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This paper analyses developments over the past three years in the stock photography industry, the global multi-billion dollar business that manufactures the majority of advertising and marketing images, and an increasing number of editorial and news photographs. Focusing on how the industry shapes the visual background to our lives - and the 'monopoly of appearance' (Debord 1970: 12) of our societies - the paper critically examines stock photography's place at the very frontier of contemporary cultural dynamics: technological change, globalization, struggles over the legal and social definitions of intellectual 'property' and cultural authority, the aestheticization of the lifeworld, and the apparently ceaseless conquest of material and virtual spaces by increasing numbers of visual images. It does this by briefly looking in turn at three interlinked questions: 1) how does the industry currently organize representational power and cultural authority; 2) what is the reach of the industry, geographically, historically (control over archives) and in terms of economic sector (in relation to other cultural industries); 3) what does 'the spectacle' look like - what visual regime characterizes the stock industry and the domains it supplies? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with the assertion that creativity in journalism has moved from being a matter of guile and ingenuity to being about expressiveness, and that this reflects a broader cultural shift from professional expertise to the authenticity of personal expression as dominant modes of valorization. It then seeks to unpack the political normative baggage that underpins the case for creativity in the cultural industries. First, there is a prioritization of agency, which does not stand up against the phenomenological argument that we do not own our own practices. Second, creative expression is not necessarily more free, simply alternately structured. As with Judith Butler's performativity model, creativity is assumed to have a unique quality by which it eludes determination (relying on tropes of fluidity), whereas it can be countered that it is in spontaneous, intuitive practice that we are at our least agencical. Third, the paper argues against the idea that by authorizing journalists (and audiences) to express themselves, creativity is democratizing: the always-already nature of recognition means that subjects can only voice their position rather than engage active positioning. The paper also incorporates an analysis of institutionalized creativity, looking at how the Guardian has sought to encourage spontaneity and synergy through the design and layout of its work spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is to re-examine the processes of travel guidebook production and consumption as reconfigured at the intersection of print and digital culture. Based on ethnographic research the paper tries to understand the complex interplay between the genre idiosyncrasy, audiences and the labour relations in travel guidebook publishing as a model and distinct case of digitalization in creative/cultural industries. Combining political economy with cultural studies, genre analysis with social theory, it has been particularly endeavoured to grasp what are the implications and paradoxes of the convergence between creative labour of professional travel writers or 'itinerant experts' and the co-creative amateur labour of a multitude of readers or 'tourists with typewriters' within the confines of guidebook genre culture. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To say that the media have become commercialized has become a standard opening for debates on the changes within the media over the past few decades, not least concerning changes in the European media landscape, or to the developments within the post-Soviet states. Indeed, the media in Europe have seen dramatic changes, some of which have to do with the increased competition between public service and commercial broadcast media, leading to the fact that more media production is aiming for producing surplus value and economic profits. (Print and music media, however, have since long, and with few exceptions, been organized commercially.) However, economic value is but one of the value forms produced within the media and cultural industries, maybe especially so in media environments marked by both strong commercial media companies and strong public service enterprises. It might therefore be worthwhile to analyse the conditions for the production of other kinds of value (political, social, cultural, etc.) in such settings. In this paper is discussed a model for analyzing the production of value within media and cultural industries, based in the field theory outlined by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu, however, did for the most part discuss the production of value (or forms of capital) in relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts (e.g. art, literature). Although one of his most known works dealt with television, one cannot say that he thoroughly enough used the possibilities inherent in his own theory to analyse this field of mass production. This paper seeks to contribute to the development of a theory of value production in fields of large-scale production. