Home
About MiT2
Agenda
Speakers
Registration
Abstracts and Papers
Art Exhibit Tele -Journeys
Audiocasts
About MiT1
Contacts
Getting to MIT
Staying in the Area
Comparative Media Studies
Communica -tions Forum

Abstracts and Papers

Click on Abstract titles to read the actual papers.
Click on the the speaker's names to read their biography.
Click here to download a free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

A-H I-Q R-Z


Barbara Abrash, New York University; and Pat Aufderheide, American University NGOs, Funders, and Filmmakers: Jointly Crafting Tools for Social Action Agendas Funders, media makers and nonprofit organizations have increasingly formed teams to produce highly strategic, often interactive, but still richly storytelling media. Propelling this teamwork has been a combination of new technologies, changing funder strategies in which funders have often taken the initiative in designing projects, and the awareness of nonprofit organizations that media are central to any strategic objective. This paper will discuss several recent cases of such creative partnering, such as: Steps to the Future, a project that created dozens of videos on the subject of HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa; Take this Heart, an award-winning cinema verite look at a year in the life of a foster mother and her six charges; Legacy, the five-year-long project of independent filmmaker Tod Lending tracking the family of an African-American boy who was murdered in the heart of urban Chicago; and Silence and Complicity, a short video that began as a scandal in the public health services of Peru, where women were being abused sexually and financially. Peruvian and U.S. women’s organizations teamed to make a video of the women’s testimony using foundation resources. When exhibited in a human rights context, it forced the Peruvian government to change policies at its clinics. These and other projects demonstrate that social action media production has become an effort that can and does begin in various institutional locations; that relatively sophisticated media production and use are integral to social action and expression at many levels; and that media are increasingly designed as projects with a range of facets appropriate to the different screens and their current capacities.
	Ryadi Adityavarman, Kansas State University Digital Media Communication in International Design Practice: A Comparative Intercultural Perspective Computer-mediated communication such as electronic mail and Web sites enable efficient and effective communication between various design participants across the world. A growing number of American architectural design firms have practiced in Asia with intensive communication activities among their clients and local design-firm counterparts. Within this context of a globalized design practice, this paper will analyze design interaction from an intercultural perspective.
Stuart Allan, University of West Bristol Toward a New(s) Society: Online Journalism and Citizenship in an Information Age 'A new society emerges,' Castells (2000) writes, 'when and if a structural transformation can be observed in the relationships of production, in the relationships of power, and in the relationships of experience' (2000: 371). Corresponding to these transformations, he contends, is the emergence of a new culture, and with it modified forms of space and time. Accordingly, in taking as its starting point the 'new normal' of post-September 11, this paper elaborates upon Castells' thesis that 'cultural battles are the power battles of the Information Age'. Specifically, it seeks to explore several pressing issues concerning the online reporting of that day's tragic events, both with respect to the main news sites but also in terms of those operated by so-called 'amateur newsies'. Regarding the latter, the paper will examine how certain ordinary citizens transformed into 'personal journalists', acting the part of instant reporters, photojournalists and opinion columnists. Eyewitness accounts, personal photographs, video-footage and the like appeared on hundreds of refashioned websites over the course of the day. Taken together, these websites resembled something of a first-person news network, a collective form of collaborative newsgathering that was very much consistent with the animating ethos of the Internet. Still, the paper argues, important questions need to be asked about the continued availability of diverse spaces for alternative forms of reporting in the aftermath of the crisis.
	Anne Allison The Cultural Politics of Pokemon Capitalism When Pokemon, the media-mix entertainment complex and mega kid’s hit, took off in the States, the Japanese press reported it as a sign of Japan’s "cultural power" that was finally gaining recognition and cachet around the world. It was telling that reception of this Japanese pop product counted for so much in the States, itself the longtime world capital of children’s fantasy-production and hegemonizer of global (including kid’s) culture. What does it mean though to calculate national prestige on the basis of imaginary monsters packaged in the form of commodity fetishism targeted to a global (and millennial) consumerism? And does the success of Japan’s children entertainment industry with Pokemon and other properties in the 1990s indicate a shift in the geo-political domination of global trends by Euro-america and particularly the United States? I address these questions by examining two sets of shifting junctures -- culture/commodity and global/national -- against each other in the case of marketing Pokemon both in Japan and the US. My discussion is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted both in Japan and the United States on the entertainment fad of Pokemon with producers, designers, marketers, parents, children, child experts, scholars, reporters, and activists. How, I will ask first, has a discourse reading national(ist) pride and cultural identity in the global success of children’s play products been constructed in Japan? And, second, how have Pokemon marketers in the US dealt with what they perceive as its "cultural" inflection when (re)packaging the property for American kids?
Michela Ardizzoni, Indiana University North/South, East/West: Italian Television and National Identity in a Global Context The issue of cultural identity in Italy has, until recently, been construed upon the North-South divide that has characterized Italian national identity since World War II. The social, cultural, and economic cleavages at the heart of such divide have been challenged in the past 10-15 years by the continuous flows of immigration into the country from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe. In this paper, I explore how Italian television responds to the articulation of identity, media industries, and politics in light of contemporary globalizing forces, and how multilateral forces of globalization and transnational socio-cultural movements affect the workings of Italian television at the turn of the 21st century.
	Sanjay Asthana, University of Minnesota Visual Hegemonies: Representations of Globalization and Nation in Print and Electronic Media in Post-Colonial India, 1982 - 2002 This paper examines themes of globalization and nation represented in print and electronic media in India during 1982 to 2002. An analysis of a few short programs and advertisements drawn from a variety of media will be used to explore themes of globalization and nation in hegemonic ways. The liberalization policies of the government of India since 1991, and the subsequent changes in the media environment, particularly television software and hardware have provided a powerful impetus to globalization in India, which led to new patterns of consumption among a growing urban middle class (around 300 million). In contemporary India, state-run television, private (transnational and local) satellite television networks and private print media seek to produce particular conceptions of citizens and citizenship through a range of programming content. These notions of audiences as citizen-subjects and consumer-subjects need to examined more closely, particularly so in the context of globalization and national discourses that seek to join the two: citizens and consumers. The following questions guide the research: 1. What are the ways representations of globalization appear in print and electronic media? 2. What are the ways representations of nation appear in print and electronic media? 3. How are the representations of globalization and nation related to each other in print and electronic media? 4. What are the visual vocabularies through which representations of globalization and nation appear in print and electronic media? 5. In what ways are citizen-subjects implicated in representations of globalization and nation in print and electronic media?
Pat Aufderheide, American University; and Barbara Abrash, New York University NGOs, Funders, and Filmmakers: Jointly Crafting Tools for Social Action Agendas Funders, media makers and nonprofit organizations have increasingly formed teams to produce highly strategic, often interactive, but still richly storytelling media. Propelling this teamwork has been a combination of new technologies, changing funder strategies in which funders have often taken the initiative in designing projects, and the awareness of nonprofit organizations that media are central to any strategic objective. This paper will discuss several recent cases of such creative partnering, such as: Steps to the Future, a project that created dozens of videos on the subject of HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa; Take this Heart, an award-winning cinema verite look at a year in the life of a foster mother and her six charges; Legacy, the five-year-long project of independent filmmaker Tod Lending tracking the family of an African-American boy who was murdered in the heart of urban Chicago; and Silence and Complicity, a short video that began as a scandal in the public health services of Peru, where women were being abused sexually and financially. Peruvian and U.S. women’s organizations teamed to make a video of the women’s testimony using foundation resources. When exhibited in a human rights context, it forced the Peruvian government to change policies at its clinics. These and other projects demonstrate that social action media production has become an effort that can and does begin in various institutional locations; that relatively sophisticated media production and use are integral to social action and expression at many levels; and that media are increasingly designed as projects with a range of facets appropriate to the different screens and their current capacities.
	Doris Baltruschat, Globalization and International TV and Film Co-productions: In Search of New Narratives The paper, titled "Globalization and International TV and Film Co-productions: In Search of New Narratives," explores the changing dynamics of Canada’s and Europe’s film and television sectors, which are increasingly challenged by globalization and the diminishment of local cultural spaces. Co-productions provide an opportunity for the pooling of financial and creative resources for participating partners. They also, potentially, could provide insight into the hybridization of cultural forms of expression. However, co-productions are predominantly used as a means to access funding in an international marketplace--a market dominated by commercial productions which fail to address audiences as nationally and locally differentiated and unique. Through an analysis of professional practices, textual development and narratives, the author highlights how commercial productions are favoured over culturally distinct and differentiated forms of statement and expression. The discussion is framed in theoretical debates around globalization and localization, narrative construction in film and television and the concept of a viable public sphere underscoring cultural production within democratically inspired frameworks.
Arundhati Banerjee The Goddess and the Demon: Contested Territories in Durga Puja The Bengali month of Aswin (September-October) is festival time in Eastern India. People celebrate Durga Puja, a festival that fictionally commemorates the coming home of goddess Durga, after slaying the arch-demon Mahishashur, who was threatening the world. There is public celebration for five days, culminating in Durga’s ceremonial return to her marital home. The institutional form of this festival has shifted over time: from an earlier feudal mode where the local zamindar or landlord would host the festival in his Durga mandap for the rest of the village to gather, it is now the neighborhoods that have taken charge of the organization. This infusion of democracy has turned it into a contested political terrain. While the religious rites remain always nearly identical, the aesthetic form of the mandap and the icons that are custom-made for the occasion, are contested by the many voices of the society: fundamentalist, secular, socialist and feminist groups often use these forms to narrate their own ideologies and to comment upon local and global events. In 2001 the dominant theme appears to have been nostalgia for the intimacy of the feudal mode of celebration, but there were others that were looking out on to the larger world. Mandaps that recreated nostalgically the interior of the decaying zamindari mansions stood next to those that narrated the earthquake of Bhuj, and one even depicted the destruction of the Twin Towers on Sept 11. Indeed, there would have been more on the Twin Towers theme, had the West Bengal government not explicitly forbidden any attempt to interpolate Osama Bin Laden for the archetypal demon Mahishashur. This paper will explore the complex coding system of these narrative devices and their relationship between local politics, global news and regional censorship using extensive footage from Durga Puja 2001.
	Emma Baulch 'Post Imperial' Globalization and Balinese Alternative Music The Balinese punk scene has its roots in the state’s media deregulation policies - which took effect in the mid 1990s - as well as the opening up of the Indonesian recording industry to foreign investment in 1994. As a result, rock music, particularly alternative rock, was depicted in media constructions as a realm of hedonism, in contrast to the demonization of rockers in the official state discourse. In this instance, the impact of media globalization provides one instance of how, on the one hand, official, anti-liberal and anti-global and, on the other, pro-capitalist, ‘new rich’ discourses competed for dominance in the late 1990s. As a nascent punk scene emerged in 1996, young punk musicians were reactively labeled by more senior musicians as naïve fashion victims. Indeed, these punks were seemingly compliant - they played only covers, did not adorn their bodies and were yet to develop a distinct dance style. In the following years, however, the same punks came to engage much more critically with the products of the global media as they developed local territories in which intimacy and solidarity was secured. This became evident in the emergence of distinct punk dress and dance styles referred to as "punk chaos" or "punk anarki." In this paper, I demonstrate how the hybridization of punk in Bali took place over time as a progressive territorialization.
Bret Benjamin "Attach the Electrodes:" On Ways of Reading the Stories of the Global Information Infrastructure With the new scholarship being produced about the phenomenon of globalization, English studies--most notably post-colonial studies--finds itself needing to re-theorize the tripartite relationship between information technology, capitalism, and cultural production. Amitava Kumar has made useful steps in this regard by challenging us to replace the traditional category of "World Literature" with the more politically responsive category of "World Bank Literature." This paper will extend the work of Kumar to explore some of the implications for literary and cultural studies created by the development of Global Information Infrastructure (GII) --the network backbone of globalization--and the formidable presence of international organizations such as the World Bank in shaping the ways in which we read the stories of GII. In particular, the paper will explore two interrelated rhetorical tropes: the idea of "leapfrogging" into development, and the notion of "economic democracy." I argue that while digital literacies will become increasingly important for the analysis of networked culture, so too will economic literacies--developing ways of reading the narratives of information and capital flow--for the study of cultural production and cultural critique enabled by and, perhaps, demanded by GII.
	Sarah Berry-Flint, Portland State University Cognition and Culture - interaction design and globalization The need for general principles of cognition and learning among developers of interactive media has coincided with a growing recognition in communication studies of the role played by culture in peoples' use and understanding of media. How can new media designers and theorists reconcile the desire for psychological models of cognition (such as those used in the fields of human-computer interaction, human factors, and educational technology) with the need for cultural specificity? This paper will look at contradictions between the use of cognitive psychology to provide a basis for media development -military, consumer, and educational - and cultural and media studies that point to the difficulties of universalizing models of media reception and understanding.
Henri Beunders, Eramsus University (Rotterdam) The Failure of the Elite’s Ideas for European Television Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy) was declared the hymn of ‘Europe’ in the seventies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Leonard Bernstein performed this symphony as a celebration for the peaceful breaking down the Wall between East and West-Europe. Two things about this event were interesting. It was an American, not a European, who conducted the symphony, and for the occasion the hymn was transformed in Ode an die Freiheit (Ode to Freedom). Some commentators concluded that the fall of the Wall was not the beginning of unification of Europe but the beginning of an era of globalization of European culture, shaped by American ideas and products. So, not Europeanization but globalization or Americanization of European culture. The nineties, in practice, showed almost the opposite, especially regarding radio and televison. Regionalisation and localization were the tendencies of the day. American domination persisted in the field of cinema, but was forced back on radio and tv in favor of locally produced programs - soaps, talkshows etc. So, the need for local, regional and national identity enforcing programs was much stronger than the European elite’s vision from the fifties onwards on the need for European television, and stronger than the Americanization of European culture. The failure of the European elite in creating European television can be ascribed to their elitist views on ‘the right stuff’ that was to be shown on television: high arts like classical music, opera, ballet and philosophical debates and so on Some of these high-brow arts just were not suited for television, like ballet, but more important was the not accepted fact that ordinary people in Europe simply were not interested in watching these high arts more than occasionally. At the beginning of the 21st century, the uses of television, the programming, etc., are more or less the same everywhere in Europe - although with regional differences - but the content of the programs can still be described as local. In this paper, I will address the fact that Europeans may now live in the best of both worlds: global and local.
	Jan Bierhoff, International Institute of Infonomics The State of Multimedia Newsrooms in Europe The majority of the established media plans to transform into more diverse and flexible information processing companies, but it is by no means clear how this objective can be achieved, which content categories one should aim for, how the newsroom of the future should be organised and which strategic alliances are needed to accomplish this formidable task. A high-profile consortium of experienced research institutes and international professional organisations has agreed to carry out groundbreaking research in this area, to establish a European-wide overview of the multimedia playing field, stimulate innovative media practices and develop an understanding of the changing role of information (and information providers) in a networked society. The project will run in 2001 and 2002 with the title "Multimedia Content in the Digital Age" (MUDIA). The presentation for the Media in Transition 2 gathering will focus on the results of a survey conducted in 40 European newsrooms (print, television and net native), describing the way in which European media prepare for and already practice rich media content production.
Anita Biressi, University of Surrey, Roehampton Heather Nunn, Middlesex University Video Justice: Public Anxiety and Private Trauma (the authors are currently writing a book on factual television and hybrid forms entitled Reality TV: Realism and Revelation for Wallflower Press) This paper concentrates on the U.S. program Video Justice: Crime Caught on Camera (US 1997 Fox Productions) as an example of programming that raises a number of important questions about media spectacle, media technologies and media ethics. This controversial true crime program chronicles a range of crimes including store robberies, shootings and street beatings. Its voiceover begins with the statement: "There’s a war going on in America between citizens and criminals, between the violent and the vulnerable." It was produced through editing together mainly CCTV and security footage and individuals’ recordings, together with film from law enforcement sources. Here scenes of violence and aggression are anchored by a voice over and spliced with interviews with witnesses, experts and the surviving participants. We argue that the appeal of the program operates on several levels and in contradictory ways. Viewers are confronted with scenarios of sudden and unprovoked violence that seemingly confirm public anxiety and fear of crime. They are also arguably offered a ‘safe’ and even pleasurable subject position from which to witness these events. However, the spectacle of crime is punctured by moments of intimate personal revelation when the victim relates the trauma of violent experiences. This paper explores that ways in which these narratives of personal trauma and crisis fracture and undermine the coherence of the program as ‘entertainment’ and consequently reveal a more complex and ambiguous relationship between audience and text.
