"Chinese idol fans have been identified among the main forces in cyber nationalist activisms in recent years, acting as the nationalist fans protecting the state as an idol in response to external political shocks. Their skills in acknowledging, involving, and even reinventing the image of the state
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and national pride in cyber nationalist activisms do not emerge in a vacuum. This article examines how idol fans involve and reinvent the nationalist discourse in their everyday fan activities – idol promotion. We focus on the pandemic in 2020 as it provides a specific social and political context that allows us to understand better the interaction between idol fans and the state in their mundane fan activities. We construct our analysis under the computational grounded theory framework with over 6 million fan posts collected from Weibo and 11 in-depth interviews with active idol fans. Our findings show that when engaging in pandemic-related discussion, idol fans actively borrowed official discourse on nationalism and strategically responded to key political and social events in their idol promotion activities. The idol images they built are not only positive but also nationalist. Therefore, they play not only the commercial logic commonly seen in the Japanese and Korean K-pop/idol culture but also the political logic propagated by the state in China." (Abstract)
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"In the algorithmic era, both users and the platform battle for visibility. Chinese fans are savvy users who explore the hidden algorithms behind platform functions. With the collectively developed algorithmic imaginary, digital fandom communities negotiate with the platform over algorithms to optim
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ize the visibility of celebrities they endorse. Drawing from participatory observation and semi-structured interviews in Chinese online fandoms of an idol group, INTO1, we detailed how fans as digital users collectively explore, interpret, and creatively utilize algorithms to increase their idol’s visibility. We conclude that visibility, as a representation of algorithm power, is co-defined through the constant push-and-pull between digital users and the platform. This paper contributes to both algorithm and fandom studies by describing large-scale non-professional users’ daily construction of the algorithmic imaginary in the unique context of Chinese fandom and beyond. It also discusses broader civic implications of fans’ algorithmic practices to wider digital users in China." (Abstract)
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"One key aspect of Filipino cinema during its 100-year history is its attempt at self-reflexivity. Films that revolve around films have been made repeatedly, exploring the morality of the industry, the highs and lows of actors, or the passions of fans. Fandom, in particular, is depicted at length in
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films like Bona (Lino Brocka, 1980), Bituing Walang Ningning [Lackluster Star] (Emmanuel Borlaza, 1985), Konorang Itim [Black Crown] (Jose Mari Avellana, 1994), and Fangirl Fanboy (Barry Gonzalez, 2017). Each features a narrative centered on the life of a fan in relation to a film or a music idol. Do such movies value and appreciate their highest patrons? In what ways are representations of fan practices and behaviors in such movies affirming or contesting of fan stereotypes? How do fan representations affect the movie industry’s attitude, more broadly, toward its audiences? These are only some of the questions the paper shall address in order to identify an iconographic understanding of fans, based on movies that directly recognize their existence and narrate their experiences." (Absract)
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"Featuring contributions from a diverse range of internationally-recognized experts and practitioners, this timely volume discusses recent developments in the field in the context of related scholarship, public policy, formal and non-formal teaching and learning, and DIY and community practice. Offe
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ring a truly global perspective, the Handbook focuses on empirical work from Media and Information Literacy (MIL) practitioners from around the world. The book’s five parts explore global youth cultures and the media, trans-media learning, media literacy and scientific controversies, varying national approaches to media research, media education policies, and much more." (Publisher description)
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"Siguiendo con la conexión entre tradición e innovación, la estructura del libro parte de una aproximación teórica al concepto de audiencia y su evolución histórica para, a continuación, explicar las principales metodologías de investigación en audiencias, tanto cuantitativas como cualitat
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ivas, y analizar los sistemas de medición de la audiencia en los diferentes medios: televisión, radio, prensa e Internet. La obra ofrece una reflexión sobre los retos de futuro, con abundantes enlaces y recursos audiovisuales extra que permitan ampliar cada uno de los capítulos." (Editorial)
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"A diverse range of international and interdisciplinary scholars take a closer look at how gender and sexuality have been essential in the evolution of comics, and how gender and sexuality in comics demand that we re-frame and re-view comics history. Essays cover a wide array of intersectional topic
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s including Queer Underground and Alternative comics, Feminist Autobiography, Re-drawing disability, Latina testimony, and re-evaluating the critical whiteness and masculinity of superheroes in this first truly global reference text to gender and sexuality in comics." (Publisher description)
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"As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed
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and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts." (Publisher description)
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"The authors engage with a range of cross-disciplinary perspectives in order to explore the actions of a vigilant digital audience — denunciation, shaming, doxing — and to consider the role of the press and other public figures in supporting or contesting these activities. In turn, the volume il