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps the emerging practices in media professions like journalism, advertising, marketing communications, and public relations as they adapt themselves to a new media environment. Among creatives and brand managers in ad agencies ‘interactive advertising’ is at the center of the contemporary buzz. Marketers in the cultural industries brainstorm about the potential of upstream marketing, while in public relations the opportunities of two-way symmetrical communication are explored. Editors of news publications increasingly jump on the ‘citizen journalism’ bandwagon. Among business professionals understanding and managing consumer-generated media is considered critical to commercial survival. All these trends are part of the same phenomenon: the cultural convergence of media production and consumption. Where media, communication and journalism studies traditionally differentiate between audience and reception research or production and industry analyses, a third approach dissolves this distinction and treats making media and using media as essentially the same praxis. In this essay, these developments are discussed in terms of their potential impact on consensual assumptions about the nature of media work, seen through the lens of the combination of individual creativity and mass production, also known as creative industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a historical analysis of Disney's corporate exhibits at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, GE's "Carousel of Progress" and Ford's "Magic Skyway," in an attempt to consider their historical and cultural significance. The coming together of Disney's legacy of nostalgic entertainment achieved via his desire and skill in "improving" the past and future with the equally strong desire of corporate giants to sell themselves and their products is presented here as a case study of the processes of cultural creation: how and why specific discourses of technology and consumption are written into these narratives of the past and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much scholarly writing and in many leftist and activist accounts the enclosures of the cultural commons have been fiercely critiqued. However, during the last years new media business models are taking shape that challenge the notion of the cultural industries as 'copyright industries'. A new class of entrepreneurs is instead working to expand the commons as part of their businesses. Accordingly, representatives from these new media industries, policy makers and politicians have joined the academic and political critique of the "enclosures of the cultural common". The paper argue that this is a shift within the dominant media policy paradigm and an attempt to integrate existing practices on the internet, based on cooperation and sharing, into the market. By relocating the struggle from 'intellectual property' to 'platform economics' the media industry can exploit the productivity of the commons while holding on to the power that comes with ownership and property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agenda-setting approach traditionally deals with news coverage. However, there is also evidence that fictional entertainment can have an impact on the public's agenda. Our paper builds on those findings and focuses on a specific part of agenda-setting: the role of fictional entertainment in the process of intermedia agenda-setting. Using the feature film The Day After Tomorrow as an example, a time-series analysis was conducted to determine the impact of the film on news media coverage in Germany. Findings show that the film not only had a short-term effect on German news coverage of climate change but also an, albeit weak long-term effect. The effects remain when controlling for real-life events and the news input (indicated by the number of news agency reports). On the whole the results prove that political communication research needs to further consider and examine the political impact of fictional entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains previous conflicting findings regarding the ability of entertaining media to facilitate well-being by including the volitional state of media users (i.e., the extent to which individuals are ego-depleted), as an underlying mechanism influencing media-based stress recovery processes. Using path modeling, relationships between ego-depletion, procrastination, guilt, enjoyment, vitality, and recovery experience were tested using data from an online survey (N= 225). Results suggest that ego-depletion increases the negative emotions associated with media use, which are negatively related to the recovery experience associated with using entertainment and the vitality of the user. This makes ego-depleted individuals less able to benefit from the psychological recovery potential of entertainment media, despite their greater need for recovery from stress. These findings are an important step in understanding both the potential health benefits of media use, as well as how appraisal of media use can profoundly affect the entertainment experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a paper which discusses the notion of cultural diversity by analyzing changes in its meaning from its institutionalisation in discourses related to the notion of multiculturalism to its instrumentalisation into the Cultural Diversity Convention in 2005. It also tries to examine how the characterization of cultural diversity in institutionalised social discourse on culture.

