"Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital as
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sume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory." (Publisher description)
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"Vertrauenskrisen haben Konjunktur: Ob Politik, Wissenschaft oder Journalismus - kein gesellschaftliches Teilsystem bleibt von öffentlichen Misstrauensbekundungen verschont. Doch was genau meint der schillernde Begriff »Systemvertrauen« und welche Konsequenzen hat ein Mangel desselben? Malte G. S
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chmidt folgt diesen Fragen aus einer gesellschaftstheoretischen Perspektive. Er zeigt die sozialintegrative Bedeutung des Journalismus auf und prüft, inwieweit dieser seine Rolle als Vertrauensvermittler im neoliberalen Kapitalismus erfüllen kann. Ein ökonomisierter Journalismus - so seine These - bedingt gesellschaftliche Integrationsstörungen, die dann in Form von Autoritarismus auf ihn zurückfallen." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Tenemos que afirmar que, en estos días, está en su casi totalidad, por lo menos cuando nos referimos a los medios de comunicación masivos; permeado y bajo el control de las élites económicas que, además, hay que recordarlo, son en su inmensa mayoría élites masculinas. Esta situación de dom
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inación supondrá una evidente retroalimentación de conceptos y visiones desde el mundo económico al comunicacional donde, entre otras, será también dominante la visión patriarcal. Pero podemos ir más allá aún y, al hilo de ese sometimiento al poder económico, recuperar la cita inicial que abre esta introducción para entender que el cuarto poder, el mediático, además de estar hoy supeditado a las élites económicas, ante la ausencia de un contrapoder que lo reequilibre y controle en sus actuaciones, no es un poder necesariamente democrático. Sobre todo esto, entre otros aspectos, iremos profundizando en las páginas siguientes y, de alguna forma, en la totalidad de este ensayo. En los últimos capítulos, hablaremos también de ese posible contrapoder que constituiría la comunicación alternativa, comunitaria, basado en la sociedad civil." (Introducción)
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"Tal como plantea el autor, frente a la producción de los medios electrónicos comerciales que se da en condiciones de ausencia de sujeto y con destinatarios convertidos en meros espectadores y consumidores de contenidos rápidamente digeribles, el reto es repensar la comunicación como acción del
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común, como una plataforma para replantear las relaciones y las posibilidades de constituirse en lazos sociales. Luego del desarrollo y consolidación del poder mediático a nivel global, que ha significado la mortificación y los intentos de anular las tramas antropológicas del lugar fomentando el individualismo y debilitando los procesos de colectivización, se plantea la necesidad de una inversión radical: concebir a una comunicación mediática no divorciada de la comunicación de proximidad." (Descripción de la casa editorial)
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"Contemporary Latin American Cinema investigates the ways in which neoliberal measures of privatization, de-regularization and austerity introduced in Latin America during the 1990s have impacted film production and film narratives. The collection examines the relationship between economic policies
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and the films that depict recent transformations in many Latin American countries, demonstrating how contemporary Latin American film has not only criticized and resisted, but also benefitted from neoliberal advancements. Based on films produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru since 2010, the fourteen case studies illustrate neoliberalism's effects, from big industries to small national cinemas. It also shows the new types of producers that have emerged, and the novel patterns of distribution, exhibition and consumption that shape and influence the Latin American filmscape." (Publisher description)
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"In the development communication equation, whether more theoretical, empirical and analytical attention is given to ‘development’ or to ‘communication’ makes a difference: where the emphasis is on development, it is at the expense of communication. Since communication and media arguably pla
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y an increasingly pervasive role in the everyday life of citizens and in the politics, economies and governance of most societies, the characteristics and role of specific forms of applied communication strategies in the context of the neoliberal project merit critical scrutiny. Given a complex global scenario, what can a political economy approach bring into an agenda for the future of development communication as a field of study, a practice and an institutional project? This article outlines ways in which a focus on political economy dimensions may contribute to understanding the obstacles and limits to a transformative practice of international development communication." (Abstract)
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"By illustrating the rise of neoliberalism as a case in point, the study hypothesises a neoliberal influence on the measurement of freedom of information. To test such assumption, the work describes three ideal typical models of freedom of information – the liberal, egalitarian and neoliberal mode
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ls – and their connection with specific conceptions of democracy. Then, the article focuses on the Freedom of the Press Index by Freedom House, that is the most used and recognised instrument for measuring freedom of information. Though the Freedom House contends to measure a liberal conception of freedom of information, the analysis of the indicators of the Freedom of the Press Index shows that they mirror the neoliberal model at least with respect to the role of state and market on media systems, and the conception of media pluralism. The results bring into question the uncritical acceptance of the Freedom of the Press Index as the universal yardstick of freedom of information." (Abstract)
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"This article deals with entertainment in the neo-liberal age. The key aim is to describe the emerging brokering practices of certain entrepreneurs within the entertainment industry in Ghana, and to explore the effects of these practices. On the one hand these entrepreneurs receive sponsorship from
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major transnational corporations, in order to produce reality TV shows and major entertainment events. The shows are meant to appeal to the target market of the corporate sponsors, and in this way these entrepreneurs fill the role of a power broker. On the other hand, the entrepreneurs also fill the role of a culture broker as they try to tune into a larger market by producing entertainment that is aimed to be popular not only in Ghana, but to a larger market across Africa. In this article I refer to this shift in style of entertainment as a shift towards an Afro-Cosmopolitan style of entertainment. The strategic epicentre for the fieldwork of this study is one of Ghana’s major production houses, Charterhouse Productions." (Abstract)
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"This first book-length study of infotainment and its globalization by a leading scholar of global communication, offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of this emerging phenomenon. Going beyond - both geographically and theoretically - the ‘dumbing down’ discourse, largely confined to the
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Anglo-American media, the book argues that infotainment may have an important ideological role, a diversion in which ‘soft news’ masks the hard realities of neo-liberal imperialism." (Publisher description)
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