John D.H. Downing

Audiences and Readers of Alternative Media: The Absent Lure of the Virtually Unknown:

Reasons for the virtual absence of research in this area are proposed, and contrasts between users of conventional media and alternative media audiences suggested, along with a political ethics of listening. Connections between social movements and alternative media uses are discussed, the interplay between political consciousness and alternative media use is examined, and social conditions in which the latter are responded to are explored. Finally, the variety of alternative media formats, genres and technologies is noted.

Internationalizing media theory

Media theory has been too narrowly conceptualized within the experiences of British and American scholars. Because the United States and Great Britain are the two countries where most media research has been done, our ideas of what constitutes a media “theory” have been limited by the cultural, political and economic contexts of these nations. But these two countries are far too similar for us to base general media theories on their experiences. Both nations share an imperial history, for example, and a diffuse Protestant Christian culture. They have also both experienced a great degree of political and institutional stability since 1865, and they share a basic economic structure as well as patterns of extensive affluence. Witticisms notwithstanding, they also share a common language. A few other countries have also contributed to our ideas about media theory—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the Nordic nations have also had their savants in this field. But for the mos...

Mediating terrorism: text and protest in interpretations of The Siege

In this study we focus on the film The Siege (1998), as an illustration of how mediated representations of terrorism serve as a vehicle for Orientalist discourse. This text serves as a specific location of struggle and negotiation over interpretations of media characterizations of Arabs, Arab Americans, Muslims, and Islam. First, we focus on how the film represents these communities and the religion textually. Second, we consider news discourse offering critiques of the film by protesting organizations, and the defenses articulated by some of the films makers. Third, we explore the interpretations of young U.S. viewers as they resonate with competing facets of the text and with public perspectives. Despite the varied possibilities within the text, these interpretations privileged rather than challenged an underlying Orientalist ideology. Still, news media did acknowledge the contestation of dominant discourse, a potential step toward improved portrayals.

The realities of virtual play: video games and their industry in China:

In this study, ‘video game’ is an umbrella term for arcade games, console games, single PC games and online games. Video games have a 20-year history in China and continually impress us with their impressive statistics. With over 20 million online gamers and the largest game population in the world, China was predicted to be the largest online game market in 2007 (Game Trust and Diffusion Group, 2004). In 2005 alone, video games generated 6.7 billion RMB (US

“Geopolitics” and “the Popular”: An Exploration

0.8 billion) of revenue in China (Popsoft, 2006). Playing video games has displaced TV watching as a major leisure activity among Chinese youth. A recent survey showed that 25.4 percent of urban youth reported video games as the medium they most enjoyed, followed by television (18.8%). Average playtime reached 0.98 hours a day (Yang et al., 2004). As video gaming soared in popularity, it became recognized as an official sport by the state. Aside from being a huge economic and entertainment phenomenon, video games have complex social and cultural impacts. Researchers suggest video games are becoming a social location in which new social relations, community networks, and new life-styles are formed (e.g. Humphrey, 2005; Whang, 2003). Furthermore, as a new and popular medium, video games have significant ideological and cultural influences on young people. They also function as a rich art form and a new venue for critical expression (Jenkins and Squire, 2002). Despite their cultural and social significance, rapid growth and widespread appeal in China, video games – unlike traditional media – have received scant attention from international communication researchers. This study is among the first attempts to fill the void by providing an outline of video game development in China, and develops game scholarship by providing research into

Is there an American public?: An exchange of correspondence

The article explores the conceptual boundaries of “geopolitics” and “the popular.” Various examples, both historical and contemporary, are drawn upon to illustrate the necessary linkages between these two taxonomies. These examples illustrate four main arteries of the deeply rooted popular culture of fear in the United States and of its publics consequent capacity to be mobilized for war. The argument concludes with some pointers for further research on continuing unsolved and knotted issues in the dynamics of popular culture, communication and power.

Review Essay: Race, ethnicity and global communication studies:

This paper is an exchange of correspondence that debates the empirical and critical usefulness of the construct known as “the American public.” Because that construct is often used in mass media research, but used stipulatively rather than self‐consciously for the most part, its theoretical worthiness is explored here in some detail. By approaching the topic from different vantage points, the authors hope to stimulate further scholarly examination of the constructs social, political, and even moral effects on the American people and their media habits.