This paper explores news journalism in an era in which practitioners and observers alike have noted startling changes in the depth, scale and speed of news coverage. My project investigates the everyday practice of news journalism in its organizational contexts in order to develop a more nuanced portrait of the forces that shape news-making today. This paper is based primarily upon 14 months of field research with German news journalists between 1996 and 2005, and focuses specifically on two issues: (1) the reconfiguration and tightening of relations between news organizations over the past 25 years and (2) the phenomenological challenges of practicing news journalism in a "real time" mode. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Porter's theory of the competitive advantages of nations, this paper analyzes the up-and-down story of Hong Kong's movie industry. The output, revenue and world market share of this industry has experienced a decisive decline since the mid 1990s. This study finds factor and demand conditions in Porter's model to be most important in unveiling the underlying forces that built up and brought down this Hollywood of the East. The endowment of the kung-fu tradition and cheap labor helped Hong Kong develop its brand name genre action and comedy and win a large audience with cultural proximity. The breakthrough of Hollywood in computer-simulated special effects technology since late 1980s, however, greatly compromised Hong Kong's competitive advantages in those genres and thereby attracted audiences away. In conclusion, this paper recommends a long run strategy of positioning Hong Kong as a regional center. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citing the globalization of entertainment, the major Hollywood studios have recently been increasing their involvement with both the production and distribution of locally-produced Asian films. Although globalization has Hollywood studios forming collaborative ties with foreign cultural production entities, crucial questions arise when we analyze the issues of globalization, entertainment, and race. The purpose of this project is to examine the effects emerging Asian media markets have on cultural identity, race, and masculinity from a global cultural standpoint. With this perspective in mind, this paper will then review the issue of "cultural homogenization" by Hollywood and how the emergence of global Asian media markets problematizes the notion of globalization as a one-way flow of cultural influence and a threat to the cultural sovereignty of other nations. Moreover, this paper will analyze how the current Asian media market trends affect the stakes for Asian males with regard to representation and masculinity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological development is accompanied by a popular discourse evolving around the potential and the actual use of the technology (e.g. Bijker, Pinch 1989; Feenberg 1999). The introduction of the Internet in mainstream media was framed by a technological imaginary related to the promise of social progress and the decrease of social inequalities (Flichy 2007). Currently the debates on media practice are not settled yet. Copyright infringement, proprietary software, file sharing, new business opportunities and old models of culture industries are promoted or attacked by various interest groups. Their communication of objectives employs several metaphors, images and associations in a rhetoric of social progress. This paper investigates how this rhetoric is constructed in current debates on file sharing, open access and open source software. The paper argues that this symbolic level, as assemblages of metaphors, images and associations is constitutive for the agenda setting, framing and development of technology. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary cultural industries, the complex legacy of aesthetic autonomy has come under attack from a number of sources, as neo-liberal notions of the market penetrate deeper into culture. The paper begins by briefly outlining some of these threats, based on empirical work in three contemporary industries (television, music and magazine journalism). The paper goes on to argue that, in response to such attacks, intellectuals, while recognising the complex nature of the creativity-commerce dialectic, need to develop a robust critical and social conception of aesthetic autonomy in order to defend artistic production against the forces of marketisation and commodification. It is partly because critical intellectuals - including many cultural producers - have lost faith in aesthetic autonomy that it has become so vulnerable to penetration by these forces. Possible bases for such a critical and social conception of aesthetic autonomy are discussed, most notably work by Nicholas Garnham and Russell Keat. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hollywood is not only the dominant global exporter of programs but also of the "industry lore" of what television should look like in terms of genre, narrative forms, and audience expectations - to the extent that other countries now adopt these conventions in order to sell programs internationally. Canadian producers, through their cultural proximity to the United States as well as their experiences working with American counterparts in the Canadian runaway locations industry, have become particularly adept at integrating the Hollywood style while maintaining a unique cultural sensibility that appeals to the U.S. industry's current discourse on the need for both standard formulas and competitive originality in the post-network era. This paper explores this process through a case study of Canadian producer Chris Haddock's series Da Vinci's Inquest, a crime drama that has been sold to thirty countries and was the first Canadian series to be purchased by a major American network (CBS). