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Featured researches published by J. Teurlings.


European Journal of Cultural Studies | 2010

Media literacy and the challenges of contemporary media culture: on savvy viewers and critical apathy

J. Teurlings

This article aims to make a contribution to the media literacy movement by focusing on the debate between liberal and more radical approaches. It argues that the media literacy movement is fighting a battle that is already partly won, but that contemporary popular culture has moved into a terrain that anticipates and undermines the supposedly liberating effects of increased knowledge on behalf of the television viewers. Drawing on Andrejevic’s work on reality TV and the author’s own work on dating shows, the article argues that the dominant viewing position can be described as a savvy one. The savvy viewer is not ‘duped’ into a naive belief in the media but literally sees through the text. However, the article concludes that the savvy attitude is essentially a conservative one in which the media are understood but not challenged, leaving the capitalist media industries beyond criticism — a phenomenon described as critical apathy.


Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies | 2001

Producing the Ordinary: Institutions, discourses and practices in love game shows

J. Teurlings

Television, it seems, has entered the age of the ordinary. The number of formats evolving around and using as their prime material ‘ordinary people’ has exploded in recent times. The emergence of these formats has produced a binarized debate in cultural studies, and in public discussion more widely. On the one hand, the age of the ordinary comes close to cultural studies’ ideal of ‘giving a voice to the people’, since these participants (who are non-media professionals) are given a public space to express their concerns, beliefs and preoccupations. The rich literature on talk shows points towards such an interpretation of these programmes: for instance, Shattuc (1997) and Livingstone and Lunt (1994) argue that talk shows open up the public sphere by giving ordinary people access to public debate, though not in the form of the rational debate to which Habermas aspires. On the other hand, studies like Gamson’s (1994) worry about the exploitation of participants in these programmes (1994, p. 13), suggesting that the ordinary voices in these programmes are not being expressed in a pure, free form but are controlled and limited by production situations:


Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies | 2014

Introduction The Transparency Issue

J. Teurlings; M. Stauff

Besides giving an overview on the individual contributions, this introduction to the special issue on transparency delineates a conceptual context for a critical analysis of the contemporary discourse on transparency and the media mechanisms related to it. It focuses on three ambivalences inherent to transparency: (a) The Enlightenment and modernity promise transparency and at the same time produce a structural complexity undermining all simple endeavors to make things visible. (b) Transparency, therefore, is never given but is based on artificial representational and mediatic strategies; the processes of mediation, however, applied to produce and display transparency, attract suspicion for being selective and manipulative. (c) Transparency is often equated with the possibility of a critical public while the practice of critique (according to scholars as different as Latour, Serres, Ranciere, and Boltanski) has become toothless in its redundant claim to disclose what other people do not see. Instead of just ridiculing the notion of transparency, we argue in conclusion that any call for transparency should always be accompanied with a careful examination and possible contention of why to disclose this (and not something else) and why with these tools (and not others).Besides giving an overview on the individual contributions, this introduction to the special issue on transparency delineates a conceptual context for a critical analysis of the contemporary discourse on transparency and the media mechanisms related to it. It focuses on three ambivalences inherent to transparency: (a) The Enlightenment and modernity promise transparency and at the same time produce a structural complexity undermining all simple endeavors to make things visible. (b) Transparency, therefore, is never given but is based on artificial representational and mediatic strategies; the processes of mediation, however, applied to produce and display transparency, attract suspicion for being selective and manipulative. (c) Transparency is often equated with the possibility of a critical public while the practice of critique (according to scholars as different as Latour, Serres, Rancière, and Boltanski) has become toothless in its redundant claim to disclose what other people do not see. Instead of just ridiculing the notion of transparency, we argue in conclusion that any call for transparency should always be accompanied with a careful examination and possible contention of why to disclose this (and not something else) and why with these tools (and not others).


European Journal of Communication | 2013

From the society of the spectacle to the society of the machinery: Mutations in popular culture 1960s–2000s

J. Teurlings

When Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, he was criticizing a society that was saturated by mass media and the endless stream of representations they crank out. This article argues that the society of the spectacle as described by Debord has mutated into a new form, best described as the society of the machinery. In it, the focus on representations is complemented by an obsession with the machinery that produces said representations. The mechanism can be seen at work in phenomena as diverse as America’s Next Top Model, the by-now obligatory Director’s Commentary on DVD releases, or the success of Hollywood and television tourism. In the society of the machinery, the dominant ideological form is the debunking mode that combines a hermeneutics of suspicion with a conservative refusal of utopianism, making it a particularly effective ideological tool for pacifying society. The second part of the article traces how the change from spectacle to machinery has occurred. Drawing on the work of Boltanski and Chiapello, the article contends that the society of the machinery is a by-product of the Situationist critique of the spectacle. Contemporary capitalism has split the Debordian critique into the artist critique and the social critique, and has incorporated the former while neutralizing the latter.


Television & New Media | 2018

Social Media and the New Commons of TV Criticism

J. Teurlings

This article investigates the way that social media have given a renewed impetus to TV criticism. Websites like Entertainment Weekly or TVline.com not only offer TV criticism by TV critics but also offer ample opportunity for fans to debate their favorite TV shows, part of what Graeme Turner has called “the demotic turn” in contemporary media. Whereas academic scrutiny of this demotic turn has tended to focus on the issue of democratization and the valorization of subjugated knowledges, relatively little attention has been given to how this has created a “commonification” of TV criticism. An analysis of audience reactions to The Walking Dead shows a protoprofessionalization of TV criticism, with audience members offering increasingly sophisticated analyses of TV shows, informed by standards set by the culture industry. The paper ends with a discussion on what type of cultural knowledge these new televisual commons produce and circulate.


Televisual culture | 2013

Unblackboxing production: what media studies can learn from actor-network theory

J. Teurlings


Televisual culture | 2013

After the break: television theory today

M. de Valck; J. Teurlings


Advances in media, entertainment, and the arts (AMEA) book series | 2017

What Critical Media Studies Should Not Take from Actor-Network Theory

J. Teurlings


cultural geographies | 2016

[Review of: J. Crary (2014) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep]

J. Teurlings


Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft | 2015

Review of Zamora's 'critiquer Foucault' [Review of: D. Zamora (2014) Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale]

J. Teurlings

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J. de Kloet

University of Amsterdam

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M. Stauff

University of Amsterdam

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Nico Carpentier

Charles University in Prague

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