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luminates several tensions underlying these justice seeking activities — from their capacity to reproduce categorical forms of discrimination, to the diverse motivations of the wider audiences who participate in vigilant denunciations. This timely volume presents thoughtful case studies drawn both from high-profile Anglo-American contexts, and from developments in regions that have received less coverage in English-language scholarship [China, Morocco, Russia and Slovenia]. It is distinctive in its focus on the contested boundary between policing and entertainment, and on the various contexts in which the desire to seek retribution converges with the desire to consume entertainment." (Back cover)
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"The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is a wide-ranging collection of 42 original and authoritative essays by leading contributors from a variety of academic disciplines. Introducing and exploring central debates about the diverse relationships between both media and protest, and communicat
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ion and social change, the book offers readers a reliable and informed guide to understanding how media and activism influence one another. The expert contributors examine the tactics and strategies of protest movements, and how activists organize themselves and each other; they investigate the dilemmas of media coverage and the creation of alternative media spaces and platforms; and they emphasize the importance of creativity and art in social change. Bringing together case studies and contributors from six continents, the collection is organized around themes that address past, present and future developments from around the world." (Publisher description)
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"This study focuses on the meanings fans ascribe to the death of fictional characters. Previous research on this topic has been predominantly quantitative in nature, concerned with correlations between the consumption of fictional narratives and people’s coping mechanisms and attitudes. In contras
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t this paper provides a contextualized account of how the mourning of fictional characters works in practice by revealing the underlying meaning making process of this kind of grief and exploring how this is related to people’s everyday lives. By analysing 15 in-depth interviews, this article concludes that these respondents actively utilise fictional narratives of death for reflecting on personal loss; contemplating unexperienced situations and feelings, and more generally, coping with the prospect of death." (Abstract)
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"Este volume consiste em uma seleção de artigos que versam sobre questões contemporâneas dos estudos de jogos eletrônicos – game studies – e sobre sua inevitável interseção junto ao campo da Comunicação. Nela estão presentes trabalhos apresentados na primeira edição do GP de Games d
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o Congresso da Intercom – realizado em setembro de 2016, bem como artigos de pesquisadores nacionais e internacionais convidados. De modo geral, acreditamos que o livro apresenta um panorama geral sobre o estado do campo de estudos dos video games no Brasil e seus avanços nos últimos anos, além de auxiliar na reflexão acerca dos caminhos de pesquisa tomados por pesquisadores engajados neste campo. Dentre os onze artigos que compõem a obra, figuram questões como relativas a retórica e linguagem, filosofia, game design, estudos de narrativa, estudos de fãs, media literacy e aspectos históricos dos video games." (Resumo)
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"Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach, which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art. Contributors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics, including fan
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dom, genre, intertextuality, adaptation, gender, narrative, formalism, visual culture, and much more." (Publisher description)
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"How do students' online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture? In this book scholars from a range of countries including Australia, Lebanon, Nepal, Qatar, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influ
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enced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students. The authors examine issues of theory, identity, and pedagogy as they address participatory popular culture sites such as fan forums, video, blogs, social networking sites, anime, memes, and comics and graphic novels." (Back cover)
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"An engaging and original study of current research on television audiences and the concept of emotion, this book offers a unique approach to key issues within television studies. Topics discussed include: television branding; emotional qualities in television texts; audience reception models; fan c
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ultures; 'quality' television; television aesthetics; reality television; individualism and its links to television consumption. The book is divided into two sections: the first covers theoretical work on the audience, fan cultures, global television, theorising emotion and affect in feminist theory and film and television studies. The second half offers a series of case studies on television programmes in order to explore how emotion is fashioned, constructed and valued in televisual texts. The final chapter features original material from interviews with industry professionals in the UK and Irish Soap industries along with advice for students on how to conduct their own small-scale ethnographic projects." (Publisher description)
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"This book explores people's everyday experience of the media in Asian countries in confrontation with huge social change and transition and the need to understand this phenomenon as it intersects with the media. It argues for the centrality of the media to Asian transformations in the era of global
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ization. The profusion of the media today, with new imaginations, new choices and contradictions, generates a critical condition for reflexivity engaging everyday people to have a resource for the learning of self, culture and society in a new light. Media culture is creating new connections, new desires and threats, and the identities of people are being reworked at individual, national, regional and global levels. Within historically specific social conditions and contexts of the everyday, the chapters seek to provide a diversity of experiences and understandings of the place of the media in different Asian locations. This book considers the emerging consequences of media consumption in people's everyday life at a time when the political, socio-economic and cultural forces by which the media operate are rapidly globalizing in Asia." (Publisher description)
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