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With the expansion of the European Union eastwards,nations have adopted various strategies for being included in the Europeancommunity. This article discusses examples of cultural technologies used bypost-communist countries in aligning with Western Europe. It is argued that thephenomenon is in fact not new, as the marketing of nations has occurred since atleast the World’s Fairs of the 19th century. However, while the World’s Fairsaddressed the nation-states of high industrialism, cultural technologies are thefeatures used in a post-industrialized context, where it is more important toimpress with abilities of symbolic production rather than with traditionalindustrial production. In terms of modernization processes, it can be argued thatthe increased emphasis on symbolic production indicates a shift fromtechno-industrial modernization to techno-cultural modernization.

Published on ICA's website. Access for members only.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the Baltic Sea Region and Eastern Europe have attracted increasing interest from researchers from various disciplines. This book gathers researchers from the humanities, the social and natural sciences, who in their respective ways, and from a wide range of perspectives, attempt to come to grips with the challenges that the region poses for research.

Det populære svenske spil- og underholdningsprogram, Bingolotto, har været vist på national svensk tv lige så længe der har været kommer- ciel tv i Sverige. Programmet har haft skiftende succe siden starten i 1991 og havde på sit højdepunkt over 2 milllioner seere. Artiklen be- skriver Bingolotto som et særligt format inden for spil- og legeprogram- mer. Det sker gennem en diskussion af formatbegrebet i forhold til be- grebet genre, og gennem en identifikation af 4 karakteristiske dimen- sioner i formatbegrebet. Forfatteren fremhæver tv-formatet som en konceptuel beholder, der dels kan kapitaliseres, men som også kun kan anvendes på visse genrer. Desuden betragtes tv-formaternes fremvækst som et slags kulturelt oversættelsesarbejde i en globalise- ret tid, hvor internationale formater versioneres til et bestemt publikum ved at give formatet nationalt kulturelt særpræg.

This article aims at giving some theoretical reflections and possible clarifications to theories on production and consumption of symbolic goods and commodities. It is argued that the production of sign commodities generate various kinds of values, which also differ from those produced in material commodity production. With the example of the television audience this article puts forth the idea of the audience as a pure sign commodity, a commodity solely made up of sign structures, produced by semiotic labour.

Published on ICA's website. Access for members only.

The article discusses questions concerning the cultural public sphere in relation to empirical material from a media ethnography of young menąs use of extremely violent action and horror films on video, and how the young men's cultural practices, including media reception and film swapping, relates to their cultural production in the form of fanzines and amateur video films. The aim is to analyse this practice of film swapping, fanzine writing and amateur video making, in terms of cultural publicness, in order to shed light on those micro processes of communication that result in the formation of public spheres of various kinds. In the first part of the article some theoretical implications of the concepts cultural and political public spheres are discussed. Then follows a discussion on the internal communicative patterns within this alternative cultural public sphere, organised informally around fanzines and amateur video festivals. The dynamic relation between this alternative public sphere and other public formations, alternative as well as dominating or bourgeois, is then dealt with, and the different approaches among the various individuals is discussed. This is then followed by a discussion on the alternative cultural public's relation to the market and state systems. Lastly, some general conclusions are drawn, covering the need to analytically separate cultural and political public spheres in order not to forget the task of the cultural public in mediating between market system and lifeworld, and thus not to dismiss the political implications of the cultural.