	Jim Bizzocchi, Technical University of British Columbia Ceremony of Innocence and the Subversion of Interface: A Case Study in Interactive Narrative There is a potential inconsistency between the experience of story and the process of interaction. Many interactive narratives ask the interactor to switch between an immersive state of immediacy and a hypermediated awareness of process. This oscillation has the potential to disrupt the narrative experience. The presentation examines the interactive CD-ROM Ceremony of Innocence (an adaptation of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy) with this disruption in mind. The presentation highlights the design decisions that are used to suture the potential disjuncture. Two broad strategies are reviewed. The first is the saturation of narrativity throughout the entire work. Analogies are drawn to both expressionism and expressivity in cinema. Expressionist filmmakers used the exaggeration of film craft (such as lighting, set, costume) to portray and elicit emotion and mood. Filmmakers in general rely on a subtler and more hidden use of craft to enhance the medium’s expressivity. The careful selection and combination of visual and auditory element saturates the cinematic experience with a pervasive narrativity. In the same way Ceremony of Innocence uses graphics, layout, font choice, sound effects, and music to systematically reflect and amplify narrative concerns such as character, mood, and theme. The other strategy employed in Ceremony is more specific to digital environments. The interface itself is subverted to reflect similar narrative concerns and to enhance the experience of story. In the process the graphic user interface is remediated, and narrativity is situated at the heart of the interactive experience. The methodology that underlies the argument is a close reading of Ceremony of Innocence that combines quantitative data with subjective impressions
Mats Bjorkin, Gothenburg University, Sweden Re-mapping the Cash Flow: Digital Media and Corporate Communication When looking back at the rise and fall of many information technology companies the last couple of years, it is striking how often management theory failed. Digital media have not only brought new ways of dealing with information; they have changed the place of business. The borders between the company and the outer world have been blurred, small local enterprises can easily become global; while information and business networks are more important than individual units. This paper discusses information flows and organizational structures in relation to the material history of corporate communication. From the lose-leaf accounting system through mechanical and electronic business machines to digital systems there has been changing ways of making tangible as well as intangible assets explicable or visible both within the organization and in communication with customers and clients. Based on two case studies, a new media consulting firm and an "old-fashioned" truck and bus manufacturer - both transnational organizations - this paper will discuss different ways of historicizing recent trends in management theory and corporate communication.
	Vladimir Bratic and Don Flournoy, Ohio University Transnational Political Activism and Global Fusion: The Independent Media Centers as a Case Study Some believe that the development of the Internet promotes pluralism and therefore enhances democracy. In addition, they say, the Internet as the decentralized communication channel eradicates the economic conditions of oligopoly. Others see the rapid merger of global telecommunications and media institutions resulting in online consolidation. Research does shows that a very small number of large corporations, namely AOL Time Warner, Microsoft and Yahoo!, have captured the lion's share (over 40%) of the public online time. This paper argues that the two developments need not be mutually exclusive. The emergence of Indy Media Centers is perhaps the best example of pluralism of the Internet. Since its launch in 1999, this grassroots, low-budget, non-profit project penetrates national borders easier than foreign investments, thanks to the Internet. At the same time it is closely intertwined with the anti-capitalist social movements that aim to undermine the influence of online corporate leaders. As a case study, the IMCs are used to illustrate how the decentralized and unmanageable nature of the Internet helps disenfranchised groups effectively protest centralized acts of business and government.
Robert Burnett, Karlstad University (Sweden) A Look Inside the Global Music Industry: Explaining Swedish Music Export Success Music, its production, distribution, regulation and reception, is an essential feature of the European Information Society. The European music industry is a key asset. Today, three of the world’s five largest music groups are European. The Bertelsmann Music Group (Germany), and EMI (UK), together with Vivendi Universal (formerly Polygram/ MCA) (France), and Sony (Japan) and Warner Music (USA) account for about 80% of the world market for pre-recorded music, a market that was worth an estimated 40 bn ECU in 2000. The music business also has many small companies. The fact that 60% of recordings sold in the EU originate in the EU means that local audiences are likely to continue to demand ‘local’ products despite the ‘globalisation’ of the music industry. In Greece, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, the majority of records sold are by local artists. In the Scandinavian countries around 30 percent of all purchases are by local artists. In Austria and Belgium the number sinks to about 15 percent. Internationally, between 1991 and 2000 the percentage of the global music market share attained by European artists rose from 34 to 45 percent. As well as supplying phonograms nationally, the music companies exploit their recordings in foreign markets. Normally this is done by licensing a local company to supply phonograms in a particular country. In the case of the majors this is usually done through the music company’s local affiliate. The independent phonogram companies often rely on unconnected companies to perform this function, including the majors’ foreign affiliates. Licence income generated in this way is important to music companies. Europe is second to the United States as a supplier of recorded music to the rest of the world, but is closing the gap as more European artists gain global exposure. Using recent empirical data collected in Sweden I will examine the globalisation/localisation issue.
	Hamilton Carroll, Indiana University Resisting the Nation: John Sayles' Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) as Postnational Cinema In their introduction to the volume Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake observe that "film, still the crucial genre of transnational production and global circulation for refigured narratives, offers speculative ground for the transnational imaginary and its contention within national and local communities." John Sayles' film Men with Guns (Hombres Armados) engages in an examination of how local forces can be utilized in a critique of capital by illustrating the collapse of Dr Humberto Fuentes’ absolute belief in the myths of the nation-state through his encounters with sites of local resistance and coercion during the course of the film’s "refigured narrative," and can be read as a meditation on the shifting natures of capital, the nation-state, and citizenship in the face of economic, cultural, and political globalization. The film, whose dialogue is almost entirely in Spanish and indigenous dialects, is the product of an American writer and director, and was produced using American money by an American company. Because of its subject matter and in part because of its status within America as a "foreign film," Men with Guns stands in a liminal position in relation to U.S. cultural production. The film functions as an oppositional U.S. cultural production as it is engaged in a precise examination of the function of nation and citizenship in the Americas. Thus, while this paper reads the film on the level of its plot, it also engages in an examination of the film as a transnationally located cultural artifact. Men with Guns is a product of cultural globalization while it is about the process of economic and cultural globalization. Because cinema is a crucial transnational cultural form, this examination of Sayles’ film will be particularly relevant to a conference on media and globalization.
Catherine E. Celebrezze The Organization and Standardization of Television: A Historical Precedent to Current Globalization and Convergence in Media Infrastructure This paper examines the emergence and standardization of television as a historical precedent offering insight into the conglomerated conditions characterizing current U.S. media infrastructure. Its primary goal is to denaturalize the notion that convergence in media infrastructure is a recent occurrence and that it relies solely on chronological, material innovation. Its secondary goal is to compare the debates over spectrum space and standards regarding television in the 1940s and those regarding the convergence between content and telcom industries in the early 21st century.
	Anita Chan, MIT "Open" Journalism’s Distributed Editors: The Construction and Exchange of Online News on Slashdot.com This paper will explore the emergent social practices surrounding an open journalism model of online news production and exchange, as manifested on the technology-related news and discussion site Salshdot.com, where a global network of users is invited to construct and edit news, rather than merely consume it. This study will examine how practices enacted on Slashdot construct users’ relationship to news, editors, and one another -- and will similarly investigate how it constructs editors’ relationship to news, readers, and one another. By recognizing the activity of Slashdot’s editors and users as necessarily dynamic and cooperative, such an examination complicates theoretical positionings of audiences and users as passive, uncritical readers and consumers of news, and of media producers as self-interested conduits of elite, capitalistic interests. In further acknowledging the diversity and (often disordered) heterogeneity of interests and practices represented on Slashdot, the study also challenges attempts to characterize an essential or definitive experience of online users.
Jung-Bong Choi, University of Iowa Public Broadcasting in the Age of Digital Narrow-casting: A Study of NHK’s (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) Digitization The rapid introduction of digital broadcasting technology has rendered PSBs (public service broadcasters) a volatile battleground where various social forces and ideologies clash. The primary concern of this paper is to explore ways in which NHK articulates and transforms its identity as Japan’s sole public broadcaster amid its endeavors to adapt to digital environments. It views NHK’s digital drive as leverage to implement extensive reorganizations of its institutional practices. Such reform is not confined to programming, technical standards, distribution systems and international networking but entails the alteration of NHK’s relationships with the audience, commercial broadcasters, other digital media businesses, and the state. For example, challenges from other digital media (PCs, cables, satellite TVs) impelled NHK to shift its policies towards a heightened recognition of audience diversity, a broader use of imported contents, and closer collaboration with commercial broadcasters in Japan.
	Pei-Chi Chung, Indiana University The Internet, Identity Politics and the Making of Counter Media Culture in Taiwan: A Case Study of Yam This paper examines the power of the Internet in creating an alternative media image of Taiwan. Literature in the field of new media and identity suggests that new communication devices have been vehicles for powerless groups to restructure their social positions in the society. When new communication technologies are first introduced into a society, it is often argued, they often empower people who were previously silenced or had little political voice. To investigate how political activists use the Internet to create a counter-government discourse, this paper focuses on Yam (English version), the first and currently largest Internet company in Taiwan.
Anne Ciecko, University of Massachusetts Tracking Asian Stars: From Electric Shadows to Cyber-Astronomy Using examples from recent Asian popular cinema, this presentation will examine the ways the contemporary technologies and media boundary-crossings of film star construction and international fandom have contributed to a global convergence of film cultures.
	Roderick Coover, Art Institute of Chicago; University of California, San Diego Cultures in Webs Through a multimedia presentation, I analyze how differing cultural viewpoints are revealed and concealed through the conventions and rhetorics of differing visual media including photography, film, and the Internet. In bridging theories of performance and visual cognition, the presentation offers alternative strategies of cross-cultural production while also considering some of ways new media might also help to articulate alternative stories, views, and voices.
Nick Couldry The Forgotten Digital Divide: Researching Social Exclusion/Inclusion in the Age of Personalized Media We need empirical research that investigates to what extent inequalities of access to media resources contribute to social and political exclusion in a media age. This question has acquired some urgency in digital-divide debates, but it has tended to be addressed in a superficial way, in terms of basic levels of access, rather than in terms of capacities to make effective use of media resources. This paper will draw both on the author's earlier UK-based empirical and theoretical research into the social roots of media power and on his current research into citizens' reflections on whether media provide them with the resources they need to be connected to a wider public space (leaving it deliberately open for those citizens to reflect on how they think that wider space should be defined). This research examines a number of more specific questions: Do people regard themselves as included in or excluded from social and political debate? Do people regard themselves as actors or spectators in the mediated public sphere? What contribution do they expect and hope technological change (the Web, digital television, media convergence) to make? The priority in this research is to listen closely to agents' reflexivity about these difficult questions, and the paper will give a preliminary report on UK pilot research currently under way, and the prospects for developing this research further.
	Peter d'Agostino, Temple University; and David I. Tafler, Muhlenberg College (the authors are co-editors of TRANSMISSION: Toward a Post-Television Culture) Techno/Cultural Consciousness Across the Digital Divides This paper examines the symbiotic relationship between new technologies and traditional cultures across north south, east - west divides, while identifying their convergence within Australian outback. revolves around culturally determined coding methodologies, which use various landmarks to inform a sense of identity place. These landmarks, symbolic icons, represent narratives that build from historic contemporary events in different parts world that, turn, embody own particular states-of-mind. We will argue an understanding reconfiguration consciousness becomes clearer when revisiting some relationships developed such as those indigenous people living central Australia. articulation comes surrounding space time relations. desert live harsh environment with pronounced inscribed legendary meaning. icons informed by actual metaphysical events.
Drew Davidson, Southwest Texas State University stories in between: narratives and mediums @ play I am interested in how to integrate information and technology to create engaging and relevant stories for people to experience. This is an academic study and a narrative about stories and their mediums [1]. [4] If you choose, you can decipher the puzzle and connect the links; if not, you can read straight through [5]. [3] Links in and between the digital and analog are keyed through repeated symbols (colors, words, numbers, images, etc.) creating a rhizomatic web [4]. [2] Images, colors, words, numbers and links are used to code and layer this chapter [3]. [5] Either way, stories are related and experienced [repeat]. [1] You can experience the story and play with the ideas as you puzzle through the words and images [2]. This is a hypertextual study that can be found at http://www.waxebb.com/sib2/.
	Maire Messenger-Davies Mickey and Mr. Gumpy: The Global and the Universal In Children's Media This paper looks at what Paul Hazard (1947) called "the world republic of childhood" in relation to the globalization of children's media products. The concept of childhood is examined in the context of three international developments: first, the International Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1989) and its implicit, and also explicit, assumption that it is possible to arrive at global, universally agreed definitions of the needs, rights and wants of children, despite cultural differences over, for instance, child labor; child military service and gender. Second, the rapidly developing academic fields of the sociology and anthropology of childhood, which are challenging the field of developmental psychology as the primary academic discipline within which childhood is defined and studied. And third, the global market for children's media, with Disney as the archetypal model for the commodification of storytelling, including formerly localized myths and fairy tales (e.g. Aladdin; Moses) on an international scale. The paper will look particularly at animation from both a global and local perspective.
Kim De Vries, Program for Writing and Humanistic Studies, MIT Sequential Tart: thinking about gender and online community In the last fifteen years both creators and readers of comic books have become more diverse as women and people of color take an increasingly active role in the industry. These changes have been supported and facilitated by independent websites, some of which serve to make the work of independent comic creators available, bypassing corporate publishers and retailers, and some of which operate as for a for the reporting and review of comic book culture by and for readers. In this paper, I discuss how one of these resistant communities, Sequential Tart (www.sequentialtart.com), has developed a space for women readers of comics, and has worked to change industry perceptions of women as both readers and creators of comics. Additionally, I consider how the community that has grown around this Web site differs from those often explored by scholars, in its close ties to the "real" identities and lives of the participants. This model of the online community offers an instructive alternative to those previously studied, particularly in the way the women of these communities construct their own gender while at the same time consciously working to subvert the gender representations of mainstream comic culture.
	Wendy E. Dinneen, Dinneen Designs Intellectual Property and Mediation: Bridging the Systems World and the Life World This paper will examine the intersection of intellectual property and mediation in the 21st century. Is the practice of mediation, as an alternative form of dispute resolution, helped or hindered by the information society, and can communication between individuals and societies alike improve as a result of the very nature of its practice? These and other questions guide this research which incorporates a macro and micro level approach to analyze an increasingly popular method of conflict resolution in commercial and non commercial spheres. One focus is on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and its Center for Mediation and Arbitration, based in Geneva, Switzerland, and other foci concentrate on the application of mediation by agencies handling disputes for public and private entities. Since WIPO adopted mediation at their headquarters in 1994, has this multi-lateral institution influenced the way in which conflict is resolved across diverse sectors and people around the world? While such a question may take years to answer, this research highlights challenges and changes in a field which is only in its infancy, promoting a unique practice which allows for greater communicative freedom. Drawing from Jurgen Habermas' notions of the life world and systems world, this paper strongly suggests that mediation be embraced in order to avoid further separatism with regard to globalization and conflicts experienced among citizens and nations alike.
James Donald , Curtin University (Australia) Media Freedom in Transition This paper is an early product of research into the category of media freedom, and its ambiguous relationship to the cognate rights of freedom of speech and academic autonomy. From the C18th principle of "liberty of the press," I derive criteria of media regulation that embody modern conceptions of publicness and nationhood as well as the market. Above all, I examine how those traditional criteria of media freedom and regulation have had to respond to a new regulatory environment since the neo-liberalism and globalisation of the 1980s and beyond, convergence between the media and telecommunications, and the impact of the Internet.
	Tanja Dreher, Institute for Cultural Research Talk Back: the mediated struggle to define Australian multiculturalism Prompted by news reporting of Sept. 11 and the so-called war on terrorism, people in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown developed innovative media interventions in response to global news. This paper explores the ways in which local events and issues are inflected and impacted by national and international political debates and global media flows. Encompassing Australia's most culturally diverse neighborhoods, Sydney's southwestern suburbs have long featured multiculturalism, crime and ethnicity in news reporting and talkback radio. Recently, the suburb of Bankstown in particular has become enmeshed in a spiral of signification linking local events with a federal election campaign focusing on immigration and refugees, and global attention to terrorism. Through media advocacy, training and cultural production, various communities and representatives in Bankstown responded to global media events by highlighting the experiences of Arab and Muslim communities, young people and women. These media interventions represent alternative models and innovative approaches to media representations of multiculturalism and national identity in a moment of profound border panic in Australian politics.