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government proposed to upgrade its manufacturing-driven economy to a creative and innovation-base economy by developing cultural industry. The essence of the cultural industry reforms is to open up China's cultural market and facilitate the development of a cultural economy, with the government's tight grip of content remains. But the reforms allow content providers a more relaxed environment to produce creative content. With the growing power of the audience and the speedy technological development in media, the relations between content providers and the government have turned a new page. The balance is being tipped in favor of the content providers, with the aid of the collective power of the audience. Although the top-down party controlled model of state-run media stays unchanged, commercial interests and audience demands are the driving forces to push for a more diverse and creative Chinese society. In this paper, I propose to examine the factors affecting the content-generating process in China. I will use 'Super Girl', the Chinese edition of English reality show 'Pop Idol', as an example to explain the fundamental problems of the reform, and the role the audience plays in the battleground where commercial interests are trying to fight against the government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumption of traditional news has declined precipitously over the last decade or so, even as its content has shifted from "hard" to "soft" news. Public trust in journalism has eroded at an even greater pace. Into the breach has stepped a host of new or reinvented entertainment genres that address contemporary public issues, events and people. As a result, efforts at uncovering what if any influence entertainment media has on public opinion, knowledge and action has increased in recent years. This paper will critically review the extant research on this topic that has used quantitative social science methods. My goals are to (1) provide an overview of current findings, as well as gaps in our knowledge; (2) explore the strengths and limits of the quantitative approach, both in general and as they specifically apply to the study of entertainment media as a form of political communication; and (3) suggest multi-method approaches that might build on the utility of quantitative research while addressing its shortcomings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much debate has taken place recently over the potential for entertainment genres and unorthodox forms of news to act as legitimate - indeed democratized - in-roads to the public sphere. Amidst these discussions, however, little thought has been paid to the audiences for programs of this sort, and (even when viewers are considered) the research can too easily treat audiences in homogenous terms and therefore replicate the very dichotomies that these television shows directly challenge. Consciously attempting to avoid these flaws, this paper is a critical reflection on an audience study into the Australian morning "newstainment" program Sunrise. It examines ethnography/participant observation (coupled with discourse analysis) as a research tool for understanding the ways in which contemporary news forms are viewed and understood, and promotes its potential use in better conceptualizing how citizens integrate and connect the increasingly fragmented and multifarious forms of postmodern political communication available in their everyday lives. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black representations on cable are often more populous and diverse than those on network television. This is because blacks watch more cable than whites, and subscribe to premium cable in high numbers. This has made them the "darlings" of the industry. Blackness is used as part of 'branding,' or creating an identity, for cable channels, and not just for black-oriented channels such as BET. This trend can be found in channels including Comedy Central, HBO and Showtime as well. This paper examines cable's economic structure and the varying ways that blackness is used to draw viewers and create an identity for cable channels. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative analysis is a first look at how public relations is portrayed in prime time television programming. Results confirm many of the conclusions from other studies of entertainment media outside of television: that public relations is still portrayed negatively; is only the realm of white, attractive people; has limiting roles for men and women; is not well defined, mostly as publicity and party planning; and looks "easy" and "glamorous." New insights were gained into the portrayal of public relations on television including: the association of the term "public relations" with negative and "silly" actions, gender barriers, and a tendency to focus only on practice areas dealing with the rich and powerful elements of society such as entertainment and working for the White House. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable research has been conducted on the topic of entertainment-education (E-E), the method of using entertainment platforms such as popular music, radio and television programming to diffuse information, attitudes, and behaviors via role modeling. A significant portion of the recently published E-E literature has used the case of the Radio Communication Project (RCP) in Nepal to demonstrate the effectiveness of E-E. In this project, we apply the culture-centered approach to examine the published scholarship on E-E in Nepal to articulate the key issues that are played out in the context of E-E programming in Nepal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates production-oriented mechanisms that influence the economic value of the music industry. It examines how artist rosters, the elimination of CD singles, and the economy affect industry sales. It also describes how new media sales, increases in artist, marketing and production costs, employee lay-offs, the end of the CD-replacement cycle, changing demographics, and used CD sales influence profits for the big 4 music companies.

