"Annekathrin Kohout und Wolfgang Ullrich versammeln Beiträge, die sich verschiedenen Aspekten der zeitgenössischen visuellen Kultur widmen: Was zeichnet die Kommunikation über Memes aus, und warum sind sie so beliebt? Wie funktionieren GIFs, und wie haben sich das Dateiformat und seine Nutzung ü
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ber die Zeit verändert? Was bedeutet der zunehmende Einfluss von Influencerinnen und Influencern für die Rezeption und Verbreitung von Mode? Und welche Konsequenzen hat es, dass die Allgegenwart von Bildern mit der zunehmenden Verbreitung von Software einhergeht, die in der Lage ist, automatisiert Gesichter zu erkennen? Die Beiträge nehmen unterschiedliche Facetten eines tiefgreifenden kulturellen Wandels in den Blick und zeigen seine Grundlagen, Potenziale und Ambivalenzen auf." (Buchrücken)
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"A garment spends 2.2 years on average in a UK wardrobe. Fashion is among the biggest polluters, yet the media still promote throwaway fast fashion. The growing fashion public relations industry encourages and enables this media coverage. This policy brief identifies patterns in the way journalists
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and influencers cover fashion which contribute to unsustainable buying behaviours. Research recommends practical steps to improve media coverage to make consumption sustainable, by changing consumers’ understanding and reducing the pressure on them to buy ‘fast’ satisfaction. This brief is based on the original analysis of 1,000+ media artefacts in the UK – from magazines to newspapers, gossip weeklies to Instagram influencers." (Key messages)
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"The Next Billion Users reveals that many assumptions about internet use in developing countries are wrong. After immersing herself in factory towns, slums, townships, and favelas, Payal Arora assesses real patterns of internet usage in India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and the Middle East. She fi
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nds Himalayan teens growing closer by sharing a single computer with common passwords and profiles. In China's gaming factories, the line between work and leisure disappears. In Riyadh, a group of young women organize a YouTube fashion show. Why do citizens of states with strict surveillance policies appear to care so little about their digital privacy? Why do Brazilians eschew geo-tagging on social media? What drives young Indians to friend "foreign" strangers on Facebook and give "missed calls" to people? The Next Billion Users answers these questions and many more. Through extensive fieldwork, Arora demonstrates that the global poor are far from virtuous utilitarians who mainly go online to study, find jobs, and obtain health information. She reveals habits of use bound to intrigue everyone from casual internet users to developers of global digital platforms to organizations seeking to reach the next billion internet users." (Publisher description)
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"Social media have become part of the private and public lifestyles of youth globally. Drawing on both online and offline research in Indonesia, this article focuses on the use of Instagram by Indonesian Muslim youth. It analyzes how religious messages uploaded on Instagram through posts and caption
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s have a significant effect on the way in which Indonesian Muslim youth understand their religion and accentuate their (pious) identities and life goals. This article argues that Instagram has recently become the ultimate platform for Indonesian female Muslim youth to educate each other in becoming virtuous Muslims. The creativity and zeal of the creators of Instagram da'wa (proselytization), and their firm belief that 'a picture is worth a thousand words', has positioned them as social media influencers, which in turn has enabled them to conduct both soft da'wa and lucrative da'wa through business." (Abstract)
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"Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores: "key issues of definition and of methodology, religious encounters with popular
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culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments, representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood." (Publisher description)
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"In Making Her Up, the authors try to elucidate the precise ambivalence of the image of the modern woman, which is (un)wittingly created by the producers of women’s magazines in co-operation with capitalistic advertising mechanisms and, not least, their own readers. Through the discourse and conte
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nt analysis of a diverse selection of Slovenian women’s magazines (Cosmopolitan, Jana, Modna Jana, Glamur, Naša žena, and Moj malcek), the writers have uncovered a few representative topics: the contradictory contents of ‘universal women’s culture’; the phenomenon of subtle advertising, with its inexhaustible options among the various types of magazines; fashion as the main theme of each and every one of these magazines; the disciplining of a woman’s mind through the disciplining of her body; cosmetics advertisements; medicine, pregnancy, birth, and the cult of motherhood, which still prevails over the image of the independent, successful, emancipated woman." (City of Women)
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