Eli Dresner, Tel Aviv University No Sense of Global Place? Information Technologies and Political Globalization In this paper I use the theoretical framework presented in Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place in order to characterize and analyze several developments in contemporary global politics. According to Meyrowitz’s well known analysis social situations should be defined in terms of the information (and influence) flow that they consist in, and hence communication media, by changing patterns of information flow, create new types of situations and thereby impact our social behavior. Similarly, I show how various technological changes and innovations (among which is the Internet) gradually break down such distinctions among political situations as the one between the intra-national and international domain of political action. The debate whether recent terrorist attacks are crimes or acts of war exemplifies the conceptual difficulties that ensue.
	Isa Ducke, German Institute for Japanese Studies Use of the Internet by political actors in the Japanese-Korean textbook controversy This paper examines the bilateral controversy over Japanese junior high school textbooks during the summer of 2001. The government approval of a nationalistic history textbook led to protests "especially in South Korea" and efforts to prevent its use in schools. The official and non-official Korean protests and an Internet-based Japanese NGO network were crucial in achieving an extremely low adoption rate of the book in schools. It is the aim of this presentation to outline the use of the Internet by various state and non-state actors in Japan and Korea regarding this issue.
Nabil Echchaibi, Indiana University (Be)longing Media: Minority Radio Between Cultural Retention and Renewal Diasporic media have often been dissed, by politicians and academics alike, as a toxic concept that hinders integration and encourage the formatting of ethnic cleavages. Such a simplistic view trivializes the straddling process involved in diasporic experiences of two, and possibly more, cultural and political allegiances. The end result of such experiences is very often a dual or multiple consciousness that is neither exclusionary nor regressive. Using fieldwork observation of two radio stations, one in Berlin, the other in Paris, I examine how and if diasporic media can serve as bridging entities. Radio Beur FM, a private radio station in Paris, is heavily implicated in the maintenance of a culture of hybridity between North African in France, particularly the youth within this community. Radio MultiKulti, on the other hand, a radio produced by the Public Broadcasting Corporation, addresses all ethnic minorities in Berlin both in German and in 19 other languages. This paper will look at how these stations fare in their mission in the light of their philosophies of integration.
	Jan Ekecrantz, University of Stockholm Cultural panics and other responses to media-driven modernities The paper argues that a focus on literary/artistic and popular responses to new media (technologies) may give some new clues to understand cultural change and the meaning of globalization in local or national contexts. Different modernities, historically and across the world, are always and to a certain extent media-driven, for instance in terms of transformed time and space conditions. These transformations trigger different responses in the cultural world outside the media and in the media themselves. Literary responses may range from cultural panics and ontological insecurity to something more constructive. In mainstream (news) media texts, these changes are very seldom problematized, because stable time/spaces are the sine qua non of reporting. Historical and cross-cultural literary examples from Russia and Western Europe are discussed together with results from comparative studies of news constructions demonstrating that cultural globalization evokes very different responses across time, space, media and genres. The paper relates to the following suggested themes: changing peripheries and centers, global media flows/local media meanings, narrative forms and cultural change.
Victoria Smith Ekstrand, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Controlling the Copyright Bully: The Promise of the Copyright Misuse Doctrine Like persistent bullies on a school playground, America’s copyright holders increasingly resort to intimidation and pressure to punish suspected infringers. But who or what defines the actions a copyright holder can take-- short of requesting an injunction or initiating a lawsuit-- to stop infringement? This paper addresses the doctrine of copyright misuse, an affirmative defense that has emerged in the last ten years since it was used in Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds. The doctrine requires a defendant accused of infringement to show that the plaintiff abused his copyright, thereby damaging the larger public purpose of copyright to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." This paper examines 27 misuse cases at the appeals and district court levels to determine how defendants have successfully argued a copyright misuse defense and whether the doctrine may serve as a check on the ever-expanding rights of copyright holders. This paper suggests that copyright holders should be held accountable for claiming rights beyond the scope of the copyright grant and that a more clearly defined misuse doctrine would benefit the public policy purpose of copyright law, particularly for users of digital media.
	Jessica M. Fishman, University of Pennsylvania Digital News Cultures: An Analysis of Social Class, Media Convergence and Divergence This is a case study comparing the homepage interface design of two U.S. newspapers: the New York Times and the New York Post. I have organized this study to compare the web features of an elite and a popular online newspaper—or what have been known in their offline versions as part of the broadsheet and tabloid, or the highbrow and lowbrow press. Examining these two websites, I analyze if and how the home page production features reinforce markers of social class distinction.
Don Flournoy, Ohio University Innovation and Obsolescence: A Sword That Cuts Two Ways Creative Destruction is a theory of innovation in the study of economics which suggests that the transforming power of technology is perpetually making old ways of doing things obsolete through the introduction of new products and processes. In capitalistic economies, the presence of entrepreneurship, capital investment and competitiveness create an orientation to and acceptance of change as a necessary condition of living in a world where things get better and better. What is paradoxical about modern manifestations of this old idea is the extent to which incessant innovation and the relentless destruction of those innovations are now perceived to be the basis for economic progress and the good life. But there is a serious downside. Displacement of whatever exists has become built into our new millennium institutions, aspirations and values. Nothing is ever good enough. Obsolescence is accelerated at such a pace that corporations can no longer afford to hold off on the introduction of new products and processes until public understanding and acceptance is in place. Acquisition has become so necessary to sustaining a high standard of living that consumption is thought to be a patriotic duty. This paper examines three promising new millennium technologies gone awry: high definition television, broadband cable and open systems software. The examples illustrate the ways capitalist societies have come to count on technologies and their applications to bring improvements to work and leisure, commerce and community while producing great wealth. But when those same developments move too quickly or are mismanaged, they can have adverse social effects.
	Roddy Flynn and Aphra Kerr, Dublin City University Revisiting Globalization and Convergence Through the Movie and Digital Games Industries Unsurprisingly, given the film industry’s traditional propensity to borrow from other media as the basis for some of its biggest hits - from Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind to Harry Potter -- Hollywood has for the past fifteen years been producing films based on successful digital video and computer games. At the same time, Nintendo has enjoyed some of its biggest hits from a series of games based around the MGM/UAS Bond series. Major companies like Vivendi Universal have moved, it would appear effortlessly, into the exploitation of both game and film assets on a global scale. From publishing games like Half Life and Diabhlo for Blizzard, to controlling Universal Studios, these companies seem to exemplify what we understand by globalization and convergence. This paper asks do these trends help us to understand globalization and convergence, and what are the consequences of these trends for national economies and national cultures? From a political economy of the media perspective the patterns of ownership in an industry can have a significant effect on the range and quality of content produced. This perspective would argue that cultural products, like films and games, play an important social role that economists often ignore and that globalization and convergence trends must be examined closely to assess their impact on the range and diversity of content sold on global markets. This paper is based on results from the first year of a post-doctoral project based in STeM (Centre for Science, Technology and Media) at Dublin City University that analyzed the global games industry and interviewed fifteen key players in the Irish industry.
Lawrence Fouraker, St. John Fisher College Precursors of Convergence in Interwar Japan From the 1950s until the present day, articles predicting the "inevitable" convergence of Japanese economic and political systems with those of the West have been a staple in American media. Yet for much of this period, key features of Japan’s political economy have actually been diverging from Western mhe 1950s until the present day, articles predicting the "inevitable" convergence of Japanese economic and political systems with those of the West have been a staple in American media. Yet for much of this period, key features of Japan’s political economy have actually been diverging from Western models. The clearest historical precedent for convergence between Japanese and Western systems is the interwar interregnum from the World War I economic boom until the state¹s intervention in the economy in the mid-1930s. My paper will explore how, in those years, the trend was toward a rough approximation of laissez-faire economic and political policies.
	Elfriede Fursich, Boston College Between Credibility and Commodification: Non-Fiction Entertainment as a Global Media Genre Global media expansion is connected to other trends such as the fragmentation of audiences, an increase in technological investments, industry consolidation and greater profit expectations of media companies. This competitive climate favors a non-risk approach to programming, more conservative managerial tactics and "lean" management strategies such as outsourcing and shared financing. One of the genres fitting these new programming demands is so-called nonfiction entertainment. I analyze how global television content providers such as Discovery Communication International developed this genre distinction situated between traditional journalistic values and commercial interests. I will analyze the programming strategies of the cable outlet Travel Channel before, during and after Discovery acquired a 70 percent (1997) and finally a 100 percent stake (1999) in the cable channel, and I will offer this profile of a travel program as commercially profitable global product: a show financed by several production companies in different countries, covering latest trends of tourism and fashionable destinations, appealing across cultures, presenting credible and trustworthy information, packaged as nonfiction entertainment, but non-challenging to local political situations or the endeavor of modern tourism. I examine how the situation for producers of travel and other nonfiction television programming is shaped by the economic and globalizing factors of the telecommunications industry in general. Finally, I’ll examine the problematic consequences of this dynamic on traditional documentary filmmaking and investigative journalism.
Joseph Garncarz, University of Cologne Hollywood as an Instrument of European Integration In my paper, I will analyze and interpret a process of cultural integration in the large Continental-European film markets Germany, France and Italy after WWII. First, I will reconstruct and interpret the process of cultural integration that took place. Second, I will argue that my view of Hollywood’s role in Europe is closer to the facts than the well-known hypothesis of the world-wide dominance of American movies since the 1910s, which had been constructed on a restrictive research concept excluding the power of audiences per se. Third, I will give an explanation for this process of European integration by looking not only at economic and political elites as global players but also, and primarily, at the changing tastes of European audiences. Fourth, I will explore the consequences of this process of cultural integration for Europe’s film industries as well as for Hollywood itself. Fifth, I will discuss the implications of my analysis for the existing theories of globalization.
	Nate Greenslit, Program in Science, Technology and Society, MIT Antidepressants, Advertising, and Agency: The Internet and New Cross-Cultural Negotiations in Sociomedical Identity Pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) offers a relatively new interface between consumers, patients, drug industries, and the FDA. In this new space where pharmaceuticals are connected with culturally specific images and logics, healthcare products turn into cultural products, and the Internet gives them new presence across national and cultural borders, including those media environments that do not allow pharmaceutical DTC advertising (e.g. Great Britain). This paper will get at the larger topics of globalization and convergence by problematizing the role of the Internet in psychopharmaceutical DTC advertising, specifically in terms of how pharmaceutical companies have used it to promote antidepressants in the U.S., and how a cross-cultural advertising audience has started to appropriate meanings about mental health and illness and rework them to enliven local sociomedical discourses. This paper will be framed as an interdisciplinary effort, using DTC advertising as a case study for how media studies and science studies can inform each other.
Pierre Guerlain, Université du Maine, Le Mans Institut d'Études Politiques, Paris The morphing of Le Monde: The "conquest of cool" in a new media environment . From an austere publication with hardly any photographs, Le Monde has became a more eye-catching and thicker newspaper that resembles its counterparts in the English or German-speaking worlds. Its various sections have become more numerous and are devised to target specific audiences that often do not communicate with each other. The business sections are calculated to attract up-and-coming executives, while the arts and literature sections target a younger more upbeat audience whose interest in sex and gossip is not taboo. By redefining itself as several neoliberal publications rolled into one with a bohemian-libertarian tone in its cultural sections, a People page and a mainstream political and economic core section Le Monde has proved a major success on the market. Its Web site is, according to its own advertising, the most visited news site in France. This paper will demonstrate how the newspaper has tailored its layout and ideological outlook to fit a new epoch shaped by the values of infotainment.
	Sabine Haenni, University of Chicago A Global Nation: The Logic of Incorporation in Early Twentieth Century Hollywood Film historians have often emphasized early Hollywood’s homogenizing and assimilative logic. The teens, in particular, as Miriam Hansen has argued, saw the emergence of a rhetoric of the cinema as a "universal" language that erased local, cultural and national differences. This universalism, it is often assumed, is key to Hollywood's global success; moreover, because of this universalist rhetoric, American cinema is usually not regarded as a "national" cinema. Complicating this account, this paper explores a different discourse, produced by the American film industry itself, that insisted on the cinema's ability to incorporate and transform, but not erase, the nation's, even the world's different cultures. I look at the emerging discourse of the global nation on three different levels. First, I examine the emergence of studios in California, such as Inceville and Universal City, which were often regarded as ideal global villages in journalistic accounts that soon attracted a steady stream of tourists. Second, I look at advertising campaigns by producers such as Thomas Ince who stressed American cinema's ability to produce a pleasurable experience of cultural alterity. And third, I examine the filmic national discourse generated by World War One (visible in articles in trade journals, scripts and stills from lost films located at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), which directly addressed the nation's ethnic and racial minorities, insisting on the cultural differences within the United States even as it was advocating political unity.
Randall Halle, University of Rochester The Enemy at the Gates: History and Commodity in New European Film In my presentation I will concentrate on the following three points as a way of exploring the connections between transnational production and transcultural aesthetics. First, it is possible to quickly conclude from this that war and the Holocaust offer narrative material that cuts across national boundaries and is available for deployment within various ensembles of production. It remains to be examined if there are specific strategies or subgenres that attend to the various ensembles or national production networks. Second, the list of films above represents widely disparate narratives. Indeed semiotic analysis would find here rich material for the description of subgenres and sub-subgenres like Holocaust comedies or gay and lesbian Holocaust tragedies. Here the genres follow the same pattern as the historical genre in general; they offer a visual opulence and likewise move to entertain with plot lines that turn from explicit explorations of history to rely on melodrama, love stories, fantasies, even feel-good comedies. Many critical voices have objected to the ethics of these films. It remains to be examined what significance such narrative strategies and plot motivations have for the representation of history. Third and final, the war genre, the genre singularly most important for the public production and consumption of national narratives and symbols, proves to have a great deal of resiliency. Here in the above films we witness its ability actually to break with national specificity in a manner absent in many of the recent historical films. While the war genre might represent a particular national perspective in its choice. The Holocaust offers modern morality tales that can be related so as to be germane to universal audiences. Films about the 30s and 40s, the era of European fascism and WWII, for Europe the last moments of profound national conflict, become productions of a history that propels its viewers beyond national specificity and into a transcultural position.
	Orit Halpern, Harvard University Bioinformatic Databases: A New Mode of Global Surveillance? Bioinformatics is the convergence of information technology with the biological sciences. Increasingly, bioinformatic systems are playing a critical role within police and medical practice for disease surveillance and criminal identification. As bioinformatic systems render organisms into digital information through the computerized sequencing and reading of biological products, such as DNA, we are forced to ask what are the consequences? This paper will examine the political and social implications that emerge from this integration of the biologic and informatic, particularly within police DNA databases. I explore and describe changing modes of governmentality and identity that result from making biology an information technology. The transformation of life into code is about producing supporting structures of mediation-technical, discursive, and institutional-that support certain understandings of human identity and biology, and not others. I will, therefore, produce an account of criminal identification systems, which explores the biases or possibilities being programmed into systems as they are developed. What sort of information can or cannot be encoded? What is lost and what is gained through digitalization? What are the ideological, political, and technical pre-conditions that encourage one type of system over another? I track what happens to police surveillance systems as they change media and move from analog documentary and storage techniques to digital ones.
Tal Halpern, New York University Towards a New Artistic Context - Critical Documentary in the Age of Global Surveillance Networks Today, advances in automated image capture and processing technologies are converging with computer database technologies to produce a new mode of surveillance-automated facial recognition. In this paper, I will examine the global application of facial recognition technology in a broad range of areas from airports to personal computing interface design in order to ask how facial recognition technologies are both disciplining observation while also rendering bodies visible both locally and globally. I will then turn to consider the possible role artistic documentary practice can play in responding, commenting, and critiquing this emerging mode of visuality. In so doing, I draw direct inspiration from the artist and critic Allan Sekula.
	Ferenc Hammer , Open Society Institute, Budapest Reality Television and the Public Sphere - A Hungarian Case Study My study focuses on a relatively new genre in post-communist public service and commercial television entertainment: A multitude of formerly rather unknown programs, such as factual human-interest magazines, confessional television chat shows, real-life police stories, and hospital dramas have competed for their -- cumulatively remarkable -- audience share in prime-time television. This study focuses on reality TV programs covering (either in a dramaturgical, or in a coordinated manner) problems, joys, and other facts of life of economically disadvantaged groups in the society. We have found these representations as important for critical inquiry, because the theme of poverty in non-fiction TV represents an unusual blend of rather unexamined, as well as (suspiciously) all-well-known themes in media studies and more generally, in social theory. The study contains (i) textual analyses of Hungarian television reality TV programs, (ii) analyses of audience reception based on survey data and focus group research, (iii) an analysis of production considerations based on industry data and interviews with television producers, (iv) an analysis of media regulation procedures and practices, especially in the area of content regulation, (v) and a critical assessment of relevant media studies and social theory literature.