Does political talk online promote healthy political discussion? There is a general perception that political chat is fragmented and incoherent. This study aims to better understand how focused political chat is in comparison with three other chat topics, cancer support, entertainment, and auto racing. Dynamic Topic Analysis and Content Analysis were applied to two hours of chat devoted to each of four topics: politics, cancer, entertainment and sports/auto racing. Findings demonstrate that topic matters to how coherent the talk is, with talk in the politically-oriented chat room being more coherent than in the other rooms. This research suggests that chat technology may not be inherently bad for reasoned political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common practice of song licensing for advertisements provides a unique window into the contentious relationship between popular music and commerce. Perhaps the most interesting result of the ubiquity of the practice is that what formerly might have provoked a blanket negative reaction now draws a range of responses. Through surveys and short interviews, I explore how individuals in various positions within the music industry, including independent label owners and musicians, as well as serious fans conceive of song licensing and how they distinguish appropriate from inappropriate uses of popular music in television commercials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many new communication technologies are developed for or adopted first by entertainment industries. The present paper reports a prospective study on a particularly promising entertainment technology of the future: Interactive Storytelling (IS). Integrating various streams of computing technology, such as advanced visualization, natural speech processing, and autonomous agents, IS systems are envisioned to offer new, personalized and thus unique kinds of entertainment to mass audiences of the future. We refer to existing models of media entertainment for a theoretical analysis and conducted expert interviews with members of the international IS development community to lay out the foundations for a forecast model of the entertainment experience of future IS systems. The resulting model organizes technological requirements, modes of users' information processing, and specific types of (pleasant) experiences, which holds implications for (future) entertainment theory and communication research that accompanies further development of IS media. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discourses used by Salma Hayek to situate cultural work as political work, the cinematic selection and structuring surrounding Frida Kahlo's life, and Mexican opposition to the commodification of Kahlo's life through the movie. Hayek has vocally advocated for increased and more complex roles for Latina actors, and as a result started her own production company, which in turn resulted in the making of Frida. To Hayek the increased visibility of Latinos, Mexicanos and Mexico within the terrain of global popular culture is an important cultural intervention and form of social activism. However, engaging in political work through the cultural industries inherently means making decisions that ultimately contribute to the commodification of ethnic and racial groups and practices for the consumption of global audiences. I explore the political consequences of commodifying the life of one of Mexico's most iconic political and artistic figures through global Hollywood. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural industries are often seen as a key testing zone for theories of creative labour. If creative work in general is precarious, as some would argue it is (because creativity is supposedly dependent, in any industry, on innovation and therefore its results and returns cannot be predicted with certainty) then work in the cultural industries might be particularly prone to high levels of risk and casualisation. However, along with new theories of 'precarity', there is much theoretical talk at the moment of the new capacities of 'immaterial labour' for new forms of solidarity. Such speculations are rarely based on empirical work. This paper reports on empirical work in three different cultural industries: television, recorded music, and magazine journalism. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, it asks: what forms of precarity and solidarity are apparent in these supposedly archetypal 'creative industries'? How is such precarity and solidarity constructed, negotiated and internalised in different industrial, institutional and genre settings? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the ability to bear risk determine who can participate in cultural industries? How do the years of often unpaid or underpaid work (required for entry into most cultural industries) serve as a barrier for people of color, from lower socio-economic status families, or with familial obligations? In this paper, I draw on ten years of deep ethnographic research among the first-wave of internet content producers in New York City to examine what I call "venture labor," or employees' entrepreneurial behavior, in cultural industries. Venture labor stems from the lack of job security and the increase in employment flexibility in post-industrial work and is particularly pervasive in cultural industries with long-standing expectations of unpaid work and training as the de facto requirements for entry into paid employment. Using interview data, I show how respondents explicitly link taking creative risks (such as making innovative, cutting-edge creative products) with a lack of job security and creative autonomy with economic free agency. These findings have serious implications for understanding who chooses to work in cultural industries and why. More importantly, they suggest that economic industrial structures are responsible in part for the lack of diversity of voices in cultural