: Rerouting Pre-Industry Pipelines”

Recent years have seen a rise in advocacy initiatives for women and people of color working in Hollywood. Film schools are more equitable than the media industries to which they serve as pipelines, but there are ways in which universities and training programs are reproducing the industries’ biases. In her talk, Miranda Banks will identify challenges and opportunities around issues of equity and access within the industries and pre-industries, arguing that media production programs are uniquely positioned to educate the next generation of media makers about creative collaboration across differences and challenge the status quo. She will discuss two interventions she has been involved in: as designer of Room at the Top, a massively multiplayer game that challenges assumptions about how we collaborate in creative environments, and as a co-founder of the initiative EDIT Media.

BMC 5.102 - Doctoral candidate, research presentation

“Contesting Hate: Online Misogyny and Feminist Anti-Hate Activism in South Korea”

This dissertation project explores the dynamics of online misogyny and anti-misogyny feminist activism in South Korea by (1) analyzing the ways in which an older strain of misogyny has been articulated anew and remediated through new media technologies, (2) examining online and offline anti-misogyny feminist activism and associated creative and transformative practices, (3) investigating anti-feminist backlash from male users and their strategies of silencing and attacking feminists, and (4) revealing the potential for the emergence of new feminist subjectivities in relation to the history of Korean women’s movements.

By looking at these four points of discussion, I seek to locate the politics of hate culture within gendered social relations in contemporary Korea and to identify the implications of the ongoing conflict between online misogyny and countervailing feminist activism. Because of its high Internet penetration and vibrant culture of feminist activism, Korea provides an important case study to explore struggles between misogyny and its countermovement.

Building on theoretical contributions from critical media scholarship on new media, misogyny, and feminist activism, my project highlights how online misogyny can be contested by various forms of feminist anti-misogyny activism. I use a mixed-method approach that includes textual and discourse analysis of online media sites and interviews of anti-misogyny activists in order to reveal the influence of online misogyny on women’s lives and to highlight feminist voices against misogyny. This study will contribute to the understanding of online misogyny as a field of continual cultural struggle and will offer a more granular view of the ways in which new media technologies participate in (re)constructing misogynistic culture and gender relations.

Filmmaker (Sleep Dealer)
Screening & Talk
5:00-6:30 p.m. • BMC 5.102

Alex Rivera is a filmmaker and media artist who, for the past twenty years, has been telling new, urgent, and visually adventurous Latino stories. His first feature film, Sleep Dealer, a science-fiction feature set on the U.S./Mexico border, won awards at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and had a commercial release in the U.S, France, Japan, and other countries.

Alex is a Sundance Fellow, Rockefeller Fellow, was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and was named one of Variety Magazine’s “10 Directors to Watch.” In 2015 he received an Art & Technology Lab Grant from LACMA, and in 2017 Alex was awarded major support from the Ford Foundation for his film-in-progress, ‘The Infiltrators.’ Alex studied at Hampshire College and lives in Los Angeles.

Technology & Information Policy Institute (TIPI) presents a talk by Philip M. Napoli, James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy, Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, Professor of the International Comparative Studies Program, Duke University. Sanford School of Public Policy. Co-sponsored by the Digital Media Speaker Series, Good Systems, and the Department of Radio-Television-Film.
BMC 5.208

“Governance, Social Media and Algorithms: Challenges and Opportunities for Traditional Regulatory Rationales and Self-Regulatory Models"

This presentation focuses on the relationship between social media platforms and established rationales and mechanisms for media governance. This presentation begins with a review of established rationales for media regulation, with an emphasis on distinguishing between regulatory motivations and rationales. As this review indicates, the U.S. system of media regulation is grounded in specific and idiosyncratic technological characteristics of individual media that can be interpreted as justifying regulatory intervention. Some of these technological characteristics may apply to social media, but others clearly do not. The result is that the existing media regulatory framework applies to a diminishing proportion of the media ecosystem. This presentation next considers self-regulatory models; specifically, the model that is used within the context of the audience measurement industry in the U.S. As this presentation will illustrate, there are many points of connection between audience measurement systems and social media algorithms, which suggests that the self-regulatory apparatus that has been established for audience measurement may hold potential for social media.

Professor, Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia; Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.
Part of Global Media Industries Speaker Series
Happy Hour at Hole in the Wall to follow.

“Public Anonymity in the Mexican Blogosphere”

The rules of participating in the Mexican blogosphere have changed because of violence. To remain safe, bloggers, including the makers of El Blog del Narco, have resorted to anonymity. This presentation analyzes this celebrated anonymous Mexican blog in relation both to the uses and misuses of anonymity and the connections between anonymity, displacement, and technology. Anonymity enables participation in the Mexican public sphere. Yet, I show, a public sphere based on anonymity is fraught and often disintegrating.

Hector Amaya is Professor of Media Studies at University of Virginia and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. He writes on Latino media studies, transnationalism, the cultural production of political identities, and Latin American film/media. In addition to publishing roughly twenty articles, he has single-authored two books: Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance During the Cold War (2010: U. of Illinois P.) and Citizenship Excess: Latinos/as, Media, and the Nation (2013: NYUP). His third book, Trafficking: The Violent Restructuring of Publicity in Mexico and the United States, is forthcoming with Duke UP.

Assistant Dean, Queensland University of Technology
Part of Global Media Industries Speaker Series
Happy Hour at Hole in the Wall to follow

BMC 5.208 - Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Washington

BMC 5.102 - Doctoral candidate, research presentation

Associate Professor, Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels); Lecturer at Charles University in Prague.

Postdoctoral Fellow, History/East Asian Studies, UT Austin
Part of Global Media Industries Speaker Series
Happy Hour at Hole in the Wall to follow.

Professor, Department of Media & Communication, London School of Economics