Ramaswami Harindranath, The Open University, UK Reconfiguring "cultural imperialism": global audiences, local interpretative frames, and the distribution of cultural resources Using original data from a project on audiences in Britain and India, this paper will address the issue of cultural imperialism, attempting to go beyond the impasse between the political economists and audience researchers to explore the ways in which members of one putative ‘culture’ differ significantly in terms of their interpretative frames, and how these reflect the unequal distribution of cultural resources. The paper will argue that aspects of the colonial and postcolonial histories of India (and by extension other former colonies) are significant in order to understand the complexities of the data linking audience interpretations with cultural contexts.
	Laurie Harnick, University of Ontario The Transformation of Television: Domestic Rehabilitation in Times of Catastrophe My paper considers the work of Mary Anne Doane and Patricia Mellencamp in their discussions of the immediate televisual response to catastrophe, however, I look beyond to resultant programming and consumption and consider the role of domestic and lifestyle programming as a personal and institutional restorative. Rather than the familiar television-as-hearth phenomenon, I believe that in the wake of Sept. 11, domestic and lifestyle programming has become a necessary curative and promises to move consumption (at least, temporarily) away from dramatic "real TV," court TV, fitness TV and the like to the diversion and comfort of the familiar, contained, and instructive electronic "mother."
Matt Hills, Cardiff University Transcultural otaku: Japanese representations of fandom and representations of Japan in anime/manga fan cultures " Otaku is a Japanese word coined during the eighties, it is used to describe fanatics that have an obsessive interest or hobby... The Japanese think of otaku the same way most people think of nerds - sad and socially inept. Western Anime fans often use the word to describe anime and manga fans, except with more enthusiastic tones than the Japanese." This paper will consider the transcultural appropriation of Japanese representations of fandom, and will argue that a focus on media representations of fandom must be central to any analysis of US and UK fans’ self-identifications as "otaku". I will argue that Japanese culture’s pathologisation of fandom is taken up as a "badge of honour" by fractions of US and UK fans (Napier 2000:254) via a series of potentially contradictory ‘practical logics’: -- US/UK use of the term "otaku" acknowledges that fandom is hegemonically devalued both in Japan and ‘the West’. The Japanese fan is therefore linked to the non-Japanese fan: fan identity is prioritised over national identity. This identification can be read as an attempt to ‘naturalise’ fan identities by implying that fandom is an essentially transnational/transcultural experience. --However, US/UK "otaku" continue to use limited images of Japan (Moeran and Skov 1993) within their construction of ‘transcultural’ fan identities. The desire to legitimate and exoticise fan culture as part of a technocultural and consumerist avant-garde draws on stereotypical connotations of ‘Japaneseness’.
	Teresa Hoefert de Turégano, University of Lausanne World Cinema as World Music My aim is to explore a notion of the term world cinema in relation to the term world music, where national and cultural identities are used as marketing tools within the international market. Independent, cinematographic coproductions (two or more countries involved in the financing and production of a film) made in a North -South context are an ideal site to explore questions of cultural diversity in the current global context. In many instances of coproduction between European and developing countries, the funding institutions, foundations, etc., hinge their financing and support of a film on its essence as a vehicle promoting national and cultural identities. In countries where there is a dependence on funding from outside sources, this stipulation of cultural identity can be enabling, but also potentially disempowering.
Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Margarita Maas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events.
	Jan Holmberg Globalized Vision In 1912, a French film journal characterizes the times as "where the antipodes thanks to the telegraph, the telephone, the talking newspaper and radio telegraphy... touch each other, unite, merge, when a gigantic net of electrical wires surrounds the globe." This notion of a World Wide Web avant la lettre leads the same journal in a later issue to exclaim: "In a few years, we will no longer have use for the word ‘stranger’, for we will know him as well as we do our selves." This rather naïve take on technological progress is of course a familiar topic today, where our own hopes for the information age are often equally optimistic. Globalization, in this sense, is hardly a new phenomenon. For this paper, I would like to analyze how "globalization" as a function of new media of the nineteenth century, is reflected in contemporaneous cultural discourses in art, film and literature. With Martin Heidegger’s concept of the "Weltbild" (i.e. the fundamental experience of modernity of conquering the world as picture) as my starting point, I will try to demonstrate how the new media of modernity held the promise of a united world, and how cultural expressions bear witness to this hope.
Derek Hrynyshyn, York University, Toronto The Commodification of Sovereignty in the Domain-Name Space Although cyberspace appears to be a global realm without national borders, and although information flows across international borders unhindered, the relationship between national communities and cyberspace is a deeply political one. The original decision, made in the early days of the Internet, to create two-letter designations for internet addresses specific to different national territories (known as ‘country code top-level domains, such as ‘.uk’ and ‘.ca’) established a possibility for the use of cyberspace to promote national communities online. But this original potential is undermined by the recent practice of marketing the two-letter designators. By turning the domain name spaces of countries into commodities, the value they have for national identity is superceded by their economic value to others.
	Ying-Fen Huang, Simon Fraser University (Canada) Techno-Culture in Global Cities: Aesthetics and Spectacle My paper will focus on the studies of urban technoculture in China’s rising global cities. Envisaging global capitalism, cities are incorporated into the global capitalist flows - economy, information, ethnic, and division of labors and culture etc. New media (generally referring to Internet, video game, and digital image-based forms) and information technology play crucial roles in transforming the disposition of urban culture. I attempt to explore the issues surrounding technoculture in relation to the Chinese metropolis, such as the spectacularization and the consumption of digital culture, the aesthetics shifting phenomenon of virtual discourses in everyday life, and the disparity of power in ever changing spatial discourse in urban space. In speaking of Chinese global cities, this paper will primarily focus on Shanghai and Hong Kong in particular as pivotal textual axis. I will examine the project of Digital 21 in Hong Kong and Shanghai’s Informational Port to demonstrate the ways in which the spectacularization of digital media has been implemented into the fabrics of urban life. My paper will illuminate the changing aesthetics of new information media - the ways in which the increasing image/information spectacle has transformed the new virtual worlds and the ways in which the surface play of new media implicates a shift of aesthetics towards sensation, appearance, and stimulation.
Daniel Huecker, MIT Moving Images: the crusade to project the ‘JESUS’ film to all nations In my paper I will examine the ‘JESUS’ film, a 1979 religious docudrama based on the book of Luke, and the ‘JESUS’ Film Project (JFP), the evangelical Christian missionary organization that is distributing and exhibiting this film around the world. The ‘JESUS’ film, which has been dubbed into hundreds of languages and shown in nearly every country, is a useful case study for examining the way media are mobilized across traditional linguistic, class, cultural and political bounds. Intentionally created as an evangelistic tool, the film was carefully researched and created to both authentically reproduce the life of Jesus according to scripture, and to engage a diverse and international audience. Why the JFP founders saw film as a useful medium for international evangelization, and how they continue to use the ‘JESUS’ film with a global audience will be two lines of inquiry in my paper. I will draw upon the books, audiovisual media, and documents produced by the JFP during its 20+ years of global film distribution and exhibition. I will also use interviews and first hand observations of the JFP in the US and Guatemala.
	Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Margarita Maas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events.

Click on linked Abstract titles to read the actual papers.
Click on speakers names to read bios.
Click here to download a free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

A-H I-Q R-Z


Fran Ilich, Centro del Centro Nacional de las Artes _borderhacking Borderhack is a camp where the world of technology and the Internet--tools that are known to break borders and erase limits--meet with the world of physical borders and passport handicaps. Hactivists, Internet artists, cyberculture devotees, border activists, electronic musicians and punk rockers are ready to delete the border on Tijuana-San Diego if only for a few days, with java applets, port scans, radio, microwaves, ISDN, face-to-face communication, technology workshops, presentations, music events. The idea to synthesize the camp is born out of our condition of dilettante border kids, out of our years of crossing the border and doing a little window shopping, pretending that we could be part of the American dream of wealth, happiness and freedom. On one side, the malls are filled with happiness, and on the other--the wrong side-- we are forever condemned to produce goods that we will never enjoy ourselves. A part of the project is the borderhack attachment online exhibition, which was presented August 26, 2001 at playas de Tijuana (Tijuana beach) right in the border wall between Mexico and the US.
	Janet Jones, University of Wales Wooing the Promiscuous Viewer Through Interactivity an Audience Study of Big Brother UK 2000 and 2001 The term 'convergence' increasingly dominates discussions of our media environment, yet due to the embryonic nature of the newer interactive media platforms it remains hard to predict patterns of use and meaning making among consumers. As the UK moves into the world of digital plenty leaving behind the comfortable world of analogue scarcity, television executives are increasingly looking to interactivity to woo the promiscuous audience. Reality media events stripped across nine discreet platforms, such as Big Brother, are on vanguard of these new initiatives. This article explores some of the implications for user control over content. It uses quantitative and qualitative data from a web-based questionnaire linked to Big Brother's UK Web site (August 2000, July 2001) in order to map expectations associated with different viewing platforms. It examines how these predominantly youth, fan viewers negotiate what I have called a 'reality contract' with the series while 'surfing' between platforms. This mobility I argue, (particularly appealing for 'reality TV' formats) allows the audience to customise their viewing, developing strategies for watching that cater to a sense of authorship and control over the content.

	Hirofumi Katsuno and Christine R. Yano, University of Hawaii - Honolulu Facing Off On-line Embodiment in Contemporary Japan Merleau-Ponty argues that for a blind person, the cane becomes an extension of the realm of senses. The cane, in other words, fills in for what the blind person lacks in apprehending the world. In cyberspace, the computer user as represented on the screen lacks a body--a phenomenon that Murray and Sixsmith term "disrupted bodies" ( 1999). In this paper we analyze the compensations made for the "disrupted bodies" of Japanese computer subjects by asking the following questions: 1) what kinds of extensions of the body might there be in computer-mediated communication; 2) how might these extensions be culturally embedded; and 3) how do these bodily extensions shape the communities of which they are a part? We take as a case study the frequent use of kaomoji (literally, face marks; known in computer studies as emoticons)-manipula.tions of keyboard symbols to create faces--by e-mail and Internet users in Japan. Our methods include surveys of Internet users in Japan, on-line interviews, and participant observation in chat rooms, as well as hard-copy and electronic archival research.
Andy Kavoori, University of Georgia Net Tarot in New Delhi: Reading the future of the Internet in Advertising This paper examines the future of the Internet in the developing world by examining the discourse of advertising. Based on a visual record of New Delhi and textual analysis of advertisements in an mass circulated Indian newspaper and magazine, it suggests that there is a need to re-think the discourse of digital celebration and euphoria that has accompanied the Internet in the developing world, especially India. It argues that the themes emergent in advertising of Internet firms provide for a vision of the future of the Internet that reifies issues of linguistic hegemony, technological solutions, a consumerist (rather than a citizenry) culture, and reiteration of the traditional discourses of masculinity and class. It suggests that we think about the future’s of Internet technology in the developing world as intimately connected with issues of global capitalism and cultural hegemony in place of an focus on objects of technological innovation or individual innovators of technology.
	Gary Keller-Cárdenas, Arizona State University Artists United!: An Online Community for Latina/o Visual Artists This presentation discusses and illustrates the challenges and solutions arrived at in creating an online community to network hundreds of Latina/o visual artists and their works in the U.S. and elsewhere. On behalf of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR), the Hispanic Research Center (HRC) at Arizona State University has received funds for and is in the process of establishing a creative exchange portal for the Latina/o visual arts community both in the continental United States and elsewhere including Central America, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The project uses communication technologies including the evolving broadband environment of Internet2 to provide an Internet-based home for Latina/o artists who are creators of both still and moving visual images, as well as art organizations, museums, and art history and art education scholars.
Aphra Kerr and Roddy Flynn, Dublin City University Revisiting Globalization and Convergence Through the Movie and Digital Games Industries Unsurprisingly, given the film industry’s traditional propensity to borrow from other media as the basis for some of its biggest hits - from Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind to Harry Potter -- Hollywood has for the past fifteen years been producing films based on successful digital video and computer games. At the same time, Nintendo has enjoyed some of its biggest hits from a series of games based around the MGM/UAS Bond series. Major companies like Vivendi Universal have moved, it would appear effortlessly, into the exploitation of both game and film assets on a global scale. From publishing games like Half Life and Diabhlo for Blizzard, to controlling Universal Studios, these companies seem to exemplify what we understand by globalization and convergence. This paper asks do these trends help us to understand globalization and convergence, and what are the consequences of these trends for national economies and national cultures? From a political economy of the media perspective the patterns of ownership in an industry can have a significant effect on the range and quality of content produced. This perspective would argue that cultural products, like films and games, play an important social role that economists often ignore and that globalization and convergence trends must be examined closely to assess their impact on the range and diversity of content sold on global markets. This paper is based on results from the first year of a post-doctoral project based in STeM (Centre for Science, Technology and Media) at Dublin City University that analyzed the global games industry and interviewed fifteen key players in the Irish industry.
	Laura Kertz, Graduate Center at City University of New York Morals and Markets: Deviance Digital media are exceptionally efficient at segregating hard- and soft-core media, based on such simple notions as bandwidth, noise, and push versus pull. The market for low-band, hard-core media is limited and decreases with the kink of its content, while high-band, soft-core media is routinely pushed to the masses. The mass (soft) consumer market thrives on discarded (and slightly softened) hard-core themes, however, and the notion of deviance is undermined by a relentless recycling, a symbiosis between the mass and the niche market. Thus, in the contemporary media scene, deviance is not the mark of consuming particularly distasteful or peculiar content, but rather of producing-- producing anything at all.
Sharon Kinsella Ganguro (Japanese girls dressed as Africans and Aliens): explorations of the convergence of race and gender Since the mid-1970s, girls’ culture (shojo bunka) has dominated contemporary Japan. The themes and aesthetics of girls’ culture and the cult of the Lolita figure have become central to mass culture and design. In the latter half of the 1990s, girls’ culture and the mass media became focused around the theme of the schoolgirl prostitute. Schoolgirls became subject to an overwhelming scrutiny by media, intelligentsia, and government. At the same time a distinctive schoolgirl street culture emerged. Girls identified themselves as delinquent, streetwise, and stylish (kogal). Towards the end of the 1990s, in an extraordinarily pressured media environment, kogal culture developed a new and extreme tangent, ganguro. Ganguro girls used dark tans and imagery conjured from the culture of the Caribbean and black diaspora. From ganguro also developed a secondary "alien" or "witch" (yamaba) imagery, achieved by the use of heavy and unnatural white make-up and hair over dark tans. This paper will document the orientation of girl’s culture in Japan towards hip hop, soul, and black looks, culminating in this aspect of the kogal and ganguro street culture in the late 1990s. The integration of the performance of girls’ and black culture in global space and the broader parallel between the timing and cultural logic of girls’ culture in Japan and the culture of the black Diaspora will be considered.
	Adam Knee, Mansfield University Anglophone Currents in Hong Kong Cinema The rise of English as a global language has had various repercussions in the cinemas of Asia, not least in those countries that have had Anglophone colonizers in the past. The sway of English has been particularly noticeable in Hong Kong film, with both more English-language productions, and more multi-lingual productions with extensive English sequences, appearing in recent years. This presentation will broadly sketch the industrial and cultural framework of this linguistic shift in order to contextualize an analysis of its textual repercussions-analysis of the distinctive ways that the use of the English language has recently functioned within the Hong Kong cinematic discourse. A key thesis to be advanced here is that the presence of English often operates in tandem with uneasiness over various literal and figurative border incursions and adjunct concerns regarding issues of national and/or regional identity; and moreover that this tendency holds true across various modes of Hong Kong film production, from low-budget exploitation films (e.g., Her Name Is Cat), to higher budgeted action films (e.g., Gen-X Cops), to works aimed for an arthouse market (e.g, Chungking Express). In one striking low-budget example, the suggestively titled Black Blood, characters investigating a crime inexplicably shift back and forth between Cantonese and English in their discussions a number of times, while the mystery at the heart of the film turns out to do with a curse arising from one character’s non-Chinese ancestry. In the higher-profile Who Am I?, the trans-national setting offers a narrative motivation for the predominantly English language dialogue, but this employment of English clearly also resonates with the titular theme, that of an Asian man’s confusion over his real identity.