industries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fashion, like media, offers the unique possibility to address aesthetics, ethics and social power relations all in one. As with media, fashion involves bodies, rituals, material reality as much as fantasy, imagination and creativity. Both, for nearly two decades now, have been defined as part of the creative industries, those key economic activities that derive their economic value first and foremost from their symbolic rather than their material value. This suggests a lack of robustness: that these are luxury goods and therefore suspect. Querying how media and fashion are understood will show how the current regard for the creative industries is predicated on modernity's deeply split roots. On the one hand there is the critical and rational lineage of Enlightenment thought, on the other romantic sensitivity and openness to magic and creativity. RuPaul's Drag Race will serve as focal points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kingston, Jamaica's capital city, is home to a cohort of creative and music industry workers organizing for urban creative industrial development, collective security, and social uplift. This essay uses interviews and media discourse analysis to historicize and contextualize one group, Manifesto Jamaica, and situates their work alongside close readings of new music by and additional interviews with Jamaican artists organizing as the "Reggae Revival." The groups' media is characterized by two themes: (1) a cross-textual referencing practice connected to the Rastafari folk religion's concept of "livity," or the collectivity of all things and (2) an intentional troubling of teleological, temporal order, which connects the protests, politics, and people of the 1970s reggae golden age to today through musical gestures and choices. Manifesto Jamaica and the Reggae Revival represent creative industries development and cultural production in a specific neo-colonial socio-political and Afro-diasporic world-historical context that is significant and worthy of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how two individual traits (the tendency to conform and sociability) and two media usages (entertainment usage and social usage) may be associated with how viewers conform to other's enjoyment attitudes during movie co-viewing. A sample of 156 participants was asked to rate how much they enjoyed and how much they perceived others enjoyed a recent movie that the participant watched in a group. Results found that the tendency to conform and sociability were indirectly associated with conforming towards group's enjoyment attitude when mediated by entertainment usage. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the discourse of Israel TV's reality show creators as a case study of how employees of the precarious culture industries perceive their work. On the one hand, creators of Israeli reality TV operate in a competitive working environment, and on the other hand, their work is criticized as inferior and culturally corrupting. By combining the approaches of the cultural industries and pragmatic sociology notions, this article attempts to answer questions concerning the creators' perception of their work and its quality and their ideas about creative freedom. An in-depth analysis of interviews with leading creators of the genre sheds light on their justifications and their deep-seated involvement in hegemonic capitalist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discussion about the role of open licensing in creative industries and communities tends to be polarized into two vantage points. Either: 1) it is a new, altruistic paradigm enabling creative communities to rework copyright to fit their vision for the cultural commons, or: 2) it is a radical theft of creative labor, encouraged by digital industrial powerhouses such as Google, to cheat creative laborers out of their share of profits. Both of these rhetorical vantage points presume a monolithic and largely either selfless or unaware base of creative laborers. In this article, we analyze data from a series of surveys across a range of creative industries and communities to show that, in fact, cultural laborers employ open licensing agentically for a variety of reasons, including instrumental purposes oriented toward skirting the many impediments created by institutions and law, rather than merely because they are unaware or selfless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining ethnographic data from two creative spaces that faced the challenge of enduring in turbulent times, we propose that space, understood as a material assemblage, participates in organizing. It does so because space and practice reflexively account for each other. In other words, space may constrain or enable practice, as the literature abundantly illustrates, but practices also define and shape space. Rather than emphasizing either of these two options, they should be understood as integral to each other, and it is precisely their reflexive relation that contributes to organizing, as space participates in making practice recognizably similar through time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers insight to a study conducted for examining of transmedia storytelling of webtoons in Korean cinema. It informs that Korean cultural industries, including film and broadcasting, have attempted to adapt webtoons into films and television programs. It also mentions about movies such as "Misaeng," "26 Years," and "Inside Men."

The article offers insight to a study conducted for evaluating the popularity of the Korean trendy dramas in the Chinese cultural sphere. It informs that different age of Chinese ethnic females in Singapore presents very different cultural taste when facing the difference and similarities of Asian modernity in the Korean dramas. It also informs that on the impact of cultural preference on media production, circulation and media consumption.

