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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.

The US-Mexico border zone is one of the most visualized and imagined spaces in the United States, not just for the mythology of the Southwest as the cornerstone of US identity but as a place under continual crisis, permanent visibility, and territorial defense. Border Optics argues that the border is both a laboratory and an archive that indexes an optical regime and a way of seeing drawn from maps, geographical surveys, military strategic plans, illustrations, photographs, postcards, novels, film, and television—all of which combine fascination with the region with the visual codes of surveillance and survey. Optics signals a complete visual apparatus, from recording and representation to the infrastructure and institutions that support the visual regime. The border optic refers to the expanded vision of the border as a consequence of the interface of militarism, technology, and the media archive of the region. The primary aim of this complex of industry, state, and private endeavors is not simply enforcement but control, particularly of the movement of goods and people in accordance with the split codes of the border-security imaginary. This book explores several related cultural media and apparatuses that have shaped a dominant way of seeing informed by the history of the region. This includes a countervision apparent in revisionist border historical accounts, art, media, architectural design, and activist movements, along with the strains of subversion within the dominant view.

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.

Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But Black women’s relationship with technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,”Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the U.S. to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on- and offline. Digital Black Feminism positions Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, offering a through line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. The blogosphere provided Black feminist writers a unique space to draft principles for a new generation of Black feminist thought, while other online communities offer practical lessons on the praxis of digital Black feminism. Steele makes connections between the letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. As Black feminist writers’ work now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers hopefulness and caution on Black feminism becoming a product for sale in the digital marketplace.

The Digital City focuses on the interface of people, urban place, and the role that digital media play in placemaking endeavors. Critics have understood digital media as forces that alienate and disembed users from space and place. This book argues that the exact opposite processes are observable: many different actors are consciously and habitually using digital technologies to re-embed themselves within urban space. Five case studies from cities around the world illustrate the concept of “re-placeing” by showing how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation technologies, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to reproduce abstract urban spaces as inhabited places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through clear and accessible language and timely narratives of everyday urban life, the author argues that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media while highlighting our own awareness of the places where we find ourselves and where our technologies find and place us. Through ethnographic and discourse analysis of everyday digital media practices and technologies, this book expands practical and theoretical understandings of the ways urban planners envision and plan connected cities, the role of urban communities in shaping and interpreting digital architectures, and the tales of the city produced through mobile and web-based platforms. Digital connectivity is reshaping the city and the ways we navigate through it and belong within it. How this happens and the types of places we produce within these networked environments are what this book addresses.

Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, this book contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation. Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, the book asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, it argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counterintuitive power—indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in this book, “power” assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form. In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counterintuitive power—as a resource for the political present—found at the very point of violation, the book enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.

Fake Geek Girls offers a timely survey of the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as tastemakers and promotional partners over the past decade as fan culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Through an exploration of the subtle and interconnected ways in which media industries, journalists, and other fans have cultivated an androcentric vision of fan identity and participation, Fake Geek Girls surveys the politics of participation within contemporary fan cultures and reasserts the importance of feminism to fan studies. Fake Geek Girls additionally contends that there are meaningful connections to be made between the recent influx of gendered boundary-policing practices within fan and geek culture and broader cultural pushback against “political correctness” and “social justice warriors” within the growing alt-right and “Men’s Rights” movements.

New technologies, whether text message or telegraph, inevitably raise questions about emotion. New forms of communication bring with them both fear and hope, on one hand allowing us deeper emotional connections and the ability to forge global communities, while on the other prompting anxieties about isolation and over-stimulation. This book investigates the larger context of such concerns, considering both how media technologies intersect with our emotional lives and how our ideas about these intersections influence how we think about and experience emotion and technology themselves. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book explores the historical roots of much of our recent understanding of mediated feelings, showing how earlier ideas about the telegraph, phonograph, radio, motion pictures, and other once-new technologies continue to inform our contemporary thinking. It explores a series of fascinating arguments about technology and emotion that became especially heated during the early twentieth century. These debates, which carried forward and transformed earlier discussions of technology and emotion, culminated in a set of ideas that became institutionalized in the structures of American media production, advertising, social research, and policy, leaving a lasting impact on our everyday lives.

This book analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multimedia cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, the book explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry's geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, the book is a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the United States, this book offers empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, the book develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries—film, television, marketing, and digital media. The book's transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.

Gamers have been in trouble as long as games have existed, constantly mired in controversies about violence, diversity, and online harassment. As our popular understanding of “gamer” shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. This book excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that gender, race, and sexuality operate in their technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems. By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal, Bayonetta, Tomb Raider, and Mass Effect, Phillips adds necessary analytical tools to our conversations about video games. In the context of a political landscape in which reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world.