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This book addresses popular and academic concerns that the institution of work is being irreparably damaged by digital/media technologies. The book considers three specific concerns (each in a separate chapter): 1) that all jobs may soon be automated out of existence, 2) that the sharing economy will degrade the few jobs that remain, and 3) that services like Facebook and Instagram are turning leisure into work, exploiting users in their so-called free time. Through an in-depth examination of these concerns, the book proposes that what really concerns these writers is not that work is being degraded or may soon disappear altogether, but rather that society itself is under attack, and more specifically the bonds of responsibility on which social relations depend. Drawing from recent work on affect/emotion and from the controversial antisocial thesis in queer theory, the book argues that the anxiety surrounding these transformations aims primarily not to slow or reverse these changes, but rather to solicit readers to identify with the social: to stop being irresponsible, unaccountable, lazy, self-serving, and hedonistic, and to once again engage in the hard work of being a productive member of society.

This book explores the globalization of African American television and the way in which foreign markets, programming strategies, and viewer preferences have influenced portrayals of African Americans on the small screen. Television executives have been notoriously slow to recognize the potential popularity of black characters and themes, both at home and abroad. As American television brokers increasingly seek revenues abroad, their assumptions about saleability and audience perceptions directly influence the global circulation of these programs, as well as their content. This book aims to reclaim the history of African American television circulation in an effort to correct and counteract this predominant industry lore. Based on interviews with television executives and programmers from around the world, as well as producers in the United States, the book traces the shift from an era when national television networks often blocked African American television from traveling abroad to the transnational, post-network era of today. While globalization has helped to expand diversity in African American television, particularly in regard to genre, it has also resulted in restrictions, such as in the limited portrayal of African American women in favor of attracting young male demographics across racial and national boundaries. The book underscores the importance of examining boardroom politics as part of racial discourse in the late modern era, when transnational cultural industries like television are the primary sources for dominant representations of blackness.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet became a major player in the global economy and a revolutionary component of everyday life for much of the United States and the world. It offered users new ways to relate to one another, to share their lives, and to spend their time—shopping, working, learning, and even taking political or social action. Policymakers and news media attempted—and often struggled—to make sense of the emergence and expansion of this new technology. They imagined the Internet in conflicting terms: as a toy for teenagers, a national security threat, a new democratic frontier, an information superhighway, a virtual reality, and a framework for promoting globalization and revolution. This book maintains that contested concepts had material consequences and helped shape not just our sense of the Internet, but the development of the technology itself. It focuses on how people imagine and relate to technology, delving into the political and cultural debates that produced the Internet as a core technology able to revise economics, politics, and culture, as well as to alter lived experience. The book illustrates the conflicting and indirect ways in which culture and policy combined to produce this transformative technology.

The teenager has often appeared in culture as an anxious figure, the repository for American dreams and worst nightmares, at once on the brink of success and imminent failure. Spotlighting the “troubled teen” as a site of pop cultural, medical, and governmental intervention, this book traces the teenager as a figure through which broad threats to the normative order have been negotiated and contained. Examining television, popular novels, science journalism, new media, and public policy, the book shows how the teenager became a cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. By the late 1970s, media industries as well as policymakers began developing new problem-driven “edutainment” prominently featuring narratives of disability—from the immunocompromised The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to ABC’s After School Specials and teen sick-lit. Although this conjoining of disability and adolescence began as a storytelling convention, disability became much more than a metaphor as the process of medicalizing adolescence intensified by the 1990s, with parenting books containing neuro-scientific warnings about the incomplete and volatile “teen brain.” Undertaking a cultural history of youth that combines disability, queer, feminist, and comparative media studies, the book offers a provocative new account of how American cultural producers, policymakers, and medical professionals have mobilized discourses of disability to cast adolescence as a treatable “condition.” By tracing the teen’s uneven passage from postwar rebel to 21st-century patient, the book shows how teenagers became a lynchpin for a culture of perpetual rehabilitation and neoliberal governmentality.

This book explores transnational media environments as pathways to understand the gendered constructions and contradictions that underwrite globalization. Tracking the ways in which gendered subjects are produced and defined in transnationally networked, media-saturated environments, the book advances a discussion about sexual politics, media, technology, and globalization. Covering the Internet, television, books, telecommunications, newspapers, and activist media work, the book directs focused attention to the ways in which gender and sexuality issues are constructed and mobilized across the globe. Chapters cover an extensive terrain from consumption, aesthetics and whiteness to masculinity, transnational labor, and cultural citizenship. The book initiates a necessary conversation and political critique about the mediated global terrain on which sexuality is defined, performed, regulated, made visible, and experienced.