Derek Kompare, TCU Flows to Files: Conceiving 21st Century Media The concept of flow, as characterized by Raymond Williams and others, is one of the primary metaphors of media studies. It describes how centralized information is sent to mass audiences in an endless stream via electronic receivers (i.e. radio and television). However, the media technologies of the last 25 years have been based less around this ideal of flow than on a fragmented, individuated media experience. Devices ranging from the VCR to the MP3 player deliver information in discrete packages rather than a potentially infinite stream. Accordingly, a more appropriate metaphor for 21st century media is the file. This paper examines how the concept of the file is articulated in contemporary media practices ranging from the distribution of films and television programs on home video to the contentious trade in media files over the Internet. I argue that it is crucial to understand the impact of this new metaphor on how we experience and understand media for the foreseeable future.
	Marwan M. Kraidy, American University Transnational Media and the Hybrid Fabric of Cultural Globalization In this paper I propose to use hybridity as a heuristic focal point from which to explore the ontology of mass mediated transcultural encounters. Theories of cultural domination and resistance have been central to the field of international communication since it took a cultural turn in the 1960s. At that time, international communication widened its scope to include humanities-based approaches, which became known as "global media studies." These theories have served as a framework for researching the connections between the communicative contexts of production, text and reception, articulating industry strategies to ideological content and audience practices. Different traditions in international communication have accorded various levels of importance to these contexts. Cultural imperialism, grounded in critical political economy, focused on production and distribution. Media criticism, derived from literary and rhetorical criticism, examined the layers of meaning embedded in media texts. Reception studies, rooted in cultural anthropology and sociology, semiotics and reader-response theories, emphasized the active role and creative abilities of media audiences. Central to most of these theories is the role of transnational mass media in cross-cultural encounters. What is needed is a theory of hybridity that takes into account the mixing of diverse culture while also considering the implication of global economic and political forces on cultural forms. To meet that objective, I propose critical transculturalism as a novel way of addressing the theoretical tension between infrastructure and superstructure. This objective is met by situating transcultural dynamics on a dialectical/dialogical continuum where they can be studied contextually. In contrast to previous models that conceptualized the material /symbolic equation as a conflictual dialectic, I theorize it as an articulation of mutually constitutive forces of globalization/localization, power/resistance, etc. I illustrate this articulation by presenting case studies such as Telechobis, a now defunct Mexican copycat of the Teletubbies, socio-political talk-shows on Lebanese television, and transAtlantic patterns of format and genre adaptation in reality television.
Peter Kramer, University of East Anglia, UK Hollywood and Germany: Notes on a History of Cultural Exchange Due to its international success and multi-media marketing, Hollywood is often seen as a primary agent of cultural globalization and media convergence. At the same time, it has to be noted that Hollywood is the product of several waves of immigration - from the original moguls to the imported stars and directors of today - and that the work of foreign born personnel in Hollywood has always been characterized both by their cultural assimilation into the American mainstream and by a certain degree of cultural specificity. In this paper, I want to explore Hollywood’s relationship with German personnel and with the German market since the 1970s. The second strand of my paper deals with the success of Hollywood films in Germany, which has become one of Hollywood’s major foreign markets (together with Japan and France). To bring the two strands of my paper together, I also want to ask: How is Hollywood’s success in Germany connected to the exodus of German directors to Hollywood? And how were the Hollywood hits of German directors received back in Germany? Finally, I will try - very briefly - to compare the period since the 1970s with an earlier period in which German (and Austrian) directors moved to Hollywood and rose to dominant positions there, namely the 1920s and 1930s.
	Scott Laderman, University of Minnesota "They Set About Revenging Themselves on the Population": The "Hue Massacre," Travel Guidebooks, and the Shaping of Historical Consciousness in Vietnam While my dissertation research examines tourism and the shaping of American historical memory in Vietnam, this paper will focus in particular on travel guidebooks’ representations of the "Hue Massacre" of 1968. Employing the event as a detailed case study, the paper will analyze how the alleged massacre - the factual basis of which was largely discredited by a leading scholar of the war in Vietnam over twenty-five years ago - is described as an actual and illustrative event within the foreign guidebooks utilized by Western tourists in Vietnam. I argue that the persistence of this myth serves an important ideological function in demonstrating the malevolent intent of the nationalists’ struggle in the country and, by implication, the justness, however misguided, of the American intervention. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, an extensive historical literature, and field research in Vietnam, my paper maintains that guidebooks perform a crucial and largely overlooked role in the formation and/or revision of historical memory among the tens of thousands of Western tourists visiting the country annually. I demonstrate the contribution of guidebooks in arguing that Western - and especially American - collective memory is being increasingly nudged toward what Raymond Williams refers to as a "selective tradition" - that is, "the significant past," the way in which "from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, [while] certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded."
Michel S. Laguerre, University of California at Berkeley, MIT The Digital Identity of the Global City This essay based on research carried out in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Metropolitan Area examines three aspects of the digital identity of the global city. First, it explains the diversity of global digital practices in the city; second it analyzes how diverse global flows have fragmented the identity of the local digital space; and third, it shows how the global city must be seen as a processual node in a globally connected network of digital nodes .It concludes that digitalization provides the city with a new global identity.
	Hee-Eun Lee, University of Iowa Popular Music Industry Working for Television: Neither Global nor Local, but Korean This paper aims at exploring globalized locality of popular music in Korea. A significant amount of research has been discussed local music scenes in the context of globalization, but I would argue that those studies have mainly focused on 1) ‘local’ as the opposite concept of global, 2) globalization and localization in terms of music consumption, and 3) over-celebration of difference and diversity of local music. Taking a different look at these issues and questions raised from the studies, this paper attempts to problematize some essentialized concepts of globalization of popular music. For the purpose, the unique structure and production practices of Korean music industry are investigated as an example to show the dynamics of global and local. As growing one of the biggest music markets in the world, Korean music industry has recently shown unique processes of globalized locality or internalized globalization. Unlike other early-established popular music markets, Korean music industry was not considered to be an important sector of cultural industry until a decade ago. The reasons of the marginalization of Korean music industry even in its domestic context are multi-layered: its mixed practices of pre-modern and modern production processes, its heavy reliance on television industry, its lack of youth audiences, and its lack of support from the government policy. However, one can witness the recent change of the status of Korean music industry, which in turn results not only the changes of production or popular music but also the meaning constructed about/around popular music. Throughout literature review and interviews with industry people, this paper discusses how globalization begins not simply from outside but from inside of the Korean music industry. In this sense, Korean music industry is not just a local market; rather it is a site of struggles between sometimes opposing and sometimes interacting global and local. Several key issues, including the concept of locality, global locality in music production, and notions of difference and diversity in growing youth market, are discussed in order to understand the formation of Korean music industry in the globalization era.
Kwang-Suk Lee Toward Subversive Uses of Technology against Copyright My study will examine the new material conditions that underlie information ownership by high-tech companies. It emphasizes the agency of Internet users to share information. Technology philosopher Andrew Feenberg’s notion of "technical codes" encapsulates the contradictory structure of both dominance and resistance. By using his theoretical concept, this paper will explore the tensions of the current inter-national power struggle between the dominant system of copyright and the anti-copyright movement. It does so by observing the social construction of a particular technology within newly industrialized economy; concretely, my paper performs an empirical study of "Soribada," an online music-swapping site in South Korea. I will discuss the ways in which the legal controversy around Napster, the US popular online music-sharing service functions as a kind of "hegemonic precedent" over its Korean counterpart. Simultaneously, this study focuses on how users and related civil groups in South Korea are attempting to shift power from corporations and the copyright model to users and the music-sharing model. In sum, my paper investigates the contradictory movement between the new pattern of ‘dependency’ by the US intellectual property in a newly industrialized economy and the autonomous resistance by the Internet users against the dominance.
	Julie Lesage, University of Oregon Space/Place as Represented in Travel Media: Some Theoretical Reflections The representation of place/space in documentary media has not been theorized in the way that the gender-inflected use of the human figure in film has been. Yet the framing and "seizing" of place elicits or draws upon politicized mechanisms of desire similar to the way that the representation of the human figure in film draws on politicized sexual desire, as described by Laura Mulvey. My paper draws on the work of human geographers John Urry and Mike Crang who describe the tourist gaze and the use of photography/video by travelers to frame their experience, and on the work of historians of visual culture, who analyze the relation between the rise of photography and film and imperialist expansion. Currently, travel media on television and the Internet offer a case study from which we can theorize how documentary facilitates the imaginary act, and spectatorial pleasue and the use of photography/video by travelers to frame their experience, and on the work of historians of visual culture, who analyze the relation between the rise of photography and film and imperialist expansion. Currently, travel media on television and the Internet offer a case study from which we can theorize how documentary facilitates the imaginary act, and spectatorial pleasure, of possessing space/place. I will conclude by indicating the usefulness of this model to evaluating post-Sept. 11 media coverage of Muslim countries and cultures.
Steven W. Lewis, Rice University Consumer Citizenship, Spiritual Consumerism: Privatizing Propaganda and Commercial Advertising in the People’s Republic of China This paper examines the interplay of the production of images - representations of a claimed reality -- of transnational, national and local lifestyle identification by political and economic actors. I draw upon surveys of outdoor political signs from the "spiritual civilization" campaign and underground subway commercial advertisements in Beijing and Shanghai in 1998 and 1999 to obtain images of collective lifestyle identification, and then examine the degree to which these political and commercial advertisements share common form, content and language. I conclude with speculation about how this interplay between consumer citizenship and spiritual consumerism will affect future public discourse on civil society in Chinese society.
	Arthur Lizie, Bridgewater State College Global Pop Discourse: The New Cultural Imperialism? The Internet and related new media technologies alter traditional time, space, and place considerations, alterations that create once-improbable global communities. While many researchers have investigated the overtly political and macro-social aspects of these international communities, less has been written about the interpersonal and small-group dynamics of ad-hoc mediated communities that have formed globally around popular culture subjects. In an exploratory study, I looked at Wire, an international online e-mail community dedicated to discussing the Irish music group U2. I investigated if this globalization of discourse on an interpersonal/small-group level affords the inclusion of marginalized or alternate discourses, or if it merely replicates classical models of cultural imperialism. In other words: Is interpersonal popular culture discourse on the Web a foundation for more diverse and inclusive intercultural communication, or merely another avenue for the spread of Western and English-language values? What I found was that even in an obviously Western- and entertainment-oriented forum, there was periodic and healthy resistance to English and Western-cultural dominance, and even an understanding by some of the English-speaking community that English isn’t the only global online option. Ultimately, however, the non-English speakers existed at the margins of this community except when their labor was useful to the Western/English group members.
Peter Ludes, Trier University Images of Europe: 1949 to 1998 and 2001/02 In this paper, televised images of Europe from the second half of the twentieth century are compared with media images from five European countries in 2001/02, as are images and information from the Internet, newspapers and magazines. This content analysis will be used to explore the following questions: Which commonalities and differences of European images emerge in 2001/02, with the introduction of the Euro, in selected member states of the European Monetary Union --the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and the Netherlands-- in contrast to the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Do the media cultures in the Euro-zone differ significantly from the other European countries? Are the web offerings more international than the traditional print and television media? Is there a convergence of contents and formats? Can a shift be observed toward more and more common European images when compared to the long-term continuities of US-American and West German television news coverage in the second half of the twentieth century? Does it show elements of a media transition complementary to the introduction of the Euro and to be taken into similar accout for interpreting images, social and economic processes of European and transatlantic dis/orientation and dis/integration? You will see.
	Lisa Lynch, Catholic University The Contradictory Negotiation of Global and National Identities in the Work of New Media Artists My paper explores the sometimes contradictory ways that global and national identities are negotiated in the work of a series of new media artists, including artists whose work focuses on a critique of biotechnology and genetic engineering. Working on a series of interviews and articles with new media artists over the past year (and following discussions on nettime and Rhizome, two major mailing lists for digital artists), I have become quite interested in how and when the question of national origin emerges, or is thematized, in digital art. For some of these artists, contemporary cybertheory allows them to declare themselves if not global citizens, than at least de-territorialized citizens, bound to nationality only by (as artist Eduardo Kac has told me) "an accident of birth." Without denying the relevance of some of these artists' interest in a global digital citizenship (or, for that matter, their insistence that corporate globalism has rearticulated the planet in ways that make traditional national allegiances obsolete), I argue that the positioning of these artists tends to elide the specific conditions in which their work is produced. By looking at the way in which the place does indeed matter for these artists and their work (and by considering why there has been little discussion of how or why it does matter), I hope to suggest, more broadly, how to find a way of representing media phenomena that are at once both avowedly global and materially local.
Margarita Maas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events.
	Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, University of Massachusetts Between The Global Arena and The Israeli Nation-State: The Affects of Globalization on Cultural Diversity in Israel Although geographically located in the Middle East, Israel is a state of immigrants from Europe, America and the Arab world, and is perceived as part of the Western global community. This Western status for a Middle Eastern country affects local media meanings produced by Israeli media, and affects local tension between East and West within the state of Israel. This translates to tension between center and periphery over cultural identity. The cultural domination of Ashkenazi Jews (of European extraction) over Sepharadi or Mizrahi Jews (of Arab extraction) within Israel creates a structure parallel to European domination and Orientalism, and itself mimics the Global sphere.This paper explores the effect of global media discourse on Israeli media discourse. I show how characteristics of East-West discourse, as constructed on the global scale, are found within the Nation-State of Israel. I discuss global features of media discourse when East and West conflict, using media coverage of the Gulf War and post-September 11th pursuit of terrorism as examples of stories manipulated by media choice of image.My purpose in using these examples is to examine and understand the nature of East-West relations on two levels. The first level is the power struggle and economic interests leading to Western interference in the Gulf and in Afghanistan. The second level exposes how the media shapes narratives and stories by selecting visual and cultural images.In the second part of the paper, I demonstrate how East-West power relations and Eurocentric discourse exist within the nation state of Israel. To understand this case is to reconsider questions of how Orientalism, as a practice of knowledge and thought, works. I revisit the concept of Orientalism, thereby relocating the different ways in which it internally works within the Israeli nation state. I also focus on the complexity in which Orientalism functions when the state occupies people and identities rather then land and physical borders.
Ramez Maluf, Lebanese American University Social Impact of Arab Satellite Television The paper presents an analysis of the impact satellite television has had on Arab societies in the last 10 years. Until the early 1990s, Arab audiences were only able to watch state-run television that presented them with censored and protocol news, and programming that was not attentive to the market. In the last few years, Arabs have access to a large number of competing Arab TV stations that present them with aggressive news coverage and programs, documentaries, political and social talk shows, dubbed "telenovelas," and entertainment that present women and men in a new light. Arab identity, language and social mores have all been affected. This paper examines the effect of these developments on Arab identity, by correlating specific TV programming changes and local print media reports and analyses.
	David Marshall, Northeastern University The Look of the Web: Screen Patterns, Graphics and the Web Aesthetic There is a great deal of both popular and intellectual discussion about media convergence that more or less has focused on its technological aspects. This paper, through an historical weave, attempts to stitch together the aesthetic convergence of the Web with television and personal computers. Television’s key transformation with the emergence of computer and digital editing is the expansion of graphics in its look. Thus the contemporary television screen is a partitioned display that resembles the framed structure of many Web pages. This graphical overlay onto the television screen has a longer history in the formation of information that is particularly attached to sports and news broadcasting and has been allowed to proliferate and intensify in the Web aesthetic era of information. There is also a parallel history of integrating advertising content and network branding into the television screen. These two patterns of graphic transformation of the image have been appropriated into the look of the Web. This paper explores the coordinated patterning of the contemporary screen and investigates the convergence of screen content across media. It also advances that the relationship to information and the screen between the use of point and click technology in personal computers has strong parallels with the development and use of the remote control for television viewing.
John McMurria, New York University No Title The television landscape, once a province of nationally organized systems of dissemination, regulation, finance, production and consumption, is increasingly contoured by national industry deregulation and global media conglomeration. Faith in market competition and new digital technologies drive cultural policy as pay-TV channel proliferation offers the promise of limitless choice. This paper considers this emerging global television economy through the case of the on-going international expansion of the globally branded Discovery Channel. While niche channels such as Discovery offer more narrowly focused special-interest programming, these global audience maximizing imperatives foster risk-reducing strategies that set particular limits on political engagement.