De-Westernizing Communication Research: Altering questions and changing frameworks

Race, as Downing and Husband (2005) remind us, is a ‘social category’ without a ‘scientific basis’ (p. 2). And yet, for better or worse, race is a fundamental dimension of contemporary life, one of the few master tropes that define identities, elicit solidarities and operate as an instrument of othering. Though ‘more inclusive and less objectifying’ (Spencer, p. 45), ethnicity is a ‘transient concept’ (p. 47) that, perhaps more so than ‘race’, reflects public and scholarly understandings of difference. They can also be burning issues in the life of nations and regions. As I am writing these words, public discourse in the United States has for several weeks been agitated by radio talk-show Don Imus’s racist comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, the French intelligentsia is enjoying a collective sigh of relief at the weaker-than expected performance in the 2007 presidential election of the far-right and xenophobic French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, and sectarian polarization between Sunnis and Shi’as is gripping the Arab world, fuelled by the botched US–British occupation of Iraq, rhetorical war between the US and Iran and the consequences of the Israel–Hizbullah war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Disciplines Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/320 Race, ethnicity and global communication studies

International Communications and the Second World: Developments in Communication Strategies

These essays make an interesting contribution to the crucial ongoing debate concerning the impact on the social sciences of the dominance of Eurocentric paradigms. Its contributions are divided into four segments: prolegomena on metaissues, such as Asia-centrism or Africa-centrism versus Eurocentrism; the promises and pitfalls of research focused on a single nation-state; is a genuine universalism possible in social communication research?; and the prospects for future research in this arena. They are from presentations at a 2008 Taipei conference, itself sparked by a vigorous discussion at a workshop on Chinese communication research the previous year. Some chapters also appeared in the Asian Journal of Communication (19(4), 2009). A majority of the authors, such as Marwan Kraidy, Graham Murdock and David Morley, are from outside Chinese academic circles, and indeed the collection strives hard for inclusiveness. Wang’s essay on Orientalism and Occidentalism offers a carefully considered critical commentary on the latter. She defines Occidentalism as cultural subservience to the West, rather than visceral hostility to it as in some uses of the term. She places Occidentalism as generated originally by the need for “defense, reform and survival” (p. 63) in response to the colonialist bulldozer, but as persisting to the present day despite later anti-colonialist reassertions of the values in traditional cultures. Its sources in the here and now, she argues, lie in the current global dominance of Western tertiary education and its assertion of the universality of the principles of scientific knowledge developed historically within it. These institutional factors also interlock with a subaltern mentality that applies concepts derived from Western sources, such as “public sphere”, with a kneejerk disregard for their degree of fit with non-Western contexts. This mentality is also exemplified in the requirement that scholars publish in so-called “top rank” SSCI journals whose criteria of excellence are frequently highly Eurocentric. Even the West’s “critical thinking” approaches, Wang claims, are all too often squeezed into a mould of sweeping hostility to imported ideas, thereby simply inverting the compulsion to imitate. The common Western notion that Chinese culture is collectivist while Western culture is individualist, a notion that has been picked up and used unreflectively by some Chinese researchers, is one that Wang attacks as misconceived, missing out on the “relationalism” she has argued elsewhere to be a much more perceptive term to pinpoint Chinese cultural specificity. Paul S.N. Lee’s chapter proposes that non-Western researchers should deWesternize in the sense of rejecting the positivist paradigm enthroned in many Western universities, and consequently in many non-Western universities, but work with the interpretive paradigm that also enjoys a minority space in the Western academy. However, he would glue Confucianism’s explicit concern for establishing a

Radical media: rebellious communication and social movements

There are many forms of communication between the socialist nations, and between them and capitalist countries, such as diplomatic (both conventional and public), party-to-party, scientific and foreign language media services. This article focuses upon the use of media technologies in international communication. It examines (a) TV programme exchange practices and policies; (b) the role of the Intersputnik international satellite organization; (c) the development of computer-aided international data transmission (TBDFs); and (d) the respective places of Cuba and Nicaragua in this communication complex.