The word media hype is often used as rhetorical argument to dismiss waves of media attention as overblown, disproportional and exaggerated. But these explosive news waves, as well as - nowadays - the twitter storms, are object of scientific research, because they are an important phenomenon in the public area. Sometimes it is indeed 'much ado about nothing' but in many cases these media storms …
The diversification and politicisation of the mass media within itself and also societal pressure created by the mass media at a social level have caused changes to our social structure. The first change began with the contextual changes to the mass media, and this change led to visible changes in societies. That transformation has almost erased the distinction between the private and the publi…
Since antiquity it has been known that without the freedom to speak, and later to publish, the road to fanaticism and totalitarianism lies wide open. This book focuses on how the 'press' reacted, when press freedom was under strain in number of cases in the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Contemporary literature on the freedom of the press has its focus on the role of the pr…
After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance ne…
How are the structures of power and the notion of agency among Syrian women during the recent Syrian conflict connected? To explore this matter, Rand El Zein investigates gender politics around displacement, conflict, the body, and the nation. In doing so, she outstandingly reconciles critical media theory as myriad and productive with the theoretical concepts on subjectivity, power, performati…
The massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft has become one of the most popular computer games of the past decade, introducing millions around the world to community-based play. Within the boundaries set by its design, the game encourages players to appropriate and shape the game to their own wishes, resulting in highly diverse forms of play and participation. This illum…
Images of flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky—all embodiments of the dashing New Woman—symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s is the …
Cross-disciplinary analysis of contemporary images and representations of hysteria We seem to be living in hysterical times. A simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of “hysterical” discussions on diverse topics such as the #metoo movement, Trumpianism, border wars, Brexit, transgender liberation, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and climate change, to name only a few. Against…
Tactics of the Human returns to American fiction published during the 1990s, formative years for digital cultures, to reconsider these narratives’ comparative literary print methods of critically engaging with digital technologies and their now ubiquitous computation-based modes of circulation, scenes of writing, and social spaces. It finds that fiction by John Barth, Shelley Jackson, Leslie …
For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the c…