	Monika Mehta, Ithaca College Globalizing Bombay Cinema, the Indian State, and the Indian Family In this paper, I examine the changing relations amongst Bombay cinema, Indian diasporic communities and the Indian state in a global context. On May 10, 1998, the Indian state, after 50 years of independence, recognized film as an industry. This dramatic shift in state policy occurred during the same period as two other noteworthy developments: First, in the 1990s, the Bombay film industry produced and successfully distributed what the Indian state and the audiences approvingly referred to as "family films." These films affirm India's moral foundations by representing its traditions and announce India's triumphant entry into the global market by managing to persistently include a wide array of multinational brand names in its narratives. In these films, women become pivotal for the production of the patriarchal Indian family and men are charged with spreading seeds of liberalization within and beyond the borders of the Indian nation-state. Secondly, during the same period, the Indian diasporic communities emerged as valued audiences in Bombay box-office figures -- and as desired investors in the Indian state's political, economic and cultural plans. In examining this historical conjuncture, I seek to show how processes of globalization contribute to the (re)production of the Indian state, Hindi commercial cinema, and the Indian family.
Tatsuhisa Miyanohara, Junko Sugimura, Yoshiyori Urano The Design of a Mixed-media Curriculum in the Learning Environment by Using The CRONOS Education system We have designed mixed-media curriculum for history lessons in Japanese high schools. We (teachers and application developers) have understood the profound advantages of various media (Books, Videos, Internet, The CRONOS system) and have created lessons that use the most appropriate forms of media. In collaborative and interactive situations, students in the classroom could gradually develop the ability to look at historical events from various viewpoints. Through experiments, we have demonstrated that students could think about day-to-day situations to discover, to understand, to reconstruct, and finally to create new relationships between daily events.
	Torin Monahan, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Global Matrices of Sensibility: The Construction of Artistic Value and Agency in Los Angeles Schools Technology has long been theorized as an agent of artistic change. Discourse about technology and artistic value has generally focused on how tools for art production, re-production, and dissemination alter experiential meaning. Emerging narratives about information and media technologies extend questions of artistic value to the level of mediums of creation. This paper follows the production of artistic value through narratives and practices of digital creations. Art education provides an ideal locus for observing how meanings emerge in practices of production. I draw upon ethnographic research at arts education high school sites in Los Angeles to demonstrate how artistic value is constantly negotiated in tension with circulating definitions of material and virtual purity. This negotiation, through art discourse and production, is always grounded in relational contexts of meaning. Art works are open to valuation through experience, yet art mediums present boundaries to artistic possibilities. Artistic value, then, is always co-constructed by narratives and practices in mediums of constrained underdetermination.
Sujata Moorti, Old Dominion University Imaginary Homes, Transplanted Traditions: Indian Television and Diasporic Identity Indian television schedules have witnessed recently the proliferation of entertainment programs depicting Non-Resident Indians (NRI). Significantly, in most of these narratives, NRIs are presented as being out of touch with the reality of India and shown as clinging to an archaic idea of tradition. These ideas about NRIs and their nostalgia for an edenic past are mediated by the figure of the mother-in-law. Analyzing the visual, rhetorical and discursive tropes in these NRI narratives, I argue that anxieties about the undue influence of diasporic populations - in the economic, social and cultural realms -- are mobilized by and sublimated onto the figure of the woman; she becomes the flashpoint around which contesting definitions of nation and tradition are negotiated. At the same time, Indian television producers have recently developed programming that is geared primarily for diasporic populations but is also aired simultaneously in India. In these programs, produced in India and not in the diaspora, the narratives center on antipodean definitions of home and tradition. In this instance, television producers rely on the visual grammar of tourism to depict national culture and tradition for an immigrant audience. Even as NRIs are mocked in national programming for being outdated, shows geared toward diasporic populations reiterate a nostalgia without memory, grounding tradition in a mythical golden past. Together, these two narrative strategies reveal the limited visual grammar available to discuss affect, culture and identity within a transnational public arena.
	David Morrison and Michael Svennevig, University of Leeds The Changing Nature of Privacy and the Changing Media Environment The most common defense for the intrusion of privacy by the media is that of public interest. An examination of professional associations of journalists around the world reveals that although the defense of something being in the public interest is present in all the guidelines, no definition of what the public interest is exists - only areas where public interest might operate. If, in the past, it was difficult to define the public interest, it is almost meaningless now when confronted by a public that is global. This paper, drawing on recent research at the Institute of Communications Studies, will explore what privacy might mean, and what defense can be mounted in the new communications age to protect privacy. The research includes interviews with senior media personnel, radio, television and print, along with Internet providers, and regulators. Particular attention was paid to the access of information via the Internet. Given that the research was in progress during the events of September 11th in New York, special treatment was given to considerations of the privacy of those caught up in the events, and the degree to which the Internet was used as a vehicle for following the events. Our paper presents a qualitative and quantitative basis for considering the protection of privacy in a converged media world.
James Morrison, MIT The Author is Dead-Long Live the Author! According to Jay David Bolter and George Landow, we are fortunate that the technology of hypertext has finally manifested, in material form, the principle of authorial indeterminacy proclaimed by such Postmodern theorists as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Their claim is that because all texts are interpreted variously, or "polysemously," by their readers, texts by their very nature are pervious to multiple readings, and as a result they are not the texts written by their authors, but those read by their readers. Bolter and Landow posit that owing to the interventionist capabilities afforded readers by many hypertext systems, hypermedia instantiate the writerly text technologically. My countervailing notion is that far from revealing previously hidden qualities of text, such an indeterminacy principle in written communication is nothing new, and has strong roots that extend all the way from the medieval four-level exegesis of the Bible to the types of ambiguity discussed by William Empson and the other New Critics. The kind of literacy being fostered by hypermedia may resemble the state of "craft literacy" (to use Eric Havelock’s term) prevalent in the Middle Ages, in which iconographic effect is at least as significant as semantic content. The death of the contemporary author more closely resembles the doctrine of the king’s two bodies that once validated the continuation of medieval monarchy than a clear break with the textuality of the past.
	Sheila Nayar, Greensboro College, N.C. Cinematically Speaking: Exploring Indian Cinema Via the Orality-Literacy Continuum Why did Satyajit Ray’s cinematic masterpiece Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1954) elicit so little interest on the part of Indians at home? How was it possible that a visual narrative of suck simplicity, purity and universality - and hence, by all accounts, of accessibility - was greeted with such little enthusiasm by the "unsophisticated audiences" Ray thought he could reach? This paper posits that the fundamental distinction between Ray’s movies (i.e., art film) and the commercial cinema privileged by "unsophisticated audiences" (i.e., Bombay masala movies) can be lucidly enucleated when examined in light of recent scholarship in the areas of orality and literacy. Indeed, this paper will claim that what significantly distinguishes art cinema generally from popular movies, and by extension high art from popular culture, are characteristics of a decidedly literate (or oral) nature, with respect to narrative and performance. I have shown elsewhere that Hindi popular film, not unlike Homeric epic or the Mahabharata, has been fundamentally contoured by the requirements and/or desires of an oral or oral-privileging audience. Characteristics of oral narrative and oral performance that are reflected in the Hindi film include a preference for formula and rhetorical devices, episodic structure, the use of flashbacks, high levels of violence and melodrama, a strong presence of the visually and aurally agonistic, flat characters, a Manichean worldview, a collective orientation, and narrative closure. But these "oral" attributes of Bombay movies are noticeably absent in Ray’s neo-realist films. Indeed, in comparing their forms, Pather Panchali shows itself to be an explicitly literate narrative, in possession of characteristics antithetical to those of orally inscribed screen storytelling. As such, Ray’s film would be virtually impenetrable to a mentality that had not been cognitively and/or environmentally shaped by literacy. This paper will introduce and explain what these various literate attributes are by mapping them against their oral counterparts in a pseudo-binary fashion (for, in actual fact this is a continuum, not a dichotomy). When positioned besides the attributes of conventional Hindi film, it is hoped that the significance of orality and literacy to visual media - indeed, top the very notion of aesthetics - will become truly apparent.
Heather Nunn, Middlesex University and Anita Biressi, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College Video Justice: Public Anxiety and Private Trauma (the authors are currently writing a book on factual television and hybrid forms entitled Reality TV: Realism and Revelation for Wallflower Press) This paper concentrates on the U.S. program Video Justice: Crime Caught on Camera (US 1997 Fox Productions) as an example of programming that raises a number of important questions about media spectacle, media technologies and media ethics. This controversial true crime program chronicles a range of crimes including store robberies, shootings and street beatings. Its voiceover begins with the statement: "There’s a war going on in America between citizens and criminals, between the violent and the vulnerable." It was produced through editing together mainly CCTV and security footage and individuals’ recordings, together with film from law enforcement sources. Here scenes of violence and aggression are anchored by a voice over and spliced with interviews with witnesses, experts and the surviving participants. We argue that the appeal of the program operates on several levels and in contradictory ways. Viewers are confronted with scenarios of sudden and unprovoked violence that seemingly confirm public anxiety and fear of crime. They are also arguably offered a ‘safe’ and even pleasurable subject position from which to witness these events. However, the spectacle of crime is punctured by moments of intimate personal revelation when the victim relates the trauma of violent experiences. This paper explores that ways in which these narratives of personal trauma and crisis fracture and undermine the coherence of the program as ‘entertainment’ and consequently reveal a more complex and ambiguous relationship between audience and text.
	Tokunbo Ojo, Canadian journalist Post-NWICO Debate: Image of Africa in the Western Media Developing countries, under the banner of the UNESCO, moved a motion for the New World Information Order (NWICO) to address the issue of global inequality. However, in some circles, the call for the NWICO is seen as an attack on the freedom of expression and Western values. Situated within the paradigm of information flow controversy, this paper shall focus on the image of Africa as constructed by the Western media in the emerging Communication Order after the intensive NWICO debate of the 70s and early 80s. The paper begins with a brief review of the rise and the fall of the NWICO debate. It then examines Africa’s media image in the post-NWICO era, and it concludes there has not been much positive change to the Western media’s coverage of Africa since the NWICO debate.
Esra Ozkan Search-Engine Biases on the Internet Web search engines dictate prominence to certain on-line information and systematic invisibility to certain others and by doing so create biases that have significant implications for the promises of Internet. This paper will attempt to map out these biases and their implications by studying the ways in which search engines operate in digital space to make certain information visible/invisible. By doing so, it will question the utopian promises of the Internet in terms of democratization of information, elimination of borders, and creation of a public sphere. To uncover the biases of search engines, the focus will be on the visibility of information about Turkey. The biases of search engines will be studied under the following categories: pre-existing, technical and emergent biases. The pre-existing biases will cover the social, economic, political and cultural factors that shape Turkey’s place in the "real world" and digital world. The technical biases will include the biases that emerge from the technical design of the search engines. The emergent biases will look at the biases that emerge in the context of use.
	Mari Castañeda Paredes, University of Massachusetts The Long Revolution of Digital Television Traditional over-the-air television is slowly transitioning to a digital transmission format. The events of September 11 have delayed the transition further since television broadcasters petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for more time, claiming that the continuous coverage of the tragedy reduced on-air advertising profits. The transition to an advanced Digital Television broadcast system in the United States is chock-full of such delays since the FCC began its inquiry in 1987. This paper examines the economic and policy issues surrounding the transformation of TV into a new generation of media production, distribution and consumption, and compares DTV with earlier changeovers in television history such as color TV. The investigation concludes with discussion of how digital television (and new media more generally) is part of a larger transition in the global market economy toward digital capitalism.
Jane Chi Hyun Park, University of Texas - Austin Final Fantasy: A Case Study An initial foray into the realm of CGI-based movies was the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu Sakaguchi and Moto Sakakibara), which premiered in the US in June 2001. Although well received in Germany, France and Spain, the film flopped in Japan and the U.S. My paper examines the production and reception of Final Fantasy in the latter two countries. It focuses on how and why the film might have failed to perform as well as predicted at the box office, and to what extent was this failure a result of one or more of the following factors: - the film’s inability to find a global target audience; - the difficulties in reversing the more conventional movement of feature film to videogame; - and "cultural differences' between America and Japan as reflected in the film’s narrative and formal aspects.
	Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Margarita Maas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events.
Roberta Pearson, Cardiff University Cultural Circulation in Three European Cities: spatial affiliation, cultural heirarchies and ideological centrality My paper will examine whether patterns of cultural circulation at the local level of three European cities (Bilbao, Palermo and Cologne) do or do not substantiate grand theories of globalization. The paper will do this by locating various cultural forms circulating in these cities on a three-way matrix composed of: 1. Spatial affiliations: the global; the national; the regional; the local; 2. Cultural hierarchies: the high, the low, the ‘serious,’ the ‘popular,’ the middlebrow; 3. and Ideological centrality: in Raymond Williams' terms, the dominant, the residual and the emergent.
	Jon Pettigrew, Loughborough University Generative Futures This case study considers the role of computers for creativity, a school in the city of Brighton and Hove, UK is using NMTs across the curriculum to motivate and enhance general literacy of 11 -16 year old students from disadvantaged social conditions. In particular the work of Candy and Edmonds [2000] on how computers can enhance creativity is considered in the context of children acting as artists. The role of intelligent-use interfaces and how children construct a model and relationship to deal with them has been covered in previous work with children [Pettigrew 2001]. The assumptions behind much IT teaching and other experiences for children have been questioned [Pettigrew 1999], since what needs to be learned is an approach, the reliance on teaching microskills is redundant and demotivates children. The project, called Some Old Bones, based on the discovery of the world’s oldest musical instruments [Zhang 1999], is positive about the creative use of computers in the future. Children are asked to recreate 9,000-year-old sounds. One transition that is important is the development of new genres of content which are only possible with computer power and knowledge based systems. The children in the study develop generative music [Eno 1996], which is rule based, and which creates subtly different versions of a piece or set of rules each time it plays. The long term implications of these kinds of experiences and relationships are reviewed in the context of the Fourth Great Discontinuity [Mazlish 1994] - the co-evolution of humans and computers: carbonware and siliconware and their combinations.
Sheila Petty, University of Regina Transforming Spaces: African Computer-Based Narratives The temptation is to regard the emergence of computer-based media and knowledge economies as unprecedented in media evolution. However, for cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, the process of adapting, and ultimately transforming, westocentric technologies to local concerns is well established. In particular, the rise of black African cinema and its distinctively African conventions, has demonstrated that technology is a tool rather than a determinant. The use of African social space and orality as a foundation for narrative structure has evolved into a unique and evocative filmic style, adapted specifically for local concerns and cultural needs. Given the success of black African cinema, it may be argued that sub-Saharan African artists will bring a similar approach to computer-based narrative forms despite the westocentric foundation of the technology. Thus, this paper intends to explore the Senegalese web-based narratives Amika (Ndary Lô, Massamba Mbaye, Moussa Tine and Madické Seck, 1999) and Lait Miraculeux (Séa Diallo, Alpha Sow, Mamadou Fall Dabo and Djibril Sy) as African interactive narrative forms and consider the implications of their aesthetic and narrative presentations on Dakar Web. In particular, I will examine how these narratives use space, time and oral tradition as a means of expressing uniquely African cultures and identities.
	Chris Pike - Plenary Conversation 2
Monroe E. Price, University of Oxford and Yeshiva University Globalization and the Remapping of Relationship between State and Images The phrase "global media" sometimes assumes that regulation by the state is impossible in a time of new technologies. But something about actual practice is lost in the denial of national power and the deprecation of state capacity to make and enforce law: the complex, yeasty, contradictory, often oppressive adjustments by states and other actors that seek to maintain control. What has actually resulted is a dynamic, interstate process, in which the set of narratives within any state is increasingly the result of multilateral transactions, transactions among states and between states and multinational corporations and other entities. As a result of new information technologies, the late twentieth century world became engaged in a remapping of the relationship of the state to images and information coursing within its boundaries. It is the nature of the development of global media for states to be in contest over measures of control. Globalization of media often refers to the pervasive activities of major corporations (private or ecclesiastic) or major political powers and the extent to which images they produce permeate the world’s consciousness. The global market is not merely a forum for trade in films and television programs. It is, as well, an interdependent site for the development and application of formal and informal rules that shape narratives. Ideologies compete, and the consequent alignment of allegiances ultimately affects the persistence of governments and nations themselves. Imagery becomes a supplement or substitute for force. Pressure to affect public opinion has always been a preoccupation of those holding or seeking power, as governments attempt to influence populations through propaganda, both inside and without their boundaries.
