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This article examines (im)material digital labor essential to the production of closet decluttering videos on YouTube by analyzing two case studies: Leighannsays and Bestdressed. I highlight three interconnected forms of tidying labor, that is, home, data, and waste management, mobilized for influencer work and cultural platform economy. Wardrobe clean-out videos capitalize on both corporeal and affective aspects of housework and content production in the construction and maintenance of the digital self. They also assemble management labor to organize material articles in domestic space, produce/manage multimedia, and construct/amplify digital existence. The essay also discusses the (im)material labor required by the personal and outsourced handling of the disposed's hereafters as goods and trash outside of the home. Unpacking how closet decluttering video production nests together (im)material tidying labor associated with disparate sectors from home-based platform cultural production to public management of household waste shed lights on imbricated operations of the influencer ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the idea of "cozy wholesomeness" in streaming on the Twitch platform through the example of an LGBTQ+ content creator, her partner, and her development of an ongoing domestic space which welcomed queer audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on a span of streams from November 2020 to January 2021, the article first seeks to define cozy wholesomeness as a streaming process that combines choice of game, style of streaming, and audience interest to form an experience driven by intimacy, sincerity, and active resistance to alt-right mentalities even as the concept itself potentially becomes a product or marketing hook. For this particular streamer, producing a supportive, active chat community driven by cozy wholesomeness inevitably collides with sustaining streaming as a profitable venture—a process compounded by Twitch's own interest in commoditizing queer content as a way of displaying its own apparent diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past several years, media commentary and cultural analysis has grown increasingly fixated on YouTube as a radicalization hub, particularly around extremist, alt-right content. However, a growing community of leftist YouTube content creators, loosely coalescing into the platform's "LeftTube," have developed dialogic relationships with some of YouTube's most extreme content. This work focuses on one specific LeftTube creator, ContraPoints, to explore how those on the political left engage with YouTube's cultural and technical affordances to challenge alt-right ideology. Through a textual analysis of ContraPoints' top thirty videos, we identified three main discursive strategies: practicing deradicalization strategies on YouTube; establishing alt-right individuals as an intentional audience; and developing a language for escaping alt-right logics. ContraPoints, and her rightful critics, demonstrate how political subjectivities are created and contested within YouTube as both a technical and cultural space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores the intersection of reactionary politics and fandom. Fandom has traditionally been thought of as progressive, but this has been limited and limiting. Moreover, considerations of the relationship between politics and fandom have especially focused on democratization and new media–enabled participation. However, it is important to expand our understanding to other aspects of politicization. This introduction situates the issue in relation to foundations of fan studies, examinations of political fandom and fannish politics, and growing recognition of inequality and conflict in fandom. These considerations are important in an era in which fandoms have increasingly overtly embraced reactionary politics and reactionary politics has increasingly taken fannish forms. It is this intersection of the reactionary and the fannish that this special issue seeks to unravel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the film Catfish and the corresponding television program Catfish: The TV Show to articulate how genres of the real create entertainment paradigms built on shame and derision as acceptable modes of programming particularly focused on bodies. Understanding these texts as visual culture narratives grounded in shame produced through “failed” classed, fat, and gendered bodies, I argue that when genres of the real focus on shame as entertainment they implicate individuals, rather than systemically enforced normative identity positions, as wholly complicit in their own sociocultural failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects, from a feminist perspective, on a five-year period as Head of a School of Media. It considers the position of media studies within the new academic capitalism and the re-masculinization of the university that this has produced. It considers strategies employed by the field to stake its own claim to that masculinization, in particular the embrace of "the digital." Finally, it describes the challenges this posed for the author, and tactics employed in dealing with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Television and New Media critically examines the ethos of Silicon Valley, imagined broadly, by analyzing its products, discourses, and practices. We argue that, as a technology industry and a cultural force, Silicon Valley’s practices and discourses reflect and produce particular social and economic investments in technology as a tool of empowerment and social change. Overall, the issue argues that the ethos of Silicon Valley privileges disruption over sustainability, sharing economies over union labor, personalized access over public health, data over meaning, and security over freedom. We analyze the ways this ethos extends beyond Silicon Valley itself and shapes the way we think about and act toward labor, security, sexuality, and health. As such, Silicon Valley’s technology products—as well as the way we think about them—affect the social, political, and economic conditions of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the emergence of smartwatch models from 2012 to 2015—including the Pebble Watch, Android Wear, and Apple Watch—to explore the relationship between “instants” and “information.” Through a focus on the ways in which smartwatches notify, buzz, and otherwise touch the skin, this article develops the idea of the “haptic instant” as a key feature of this technology. The haptic instant, in calling attention to