Drawing on contemporary conflicts between Latino/as and anti-immigrant forces, this book illustrates the limitations of liberalism as expressed through U.S. media channels. Inspired by Latin American critical scholarship on the “coloniality of power,” the book demonstrates that nativists use the privileges associated with citizenship to accumulate power. That power is deployed to aggressively shape politics, culture, and the law, effectively undermining Latino/as who are marked by the ethno-racial and linguistic difference that nativists love to hate. Yet these social characteristics present crucial challenges to the political, legal, and cultural practices that define citizenship. The book examines the role of ethnicity and language in shaping the mediated public sphere through cases ranging from the participation of Latino/as in the Iraqi war and pro-immigration reform marches to labor laws restricting Latino/a participation in English-language media and news coverage of undocumented immigrant detention centers. It demonstrates that the evolution of the idea of citizenship in the United States and the political and cultural practices that define it are intricately intertwined with nativism.

Based upon a year’s ethnographic fieldwork with 27 members of an ordinary London class, this book offers an original, readable and engaging study of the lives of one class of 13 to 14-year-olds in a contemporary London neighbourhood. Telling the story of their lives at home, in school, hanging out with friends and online, it shows how the lives of young people today are shaped by the pressures of individualization and how schools, families and the young people themselves attempt to negotiate the meaning of education in a digitally connected yet fiercely competitive world. The book examines young people’s concrete experiences of growing up in early twenty-first century Britain, asking: what matters to them, what vision of the future do they think their parents and teachers are preparing them for, and how are they facing the opportunities or challenges that lie ahead? While media, public and policy discourses express hopes and fears about the potential of digital media networks, the book shows how young people, along with their parents and teachers, are more invested in maintaining their separate spheres of interest. Thus they exercise their agency more to disconnect than to connect with others or across activities or places. The Class’s intersecting portraits of 27 children provide new insight into a host of academic, policy and practitioner/educator debates about what it means to grow up in contemporary society and what roles family, school, community and media now play in the lives of young people.

The election of President Barack Obama signaled for many the realization of a post-racial America, a nation in which racism was no longer a defining social, cultural, and political issue. While many Americans espouse a “colorblind” racial ideology and publicly endorse the broad goals of integration and equal treatment without regard to race, in actuality this attitude serves to reify and legitimize racism and protects racial privileges by denying and minimizing the effects of systematic and institutionalized racism. This book examines television's role as the major discursive medium in the articulation and contestation of racialized identities in the United States. While the dominant mode of televisual racialization has shifted to a “colorblind” ideology that foregrounds racial differences in order to celebrate multicultural assimilation, the book investigates how this practice denies the significant social, economic, and political realities and inequalities that continue to define race relations today. Focusing on such iconic figures as President Obama, LeBron James, and Oprah Winfrey, many chapters examine the ways in which race is read by television audiences and fans. Other chapters focus on how visual constructions of race in dramas like Sleeper Cell, and The Wanted continue to conflate Arab and Muslim identities in post-9/11 television. The book offers an important intervention in the study of the televisual representation of race, engaging with multiple aspects of the mythologies developing around notions of a “post-racial” America and the duplicitous discursive rationale offered by the ideology of colorblindness.

According to many pundits and cultural commentators, the United States is enjoying a post-racial age, thanks in part to Barack Obama's rise to the presidency. This high gloss of optimism fails, however, to recognize that racism remains ever present and alive, spread by channels of media and circulated even in colloquial speech in ways that can be difficult to analyze. This book seeks to examine this complicated and contradictory terrain while moving the field of communication in a more intellectually productive direction. The chapters challenge traditional definitions and applications of rhetoric. From the troubling media representations of black looters after Hurricane Katrina and rhetoric in news coverage about the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres to cinematic representations of race in Crash, Blood Diamond, and Quentin Tarantino's films, the book reveals complex intersections and constructions of racialized bodies and discourses, critiquing race in innovative and exciting ways. The book seeks not only to understand and navigate a world fraught with racism, but to change it, one word at a time.

With images of Jennifer Lopez's butt and America Ferrera's smile saturating national and global culture, Latina bodies have become a ubiquitous presence. This book traces the visibility of the Latina body in the media and popular culture by analyzing a broad range of popular media including news, media gossip, movies, television news, and online audience discussions. The book maps the ways in which the Latina body is gendered, sexualized, and racialized within the United States media using a series of fascinating case studies. It examines tabloid headlines about Jennifer Lopez's indomitable sexuality, the contested authenticity of Salma Hayek's portrayal of Frida Kahlo in the movie Frida, and America Ferrera's universally appealing yet racially sublimated Ugly Betty character. The book carves out a mediated terrain where these racially ambiguous but ethnically marked feminine bodies sell everything from haute couture to tabloids. Through an examination of the cultural tensions embedded in the visibility of Latina bodies in United States media culture, the book paints a nuanced portrait of the media's role in shaping public knowledge about Latina identity and Latinidad, and the ways political and social forces shape media representations.