	Aswin Punathambekar, Comparative Media Studies, MIT Zhan Li, Comparative Media Studies, MIT Sangita Shresthova, Comparative Media Studies, MIT BollySpace: An Interactive Dance Technology Project (funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT) "BollySpace" uses the performance arts to generate a new and creative bridge between popular Bollywood film-based themes and digital technologies. The application of digital innovation to the Bollywood film and dance tradition represents a new territory for the dance technology field in general in addition to expanding the space (of everyday life, weddings, festivals and other communal gatherings in India and abroad) in which the song-and-dance routines of Bollywood films function. It is impossible to overstate the role that Indian cinema, Hindi cinema from Bollywood in particular, plays in defining cultural identity in South Asia, growing Diasporic communities abroad, and culturally diverse communities such as MIT. Bollywood’s increasingly trans-national and mediated cultural presence raises important questions about globalized cultures, new media applications and redefined communal spaces. "BollySpace" is a collaborative, performative student project that explores this cultural significance in increasingly global and convergent media environments.

Click on Abstract titles to read the actual papers.
Click on speaker names to read bios.
Click here to download a free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

A-H I-Q R-Z



	Bo Reimer, Malmö University, Sweden Altered Images: TV Sports and Cultural Change In this paper, I will discuss the way that TV sports have developed in two Western countries, the United States and Sweden. In these two countries, TV sports have developed within two completely different frameworks, one commercial and one public service. This has, of course, shaped the work that has been carried out. Focusing on these two countries thus makes it possible to show the different directions a TV genre may take when it comes to the audio-visual design of the genre, as well as to show the different roles that a genre may play in different contexts. But it also means a possibility of looking at changes in the relationship between two media systems. In an era of globalization and deregulation, the traditional distinction between a public service and a commercial way of working is no longer as clear cut. In Sweden today, sport is no longer confined only to public service TV. There is now sport also on commercial stations, and public service TV has had to adjust to this new situation by re-thinking what TV sport "is" for them. This re-thinking -- which has been painful -- is a telling example of the new global media environment and its consequences.
Jan Rek, University of Lodz (Poland) Studying How the World Has Been Won: About Two Sides of One Approach to the Process of Globalization and the Media Today This paper discusses the situation of the media and media studies today. Its underlying premise is that the attack on America on Sep 11, 2001 on the one hand, and the street protests against globalization (as in Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg…) on the other hand, have brought about legitimization of the concept of the global village. Transnational and cross-cultural interactions triggered off by such events seem to corroborate claims on the convergence in the mass media. In general, two concepts of globalization have been produced within the globalization discourse. The first one is hard vertical. It overlaps with the post-colonial discourse and comes as an effect of the syndrome of the master and the servant, or the conqueror and the conquered. Its more general and universal version is that of the stronger and the weaker in which those "at the bottom" endeavor to replace the ones "at the top," avenging themselves and possibly calling upon ideologies derived from human rights or historic justice to reinforce their claims. The second one, soft vertical, results from travel theory (Said, Clifford) which, by producing a "deterritorialization" of culture, has contributed to the concept of the media as travel (Loshitzky). The concept is seemingly power-free as it removes the relationship between the stronger and the weaker from sight. However, the analysis conducted in the later part of my presentation shows that this approach, if applied to research activities, would be only a mask and a disguise, a game played by researchers who support it in the name of deconstruction of history and who want to liberate themselves from the role of the master, passed on through tradition, as evidenced in history. This intentional exclusion of the power factor from the analysis of the way in which the media operate would also be an attempt either to re-construct social memory, undertaken in conjunction with the psychoanalytical concept of repression, or to suppress less commendable elements from memory.
	Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Margarita Maas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events.
Woongjae Ryoo Negotiating Globalization: Korean Modes of Practice in the Age of Globalization as Exemplified in Advertising The purpose of this study is to investigate the fears and hopes of Korean people toward globalization by analyzing discursive strategies exemplified in advertising. This study sought to examine how particular discourses are shaped, reproduced and legitimized in a society through the use of language, mass communication and a form of cultural production. My study concludes that it may be more appropriate not to choose one of many globalization interpretations as a single monolithic theory, but to consider several perspectives altogether in a complex and nuanced way.
	Eric D. Saranovitz, New York University Theorizing the Transnational Audience This paper examines the question of what constitutes a media audience at a time of global media flows. While it has been largely assumed by global communication researchers that transnational audiences exist in some form-either as the conglomeration of individuals who are connected by a given medium (e.g., Dayan and Katz’ Media Events) or as the equivalent of the market for given cultural products/channels. However, neither of these models is sufficient for understanding the makings of an audience, especially a transnational audience, which tends to be ephemeral, scattered and extremely fragmented. While there has been much work in the past decade trying to reconceptualize our understanding of the audience, it has largely been constructed around an intrinsic sense of a local or national audience (although never articulated as such). In order to inform our understanding of the effects of conglomeration, convergence and transnational flows, this paper is an attempt to theorize the transnational audience-how it is composed, what makes it an audience, whether we can even suggest that there exists such a thing.
Steven Schneider, Harvard University World Horror Cinema and the US: Bringing it all Back Home As recent scholarship has endeavored to show, the relationship between Hollywood and its various "Others" is every bit as complex, evolving, and mutually influential as that between trash (cult, psychotronic, etc.) filmmaking and the cinematic avant-garde. As I shall argue, this is especially true when it comes to the horror genre. The dominance of American film production and the ready availability of U.S. films from all periods may have gone a long way towards engendering the disproportionate critical focus on this nations cinematic horror. But at the levels of style, technique, and narrative form, the influence of U.S. horror filmmaking practices, formulas, and (sub) generic conventions has by no means been unidirectional. Indeed, more than ever before, the horror film traditions of other national and regional cinemas are engaged in a dynamic process of cross-cultural exchange with American mainstream, independent, and underground horror alike.
	Brigitte Schulze, Trier University (Germany), Mahatma Gandhi University (India) Globalization and Divergence Dynamics of Dissensus in Non-Dominant Cinema Cultures of South India Our fieldwork researches the many facets of cinema-related "life stories" and "world views" of Malayali women (Malayalam is Kerala's predominant language) as possible. However, our focus is on women who are facing class- and caste-related discriminations. We document these life stories - views of women’s social and inner worlds - by means of video and audio tapes which are either totally controlled by, or handled in tight cooperation with the women. The empirical phase of our research will conclude by April 2002. My presentation at the MIT conference will be based on these documents, on some of our initial conclusions including two these: First, we maintain that the processes of the formation of the regional identity (i. e., of being a 'Keralite', respectively a Malayali) and of the local gender identities, are not so much shaped by global or globalized views, but by the very particular regional type of modernity and its perceptions of individuality and collectivity which have a history stretching all through the 20th century, and which crystallize in the local Malayali cinema culture. Cinema, is understood by us as a public sphere and as a complex socio-cultural space where moral and emotional aspects of often contradictory identity constructions are negotiated. Secondly, we maintain that the histories of these interconnected aspects of the specific type of how the modern Keralite relates to her or his Malayal media environment (the cinema in particular) can not be grasped by means of media theories which have not only been largely conceived by dominant academic circles in a few Western societies, but which are founded on a very small empirical base consisting of social experiences and conceptions of modernity by Europeans and US-Americans only.
James Schwoch, Northwestern University Crypto-Convergence, Media, and the Cold War: the Early Globalization of Television in a Context of Psychological Warfare, Public Opinion Polling, and Science Policy My paper builds out of my long-term archival project investigating television, telecommunications, and American Cold War diplomacy. Utilizing findings from government archives (state, US Information Agency, CIA, and a few specialized agencies); the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries; and the Public Records Office (United Kingdom) I will discuss: (1) several early attempts or schemes to build international/global television networks starting circa 1950; and (2) how these schemes for globalizing television were cast in a context of psychological warfare and East-West security issues. These global television schemes ranged from massive intercontinental relay systems to television transmitters aboard intercontinental commercial aircraft. The "visionaries" emerged from several nations and regions, including the USA, Japan, and Europe. Although none of these early global television systems came to fruition, the existence of these plans does indicate a deep interest in simultaneous global television broadcasting prior to the communication satellite. I shall also give examples of local situations, such as the resurgence of television in post-war Berlin, that further exemplify the issues of psychological warfare and East-West security. Despite surface appearances, I have become convinced that global television after the Second World War grew more along the framework of an East-West security divide rather than only along the framework of national identity. That’s a controversial idea, and I will try to demonstrate why the primary documents of the era lead to such a conclusion.
	Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Margarita Maas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events.
Charlie Sheaffer, University of Minnesota The Democratic Frontier of the Digital United States: Toward an Extimaterial Humanities Pedagogy The Camas Prairie sits in central Idaho, about midway between the Snake River and the Sawtooth Mountains, where it offers a thirty-mile long reprieve from the harsh climates and topography which surround it. It is a place where people make difficult livings on single-family cattle and wheat operations-and it is where I first began to seriously consider the electronic-age confluence of pedagogy and democracy. My paper invokes a series of events-occurring on the Prairie and entailing issues of place, ethnicity, and transnational identity-toward an inquiry into the adequacy of the contemporary American humanities curriculum to its digital contexts. The shortcomings of this relation have been blamed in various ways for the emergent public cynicism toward the academy: Conservatives such as E. D. Hirsch and William Bennett argue that the public's frustration stems from the loss of a prior condition of cultural and curricular consensus, while figures such as Gerald Graff and Gregory Ulmer assert, in contrast, that this frustration bespeaks our disciplinary declension from developing epistemological contexts, our pedagogical betrayal, in other words, of our own intellectual insights into cultural contingency. And while I join Graff and Ulmer in rejecting the fantasy of lost consensus, I want to supplant their notion of the emergence of a problematic gap with an awareness of the pedagogical foreclosure of what is in fact a constitutive split. Through an analysis of events on the Camas Prairie, my paper explores the premise of radical democracy, whereby, as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have argued, the successful struggle for equity stems neither from the assertion of essence nor from the primacy of the signifying field-but rather from the founding of the signifying aggregate upon its own intrinsic non-part. An extimaterial pedagogy, then, would be that which cultivates the element which Jacques Alain Miller denotes as extimate: an element which resides not within the space between a community and its extrinsic others, but which, on the contrary, remains internal to (yet unoccupied by) the community itself.
	Seema Shrikhande, Oglethorpe University, Atlanta Business News Channels in Asia: Strategies and Challenges This paper focuses on the internationalization of television markets, with particular attention to business news channels CNBC and ABN in Asia. Using the industrial organization approach, I will examine how changes in competition affected the strategy and performance of each of these players in this market from 1993 to 2000. This study adds to our understanding of the globalization of media audiences and questions whether diversity will, in fact, be possible when major media corporations internationalize.
Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Margarita Maass, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Media in Transition - Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events.
	Jacob Smith, Indiana University; and Kurt Squire, Indiana University and MIT ‘Sound Screen’: Points of Convergence in Recorded Sound and Digital Gaming The usual representation of virtual reality is a visual terrain of grids and glowing skyscrapers of information - with the emphasis on visual. Writer Erik Davis notes that experiments with virtual reality tend to relegate acoustic dimensions to the background - unfortunate because of sound’s incredible capacity to suggest a three dimensional space. Game designers are world designers who populate these virtual environments with agents, objects, and potential interactions. In our paper, we will demonstrate how a critical part of this design process is (or should be) the design of soundscapes. As such, the musical trajectories of virtual soundscapes and ambient recording are a rich tradition for exploring the design of virtual spaces. We provide examples of games such as Half Life and Zelda: Ocarina of Time that share elements with such landscapes, using music and sound to create atmosphere, mood, and depth of space in virtual landscapes. The critical role of sound in creating immersion within these environments suggests that game designers may benefit from exploring the hitherto ignored traditions of sonic landscapes for design inspiration. Minimally, these examples highlight the importance of designing visuals and audio in concert, and caution designers against pursuing photo-realistic graphics at the expense of sound design.
Sujatha Sosale, Georgia State University Cultural Convergence of the Global and the Local: Pan-capitalism, Empowerment, or a Third Way? The Internet encompasses both technological and symbolic convergences of many kinds in virtual space, a space that is not defined by geopolitical borders. In this paper, I would like to focus on one specific form of convergence that this medium has enabled-the cultural convergence of the global and the local. The case of Greenstar, positioning itself as an e-commerce site located at the nexus of environmental conservation (providing solar power equipment to villages in many regions worldwide) and digital production and marketing of local cultures on the Internet (in return for helping harness solar power) offers a particularly interesting case for studying this phenomenon. In its projects in locations worldwide (Asia, the Middle East, Africa), Greenstar declares its mission is to provide solar energy facilities for powering computers in rural communities. These computers are dedicated to connecting to the Internet in order to facilitate literacy, health education, and economic self-reliance. In return, villagers produce crafts and other cultural products from their local traditions and cultural reservoir, which are then marketed on the Internet by Greenstar.The company is a for-profit venture; part of the profits goes to the community, and other parts are divided among shareholders and future projects. This combination of a capitalistic venture and attempts to promote development of rural communities with their own local resources that find expression in a digital commer) offers a particularly interesting case for studying this phenomenon. In its projects in locations worldwide (Asia, the Middle East, Africa), Greenstar declares its mission is to provide solar energy facilities for powering computers in rural communities. These computers are dedicated to connecting to the Internet in order to facilitate literacy, health education, and economic self-reliance. In return, villagers produce crafts and other cultural products from their local traditions and cultural reservoir, which are then marketed on the Internet by Greenstar.The company is a for-profit venture; part of the profits goes to the community, and other parts are divided among shareholders and future projects. This combination of a capitalistic venture and attempts to promote development of rural communities with their own local resources that find expression in a digital commercial outlet in a global market raises three possible questions: (1) Is Greenstar promoting a pan-capitalist culture in a novel way that might be explained by a postmodern global economy? (2) To what extent can we say it is helping local communities empower themselves with endogenous means? (3) Has it found a third way (to borrow sociologist Anthony Giddens' political concept to understand the global cultural economy) to marry global capitalist interests with community empowerment in developing regions? I explore answers to these questions based on a reading of the Greenstar web sites.
	Kurt Squire, Indiana University and MIT; and Jacob Smith, Indiana University ‘Sound Screen’: Points of Convergence in Recorded Sound and Digital Gaming The usual representation of virtual reality is a visual terrain of grids and glowing skyscrapers of information - with the emphasis on visual. Writer Erik Davis notes that experiments with virtual reality tend to relegate acoustic dimensions to the background - unfortunate because of sound’s incredible capacity to suggest a three dimensional space. Game designers are world designers who populate these virtual environments with agents, objects, and potential interactions. In our paper, we will demonstrate how a critical part of this design process is (or should be) the design of soundscapes. As such, the musical trajectories of virtual soundscapes and ambient recording are a rich tradition for exploring the design of virtual spaces. We provide examples of games such as Half Life and Zelda: Ocarina of Time that share elements with such landscapes, using music and sound to create atmosphere, mood, and depth of space in virtual landscapes. The critical role of sound in creating immersion within these environments suggests that game designers may benefit from exploring the hitherto ignored traditions of sonic landscapes for design inspiration. Minimally, these examples highlight the importance of designing visuals and audio in concert, and caution designers against pursuing photo-realistic graphics at the expense of sound design.
Junko Sugimura, Yoshiyori Urano , Tatsuhisa Miyanohara The Design of a Mixed-media Curriculum in the Learning Environment by Using The CRONOS Education system We have designed mixed-media curriculum for history lessons in Japanese high schools. We (teachers and application developers) have understood the profound advantages of various media (Books, Videos, Internet, The CRONOS system) and have created lessons that use the most appropriate forms of media. In collaborative and interactive situations, students in the classroom could gradually develop the ability to look at historical events from various viewpoints. Through experiments, we have demonstrated that students could think about day-to-day situations to discover, to understand, to reconstruct, and finally to create new relationships between daily events.
	Michael Svennevig and David Morrison, University of Leeds The Changing Nature of Privacy and the Changing Media Environment The most common defense for the intrusion of privacy by the media is that of public interest. An examination of professional associations of journalists around the world reveals that although the defense of something being in the public interest is present in all the guidelines, no definition of what the public interest is exists - only areas where public interest might operate. If, in the past, it was difficult to define the public interest, it is almost meaningless now when confronted by a public that is global. This paper, drawing on recent research at the Institute of Communications Studies, will explore what privacy might mean, and what defense can be mounted in the new communications age to protect privacy. The research includes interviews with senior media personnel, radio, television and print, along with Internet providers, and regulators. Particular attention was paid to the access of information via the Internet. Given that the research was in progress during the events of September 11th in New York, special treatment was given to considerations of the privacy of those caught up in the events, and the degree to which the Internet was used as a vehicle for following the events. Our paper presents a qualitative and quantitative basis for considering the protection of privacy in a converged media world.