the delivery of news alerts, e-mails, personal communication, and other notifications to the wearer’s wrist, is part of the larger formation of bodies capable of living in a culture increasingly reliant on computer information systems for the management of daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010, concerned citizens in India argued that cell antenna signals had heating effects on bodies, and media campaigns compared the experience of living in cities with cell towers as being inside the oven. I argue that mediation of cell towers in newspapers and lifestyle shows as potentially emitting cancer-causing radiation was key to shaping public perceptions about them. Through their disruptive nature, cell towers call into action a technoscience public consisting of a variety of stakeholders, including radio-frequency scientists, cellular operators, journalists, tower builders, activists, municipal corporations, and building owners. Technoscience publics and media publics intersect and shape each other, and this article presents “mediated technoscience public” as a theoretical framework for an ethnographic intervention in media studies. This framework involves the tracking and comparison of media coverage about technological infrastructure as well as the ways humans emotionally perceive and interact with those infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes producer–consumer relations in social media marketing in the Swedish dairy industry. The article discusses how ideas of interspecies intimacy are publicly performed in an interactive process between the dairy industry producers and social media users. Two examples from the Swedish dairy industry were chosen for analysis: one Instagram account and one Facebook account. The analysis shows how the pages are premised on spectacularly visualizing the emotional labor and performances of cows for capital accumulation. The dairy industry’s social media presence encourages the media users to engage in building the perception that Swedish dairy farms represent an idyll where the cows are willing producers of the milk that is taken from them, and the dairy industry is loving, caring, and compassionate. Thus, the social media marketing represents a co-opting not only of the ideals of participation that social media holds but also of the ideals of ethical consumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the depiction of labor in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, paying specific attention to gender and race. It argues that the program’s interest in the historical link between coerced prison labor and enslavement in the United States, as well as the more recent implication of prison privatization in the neoliberal assault on labor rights, is undermined by its privileging of affective and interpersonal dynamics over political solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article first delineates the transformations of China’s media institutions since the reform and opening up policy of the 1980s and argues that marketization and new media technologies are two important factors in shaping media operations and culture in contemporary China. Then the author introduces the changes in perspective, problematic and research methods in the academic field of media studies in China. The article also uses some recent research articles to illustrate the author’s point about the state of media studies in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs’ approach of Web 2.0 economy. Here, Fuchs’ views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification of users’ data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation of Marx’s laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate, and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary phenomena of Web 2.0 economy. It is possible to avoid Fuchs’ errors, and another approach is possible to remake Marxism relevant for an analysis of the new media economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the BBC’s Sherlock is outwardly a conservative text sedimenting the historical function of Sherlock Holmes as a model of hegemonic British masculinity. However, queer disruptions in the performance of masculinity may be read as, after Butler, destabilizing and revealing the groundlessness of gender constructions. For as Butler has argued, hetero-masculine performativity is “constantly haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself.” Referencing Laclau’s perception of “hauntologies” to texts (adapted from Derrida), I posit that the presence/specter of the queer villain Moriarty can be read as a caesura challenging performed hegemonic masculinity. With the possible death and promise of Moriarty’s return at the close of the current season, the series now stands at a crossroads. It may either revert to the queerbaiting of previous seasons or foreshadow a more radical text. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On popular television, parenting narratives have emerged as a dominant representational paradigm in depicting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) subjectivities as “normal.” However, I argue that the work of normalization in TV programs also operates on figures and relationships related to gay parents. I identify this secondary process as “anxious displacement” in which figures and relationships circulating around gay parents are overloaded with negatively codified social differences and symbolic excesses. This study examines the cultural work of anxious displacement in Modern Family and The New Normal by interrogating how racial excess, cultural capital, queerness, and the extreme are displaced onto characters in the gay parents’ immediate world. Ultimately, anxious displacement instantiates gay parenting as culturally intelligible and legitimate, and in doing so, reproduces potential normative liabilities by reinscribing hierarchies of personhood. At the same time, anxious displacement validates gay parenting, undermines homophobia, and affirms gay masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The surge of U.S. reality television shows focused on “making over” contestants has paralleled the decline of the welfare state, the eradication of Affirmative Action, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. This article examines MTV’s From G’s to Gents to consider questions of neoliberal governmentality and race. By analyzing the show’s relationship to the prison system, enterprise culture, and heteronormativity, I argue that the show functions as a technology that governs black freedom under neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the ethical implications of the rise of a new style of personality presenter-led wildlife programming in the 1990s, reliant, in part, on digital video and aimed at creating a sense of “liveness.” It takes the BBC series Big Cat Diary (1996) as its focus, looking at how the BBC responded to increased market pressure by creating the first wildlife docusoap. Despite the lightweight connotations of the docusoap format, this series put forward a new ethical practice for representing the lives of individual wild animals. Through an exploration of how ethics are implicated in changing conditions of production and evolving media technologies, it is proposed that debates about the ethics of wildlife documentary need to be recentered on the complex ethical relationships between wildlife documentary makers and the animals and ecosystems they film rather than on issues of audience deception. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article identifies that the current literature on “distant suffering” lacks a nuanced account of the relationship between televised representations of suffering and the audiences that encounter these in their everyday lives. Text-centered studies overemphasize how news narratives cause compassion fatigue, while audience-centered studies enumerate audience responses with inadequate references to the textual elements and social factors that shape these responses. While recent theorizations about “media witnessing” have provided a guidepost in thinking about the ethical consequences of showing and seeing suffering in the media, it however obscures the normative from the descriptive and universalizes the experience of the “witness” it speaks about. To address these gaps and develop a holistic approach to examine televised suffering, the article proposes the use of mediation theory to account for the distinct ethical questions that arise from the specific “moments” of mediation and how they should altogether inform the ethical critique of media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an age in which social networking sites have become the preferred way of socializing online, the question of how to think about the contours of friendship in and through these mediated spaces becomes all the more important. In contrast to much existing research on online friendship, this article takes on a software-sensitive approach. Through a close reading of various sociotechnical processes in which friendship is activated on Facebook (i.e., registering, making a profile, finding friends, communicating, etc.), this article suggests that friendships online need to be understood as a gathering of heterogeneous elements that include both humans and nonhumans. Moreover, this article attempts to show how the traditional notion of friendship as something created between equals and free of structural constraints does not apply to the realm of social networking sites, where software increasingly assists users in making certain choices about who will and who will not be their friends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite The Wire’s (HBO, 2002-2008) successful, interesting structural analysis of urban politics and problems, its (few) portrayals of African American mothers exhibit a view of black motherhood as irresponsible, irrational, and emasculating, a view that hearkens back to that of the Moynihan Report. In this article, I look at the fourth season of the show to examine how mothers’ desires are presented as being central to the negative outcomes their sons face, as well as unrelentingly and sexually pathological. This aspect has been paid little if any attention in the show’s overwhelmingly positive critical reception; I explore the show’s political economic network context and the effects of The Wire’s self-proclaimed “authenticity” in furthering this discourse among its viewers. The treatment of these characters, encouraging mothers to “help [themselves], but [not] take too much” imbricates The Wire in the discourses of personal responsibility and self-governance that undergird neoliberal regimes it critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This short commentary piece arises from completing an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)–funded research project into the relationship between representations of business on factual television in the United Kingdom and the public’s perception and understanding of entrepreneurship. What we would like to do here is reflect on some of the implications of this work with specific regard to the research agenda around the media and civic culture. We remain convinced that even in the digital age, popular television remains a central entry point into debates about the relationship between broader civic and political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article compares the HBO series Treme to an earlier television series that was also set in the Tremé neighborhood—Frank’s Place. I suggest that whereas for Frank’s Place, media scholars’ emphasis on the show’s representational practices of race and place was entirely appropriate, these questions are not sufficient to make sense of Treme. The latter enjoins media scholars to ask a different set of questions that examine both the show’s practices within the city as well as the city’s practices that implicate the show. Specifically, I suggest that the show requires an analysis of labor and hiring practices, tourism, and corporate social responsibility in the city. In so doing, I propose considering Treme not in terms of its representational practices, but rather, as a set of spatial practices bound up with the material production of city space as well as its citizen-subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an analysis of the political economy of privacy and surveillance on Facebook. The concepts of socialist privacy and socialist internet privacy are advanced here. Capital accumulation on Facebook is based on the commodification of users and their data. One can in this context speak, based on Dallas Smythe, of the exploitation of the internet prosumer commodity. Aspects of a socialist internet privacy strategy are outlined and it is shown how they can be applied to social networking sites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the highlights of the Network Politics conference attended by media scholars and held in Cambridge, England from May 11-13, 2011. Scholars who spoke at the event investigated emerging forms of networked sociality. Tiziana Terranova discusses the intersection between mammoth platforms like Facebook and Twitter and political phenomena like the North African and Middle Eastern uprisings.