The article focuses on role of play, labor and creative voice in building a digital media powerhouse YouTube. It mentions political economy and creative industry/cultural studies about the question of digital labor seen as a form of exploitation or an instance of participatory cultural democracy. It also mentions YouTube's investment in developing high-value content creators with areas pedagogical support, financial support and logistical support.

Crowdfunding, like other online sociotechnical mechanisms, has the potential to open up cultural production to a broader population than has previously had access to capital. We investigate the institutional role a crowdfunding platform and its partners play in broadening participation in cultural crowdfunding. We consider the extent to which these actors relax the tendencies towards spatial clustering characteristic of the culture industries through an analysis of a particular practice--"curated projects"--that provides particular projects with additional public promotion. We find that curated projects tend to cluster in cultural hubs and that they enjoy much higher levels of funding. We suggest that platforms should make a conscious effort to promote more peripherally located projects in order to make their editorial practices compatible with the social justice framework they discursively champion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, audience members engage in multiple media, moving from one medium to the next as they consume entertainment. Using survey methods (N = 444), this research explores the underlying processes of mass media migration by studying the uses and gratifications of migration behavior. Specifically, findings of this survey identify migration motivations and predictors of migration activity. Results suggest that media migration has four key motivations (the need for entertainment, escape, enlightenment, and additional content-specific exposure) and that individual differences (such as loneliness), media preferences, and television viewing motivations predict mass media migration. Theoretical contributions, practical implications, and areas of future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examines the Western film market in Hong Kong, China. It highlights the complex economic, cultural and geographic setting wherein marketers encounter challenging decisions on universal versus oriented campaigns. It also explores its transnational dynamics in cultural industries as well as the role of the city as a Special Administrative Region (SAR).

Aiming to make Singapore a vibrant hub of culture and the art in Southeast Asia, the Singapore government has put in remarkable efforts to nurture and promote the creative industry sector. A sustainable culture has, therefore, become an important foundation for the industry to thrive, and the art, along this line, has also emerged as an important resource for a sustainable culture. Together with the increasing use of new media by many local art groups or individual artists for their creative activities, this poses an interesting connection between technology, culture and the art within the umbrella of sustainability. In-depth interviews with Singaporean artists shed light on what cultural sustainability means to the artists, how they see themselves in the sustainability process and how information and communication technologies (ICTs) influence their creative activities. Lastly, by examining sustainability from the cultural perspective, this study hopes to add another dimension to a concept deeply rooted in the environmental domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interactive online gaming industry is increasingly bolstered by the bottom-up energy of consumer participation and innovation. Given the contribution of the gamers made to the industry in terms of revenues and popularity of the games, it is no longer sufficient to describe them as mere consumer; rather, the discourse of consumer labor proffers a better framework to understand the change. Compared to guilds in other countries, Chinese guilds are larger in scale, more formally organized and better integrated into the commercial operation of the Chinese gaming industry. Taking Chinese online gaming guilds as my subject of study, I argue that the guild serves paradoxically as a unit for biopolitical control, aiding game companies in channeling and monetizing consumer labor, and as a site of empowerment and innovation, helping guild gamers valorize their labor while facilitating institutional changes to accommodate the rise of consumer labor. In discussing their implications, I have situated the dynamic institutional and subjective transformations in the transition to a Post-Fordist society and the specific context of Chinese cultural and information industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of entertainment media, most previous research on the third-person effect has been limited to the issue of violence (e.g., violent games, violent television programs, etc.). However, the goal of the current study is to contribute to our understanding of the third-person effect by testing entertainment content that does not directly involve violence. To investigate this topic, this study examined how young adults respond differently to the effects of lighthearted movies and serious dramas in terms of third-person effect judgments. The findings indicate that individuals still perceive beneficial and harmful effects of different entertainment media genres regardless of explicit violence in the content. Regarding lighthearted films (e.g., comedy), young adults perceived that their close friends would more enjoy, would have more positive impressions of, and more select such films to watch than themselves and other general audience would. Conversely, with respect to movies evoking deeper sentiments (e.g., drama), they consistently showed first-person perceptions, insisting that they would enjoy such films more, would have more positive impressions of, and select such movies more often than both their close friends and other general audiences. Subsequently, the target corollary concept and value perceptions of entertainment media are discussed on the basis of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As digital comic book consumption continues to rise in popularity, the comic book community appears conflicted over the effects digital scans have on the meaning of collecting and reading comic books. Historically, comic ownership served as the locus of comic fan social capital; will digital scans hold the same cultural capital as printed books? And does post-purchased digital scan dissemination primarily hurt copyright holders through lost sales, or does it help through social promotion? Building upon an analysis of fan attitudes towards digital comic book texts (Stevens and Bell, 2011), this project seeks to account for the limitations of locality by surveying the attitudes of comic book store patrons concerning their attitudes towards physical and digital comic book texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking at the case of Switzerland, a paradoxical situation can be found: Upholding diversity in press and broadcasting is asserted by all political actors to be one of the most important policy principles. Nevertheless, only a few regulatory measures favoring diversity have been implemented. In an empirical study the author was looking for reasons for this paradoxical situation by analyzing parliamentary debates surrounding the implementation and revision of competition and broadcasting regulations between 1983 and 2006. This study, using qualitative methods, identified one important reason: The awareness of Switzerland being a small state affected the implementation of regulation to a great extent. It has lead to a policy supporting cross-ownership: Publishing houses, perceived as the guarantors of diversity, were given the possibility to diversify into the broadcasting sector - a step that was intended to enable them to compete with broadcasters spilling in from abroad. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Game researchers are discussing various manifestations and determinants of video game enjoyment. Some authors argue that suspense - a well-understood process in non-interactive entertainment- is also relevant to video game enjoyment, because players are frequently confronted with uncertainty about the outcome of a situation while they are inclined to resolve the situation successfully. The mixture of uncertainty and desire for positive outcome leads to the emotional configuration known as suspense. An experiment (N = 63) was conducted to test the importance of suspense for video game enjoyment. Suspense was manipulated by framing a 3D game environment either as location of a tourist walk (low suspense) or as destination of an intelligence operation with unknown risk (high suspense). Video game enjoyment was assessed by self-report items after playing. Results suggest a positive relationship between suspense and game enjoyment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the psychology of entertainment has generally focused the bulk of its attention on the audience response of enjoyment. Although this focus is understandable, it has led to theories and models that center on reactions related to humor, mirth, or amusement. As a result, much of the theorizing in the psychology of entertainment has a difficult time accounting for the breadth of media offerings that appeal to many viewers (e.g., sad films, tragedies) or the diversity of audience responses (e.g., sadness, contemplativeness) that differ from how "enjoyment" is typically conceptualized. This presentation will argue for the importance of considering appreciation as a notable audience response associated with unique emotional reactions and with preferences for genres that current theorizing considers odd or paradoxical. Data illustrating conceptual and empirical distinctions between appreciation and enjoyment will be presented, and directions for future research in entertainment studies will be discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how young queer individuals have been contained by the "coming out" process with broadcast television continually striving to stay relevant and reflect the social issues inherent to modern life. It is noted that television has rarely paused to question the heteronormative presumption of "coming out" as an essentialized aspect of queer identification although it has certainly employed "coming out" narratives as generic televisual conventions.

Studies of transnational media flow and reception propound that audiences are cultural-linguistic groups that are idiosyncratic in content choice, but hardly distinguish or explain their collective tastes. The literatures pertaining to intercultural consumption suggest that content preferences are more similar among societies sharing a cultural or linguistic affinity than otherwise. Examining national acceptance and taste about Hollywood films among a global country-sample, this study quantifies the dissimilarity in genre preferences between the US and any given importing country, based on the 2002-2007 box office sales figures. The analysis shows that genre taste dissimilarity is positively related to the cultural distance between the countries, and negatively related to the English proficiency of the importing country. Furthermore, the economic attributes of the importer do not bear upon the taste dissimilarity. It is also shown that the genre tastes of individual countries have converged with those of American audiences over the years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]