David I. Tafler, Muhlenberg College; and Peter d'Agostino, Temple University; (the authors are co-editors of TRANSMISSION: Toward a Post-Television Culture). Techno/Cultural Consciousness Across the Digital Divides This paper examines the symbiotic relationship between new technologies and traditional cultures across the north / south, east - west divides, while identifying their convergence within the Australian outback. This convergence revolves around culturally determined coding methodologies, which use various landmarks to inform a sense of identity and place. These landmarks, symbolic icons, represent narratives that build from historic and contemporary events in different parts of the world that, in turn, embody their own particular states-of-mind. We will argue that an understanding of the reconfiguration of consciousness becomes clearer when revisiting some of the relationships developed within traditional cultures such as those of the indigenous people living in central Australia. Their articulation of identity comes from the surrounding space - time relations. Central desert people live in a harsh environment with pronounced landmarks inscribed with legendary meaning. Their icons represent narratives informed by actual and metaphysical events.
	Lokman Tsui, University of Leiden, The Netherlands (currently at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan). Internet opening up China: Fact or Fiction? Imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread. (George W. Bush in Phoenix, Arizona during a GOP Debate, Dec 7, 1999) This paper will analyze how China, the people and its government, interacts with the Internet. I will examine the attempts of the government to implement an infrastructure that facilitates censorship and control. Furthermore, I will examine to what degree Chinese Internet users are influenced and affected by the exposure of new information that the Internet offers.
Yoshiyori Urano , Junko Sugimura, Tatsuhisa Miyanohara The Design of a Mixed-media Curriculum in the Learning Environment by Using The CRONOS Education system We have designed mixed-media curriculum for history lessons in Japanese high schools. We (teachers and application developers) have understood the profound advantages of various media (Books, Videos, Internet, The CRONOS system) and have created lessons that use the most appropriate forms of media. In collaborative and interactive situations, students in the classroom could gradually develop the ability to look at historical events from various viewpoints. Through experiments, we have demonstrated that students could think about day-to-day situations to discover, to understand, to reconstruct, and finally to create new relationships between daily events.
	Jyotika Virdi, University of Windsor (Canada) National Against the Global: Romance, Consumption Culture, and Diasporic Discourses in Nineties’ Popular Indian Cinema Arguing against recent criticism on Indian cinema of the 1990s, held as exemplars of an uncomplicated combination of globalization and sexual regulation of women - figured in the Diasporic Indian woman, I view the films as signaling an uneasy relationship between a new middle class, consumption culture, and the individual vs. community conflict fueled ironically by the women’s movement.
Ingrid Volkmer, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Andres Hofmann, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck, Austria Margarita Maass, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City Mathew Payne, Ithaca College Gebhard Rusch, University of Siegen, Germany Reiko Sekiguchi, University of Tokyo, Japan Christine Slade, University of Canberra, Australia Media Memories Across International Generations On the borderline to the 21st century, it becomes obvious that the 20th century has been the first mass media century. Telegraphy, world wire, satellite and Internet technologies have become widely available. This new media infrastructure has conveyed ideas of popular culture, of live news events and concepts of global virtual communities which have - at least in the last ten years - inspired debates about the transition from international to global communication. In recent years, mass communication studies have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to define this enlarged communication sphere. As opposed to McLuhan's idea of a homogeneous global village, these current approaches emphasize the unity of diversity, i.e. the parallelism (and dialectics) of global/local, and universal/particular communication structures. Although it is of great relevance to advance these new theoretical frameworks, it is of equal importance to conduct internationally comparative research on the specific impacts of this unfolding global communication infrastructure on societies and cultures and identity worldwide. This panel will present results of an international research project, which has brought together academics of media and communication studies from different world regions in order to analyze childhood media memories of three different global events.
	Berteke Waaldijk, Utrecht University Colonial Exhibitions and World Fairs as Precursors of Digital Public Space: The Role of Historical Comparisons in Understanding Digital Citizenship One of the difficulties in the discussions about digital citizenship is the traditional definition of citizenship. In this paper I will argue that in discussions about digital citizenship, the implicit historical comparisons should be expanded beyond representational democracy and the Habermassian public sphere of the nineteenth century. Citizenship has not only been constructed within the serious discussions of informed communicative communities, but other arenas as well. World’s fairs like the one in Chicago in 1893 and the colonial and imperial expositions organized by colonial powers like France, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands between 1851 and 1939 can be seen as examples of such arenas where (world-)citizenship was developed and explored. In my paper I will examine several insights that such a comparison between colonial exhibitions and digital public space might render: 1. The conjunction of commercial interest and political intent of the designers. In contemporary Internet sites, it is impossible to distinguish between commercial interests and the politically or socially motivated. World’s fairs suffered (or: profited) from a comparable blurring of genres. I would argue that citizenship is not so much located purely in the political sphere, but is constructed exactly at the site where the two meet. 2. The erasure of the difference between spectacle and spectator. Both on the Web and in colonial expositions the visitors themselves formed part of the spectacle: the massive presence of others on the fairgrounds can be compared to communication with other visitors of a certain site. 3. Both fairs and cybercultures construct reality in such a way that their visitors can experience the freedom of going where they want. This freedom to move is both crucial classical definitions of citizenship (a citizen cannot be a slave or a serf) and it is crucial to the experience of the virtual reality of both world expositions and digital situations. Is it possible to move beyond a metaphorical comparison of both forms of free movement? How does this relate to the ambition to bring the whole world available for inspection?
Silvio Waisbord, Rutgers University McTelevision: The Global Popularity of Television Program Formats Back in the 1980s, global television seemed headed to become a "wall-to-wall Dallas," as Europeans called Hollywood’s domination of television screens. Lately, it seems that global television is more poised to be a "wall-to-wall Survivor/Expedition Robinson" (or whatever the trendy format of the moment may be). Around the world, television is filled with national variations of program formats created elsewhere. The popularity of formats is more than just another trend in an industry perennially hungry for hit shows and eager to follow them. It reveals two developments in contemporary television: the globalization of the business model of television and the efforts of international and domestic companies to deal with the resilience of national cultures. The analysis of these developments allows us to reexamine how economics and culture are related in the process of media globalization. In the first section of this paper I argue that as a set of media policies and technological developments, globalization has intensified interconnectivity among different television industries. Interconnectivity happens through structural and institutional linkages among television industries worldwide. The result is the emergence of an increasingly integrated business governed by similar practices and goals. In the second section I deal with the relation between the popularity of television formats and cultural issues. On the surface, it may suggest not only the global integration of the economy of the industry, but also the standardization of content. What better evidence of the homogenization of business and content than the popularity of formats? A dozen of media companies are able to do business worldwide by selling the same idea, and audiences seem to be watching national variations of the same show. At a deeper level, however, formats attest to the fact that television still remains tied to local and national cultures. Bringing up examples of Latin American cases, I argue that television is simultaneously both global and national, shaped by the globalization of media economics and the pull of local and national cultures.
	Peter Walsh Homer at Home: Myth, Image, and the Ideology of Television For most of human history, relatively small and homogeneous groups presented their collective myths in living performances created for and by themselves. Whether the narrative appeared as a Homeric recitation for pre-classical Greeks, a medieval mystery play performed outside a great cathedral, in Hamlet at the Globe, or by Jacob Adler on the stage of a Second Avenue Yiddish theatre, the relationship between author, performers, and audience was intimate and confined, limited in extent by the reach of the unamplified human voice. The introduction of new mass media, especially television, expanded audiences from hundreds to tens of millions around the globe. This paper will explore issues leading from this translation, focusing on television’s replacement of collective myth with calculated images that promise one meaning while delivering another. It will also explore the ambiguities of television’s moral messages, presented with the goal of selling commercial products, and touch on its mixing of fact and fiction, its homogenization and globalization of audiences, and its creation of mass media celebrity.
McKenzie Wark, SUNY-Binghamton A Hacker Manifesto Intellectual Property is becoming an increasingly prominent term in public debates on Napster, Cipro, the Microsoft case or the publication of The Wind Done Gone. This paper argues that intellectual property is the key to rethinking the relationship between the economic and cultural domains in Marxist-inspired media and cultural studies. Marx saw the concept of class as hinging on the property question. The commodity economy develops through the progressive application of the abstraction of private property to land, capital, so too the privatization of information gives rise to new class relations, perhaps even a new branch of the ruling class and a new subordinate class of information producers. This paper argues against economic reductionist theories that view media and culture as epiphenomenona of capital accumulation. Those theories miss the new class relations emerging out of intellectual property. But it also argues that media and cultural studies inspired by Althusser and Gramsci put too much emphasis on the relative autonomy of the cultural. A new synthesis of culturalist and economist critical theory is possible if the specific property forms now developing in the information economy become the object of examination.
	Margaret Weigel, MIT *Electronic Bulb Signs in Fin de Siecle* New York City: Technology, Spectacle and Commerce** Contemporary commercial advertising relies on an emotive, visual approach, that is low on words and heavy on images, sensational persuasions and cross-cultural myths. But before digital technology simplified vertical integration of commercial media, another type of spectacle was already wowing urban audiences with strong visuals and minimal written texts at the turn of the nineteenth century -- the electronic bulb sign. Many of the issues in contemporary globalization discourse can be found in the earlier cultural battles pertaining to this humble commercial display technology; including: --the capitulation of civic and cultural controls to commercial interests; --the ascension of technologies whose only purpose was to dazzle and to sell; and --the cultural tensions between different social classes regarding the construction and consumption of spectacle. The research for this paper is primarily historical, drawing upon both firsthand New York City artifacts including tour guides, zoning records, and newspaper and magazine accounts from 1870 to 1920, and augmented by modern discourse on spectacle, consumption, and technology by such scholars as David Nye, Jonathan Crary, Pierre Bordieu, and Siegfried Zielinksi.
Mimi White, Northwestern University Flows and Other Close Encounters with Television This paper traces the genealogy of the term "flow" in television studies, with particular emphasis on the question of what kind of object television is if "flow" is the keyword. The term flow has been used to account not only for television as a technology and cultural form, in Raymond Williams’ sense, but also as a political economic form, in line with the study of global media flows. While none of these uses of the term is exactly the same, in all cases television is conceived in terms of mobility and global activity. (It is traveling theorists who recognize flow in American commercial television to begin with; global media flow studies look at the ways in which television programs circulate around the world, a subject made more complicated by developments in means of media production and distribution.) However, what (or who) moves, and to what ends, varies in each case. What assumptions about what moves, where, and how, are carried by the use of the term "flow"? What sorts of intentionality and agency are attributed to technologies, texts, and viewers by different concepts of flow? What are the implications of all of this for understanding television as an object of study, or as an academic subject? How do you pin down a moving target? One of the central goals of this paper is to assess the implications of television as an object of study in this context.
	Indigo Thuy Williams, University of Technology, Sydney Downloading Heritage: Vietnamese Diaspora Online Global communications information technology via the Internet has contributed a bridge across space and time bringing nations and communities into immediate real-time interactions. The construction of Internet-based communities has opened up the new frontier for negotiating relationships and expressions of culture and identity. This is demonstrated by looking at the transnational/transcultural position of Vietnamese orphans who were separated from their country, culture, language and heritage at birth during the Vietnam War and adopted into Western families. This community of thousands of adoptees, who were evacuated from Saigon as babies, were dispersed across America, Australia, Canada and Europe. They are now in their twenties and thirties and have begun to engage in transnational activism by developing cyber communities to reconcile and reconnect with their origins. This paper explores emerging developments of text and multimedia representations of ethnic or cultural information replacing traditional teachings creating a form of "e-heritage."
Richard Wise , University of Luton The Paradoxes of Information Markets Drawing on the Russell & Whitehead theory of logical types, this paper will argue that mainstream discourses on media globalization and convergence are informed by epistemological errors. These epistemological errors, it will be argued, result in irresolvable paradoxes: between the logic of markets and logic of symbolic exchange; between the logic of transmission and the logic of content; between the logic of telecommunications and the logic of broadcasting. The consequence has been a dysfunctional global public communications system inimical to the interests of the citizens of a democratic polity. The argument will be supported with evidence from the recent history of the telecommunications and media industries in the United States and the United Kingdom.
	Dixon Wong, University of Hong Kong; and Yau Hoi Yan, University of College London Taking People Seriously: Japanese Adult Videos in Hong Kong This paper is an anthropological protest against the Japanese cultural imperialism thesis that the recent globalization of Japanese media will inevitably bring about homogenization of local cultures, as if under the influence of Japanese cultural imperialism local people can never be active in making their own history and the local culture can never have its mediation capacitst the Japanese cultural imperialism thesis that the recent globalization of Japanese media will inevitably bring about homogenization of local cultures, as if under the influence of Japanese cultural imperialism local people can never be active in making their own history and the local culture can never have its mediation capacity. The main point of this protest is that we should take the perceptions and acts of local agency seriously when we study the ongoing globalization process of Japanese media. We will demonstrate that Hong Kong viewers do not embrace all Japanese pornographic videos. Instead, they are selective; they choose according to their ‘taste’ which is constituted by the native concept of shun chine (purity and innocence). This culturally constituted ‘taste’ further helps account for the popularity of a Japanese adult video actress, Yuki Maiko and her pornographic videos in Hong Kong. At the end of this paper, we will see that the globalization of Japanese media does not necessarily bring about homogenization. It depends on the logic of local culture. To equate globalization with homogenization is to deny the existential status of local cultures.
Harmony Wu, University of Southern California Matricidal Cinema: New Zealand Cinema, National Myth, and Border-Crossing Cultural Capital in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures In the wake of the apparent success of the epic film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, produced on far-flung New Zealand shores, it has become clear that Hollywood’s hegemonic position as center of the commercial filmmaking universe can be viably challenged. Indeed, Rings director Peter Jackson seems to have been cannily crafting a Hollywood alternative in Wellington, New Zealand--on the very periphery of the global map--building up cinematic infrastructure using the financial capital cobbled together f-om an eclectic mix of cult genre and art-house pictures. The case of Peter Jackson illustrates the degrees to which national specificity can be mobilized to travel across global borders. In positioning the matricidal imagery and thematics of Heavenly Creatures against the impressive growth of the cinematic industry engineered by Jackson, I will be considering the intersections of national trauma, cinematic representation and economic imperatives, questions of "national cinema" and "international audiences," and the hybrid forms of "cultural capital" fashioned out of marginalized cult cinematic artifacts. Integral to my discussion will be the histories of colonization in New Zealand, particularly the cultural and economic colonizations of Britain and more recently, America/Hollywood. I will explore how these colonial legacies play out--textually in Heavenly Creatures’ narrative, and extra-textually in the film’s international reception--and consider how these at times conflicting discourses interact to precipitate a "New Zealand" national image.
	Yau Hoi Yan, University of College London; and Dixon Wong, University of Hong Kong Taking People Seriously: Japanese Adult Videos in Hong Kong This paper is an anthropological protest against the Japanese cultural imperialism thesis that the recent globalization of Japanese media will inevitably bring about homogenization of local cultures, as if under the influence of Japanese cultural imperialism local people can never be active in making their own history and the local culture can never have its mediation capacity. The main point of this protest is that we should take the perceptions and acts of local agency seriously when we study the ongoing globalization process of Japanese media. We will demonstrate that Hong Kong viewers do not embrace all Japanese pornographic videos. Instead, they are selective; they choose according to their ‘taste’ which is constituted by the native concept of shun chine (purity and innocence). This culturally constituted ‘taste’ further helps account for the popularity of a Japanese adult video actress, Yuki Maiko and her pornographic videos in Hong Kong. At the end of this paper, we will see that the globalization of Japanese media does not necessarily bring about homogenization. It depends on the logic of local culture. To equate globalization with homogenization is to deny the existential status of local cultures.
Christine R. Yano and Hirofumi Katsuno, University of Hawaii - Honolulu Facing Off On-line Embodiment in Contemporary Japan Merleau-Ponty argues that for a blind person, the cane becomes an extension of the realm of senses. The cane, in other words, fills in for what the blind person lacks in apprehending the world. In cyberspace, the computer user as represented on the screen lacks a body--a phenomenon that Murray and Sixsmith term "disrupted bodies" ( 1999). In this paper we analyze the compensations made for the "disrupted bodies" of Japanese computer subjects by asking the following questions: 1) what kinds of extensions of the body might there be in computer-mediated communication; 2) how might these extensions be culturally embedded; and 3) how do these bodily extensions shape the communities of which they are a part? We take as a case study the frequent use of kaomoji (literally, face marks; known in computer studies as emoticons)-manipula.tions of keyboard symbols to create faces--by e-mail and Internet users in Japan. Our methods include surveys of Internet users in Japan, on-line interviews, and participant observation in chat rooms, as well as hard-copy and electronic archival research.