Pat Brereton

New media – new pleasures?

The promotional and academic discourse surrounding new media suggests that they offer more fun and more pleasure than existing or traditional media. However, academic work within media and cultural studies has failed to interrogate these claims empirically. This article critically assesses the conceptualization of pleasure as it is deployed in media audience research and attempts to update these conceptualizations by drawing upon game design theory and key concepts from new media theory. The article goes on to evaluate these concepts through an empirical examination of the varied experience of digital games, DVDs and digital television in a variety of households in Dublin, Ireland. Central to the findings is that while pleasure and displeasure are largely undertheorized, these terms, when deployed empirically, afford a useful entry point into evaluating media experiences. The article identifies key differences between the experience of online and offline new media and calls for more research into the pleasures of play and control in relation to both new and more established media use.

Screening Not Greening: An Ecological Reading of the Greatest Business Movies

This article submits that filmic representations of the market are important points for consideration in macromarketing scholarship. As such business movies visualize the marketplace that has itself been recently termed the agora in this journal. The top ten greatest business movies as selected by a panel of experts for Forbes magazine are considered from an ecological point of view (POV). The authors submit that the dominant social paradigm (DSP) is the culture within the movies and as such the business movie does not generally present business and/or materialism in an ecologically benevolent manner. The authors remark on the consequences of this for the future.

Pleasure and Pedagogy: The Consumption of DVD Add-Ons Among Irish Teenagers

This article addresses the issue of young people and media use in the digital age, more specifically the interconnection between new media pleasures and pedagogy as they relate to the consumption of DVD add-ons. Arguing against the view of new media as having predominantly detrimental effects on young people, the authors claim that new media can enable young people to develop media literacy skills and are of the view that media literacy strategies must be based on an understanding and legitimating of young peoples use patterns and pleasures. The discussion is based on a pilot research project on the use patterns and pleasures of use with a sample of Irish teenagers. They found that DVDs were used predominantly in the home context, and that, while there was variability in use between the groups, overall they developed critical literacy skills and competences which were interwoven into their social life and projects of identity construction. The authors suggest that these findings could be used to develop DVDs and their add-on features as a learning resource in the more formal educational setting and they go on to outline the potential teaching benefits of their use across a range of pedagogical areas.

Developing, Deploying and Assessing Usage of a Movie Archive System among Students of Film Studies

This paper describes our work in developing a movie browser application for students of Film Studies at our University. The aim of our work is to address the issues that arise when applying conventional user-centered design techniques from the usability engineering field to build a usable application when the system incorporates novel multimedia tools that could be potentially useful to the end-users but have not yet been practiced or deployed. We developed a web-based system that incorporates features as identified from the students and those features from our novel video analysis tools, including scene detection and classification. We deployed the system, monitored usage and gathered quantitative and qualitative data. Our findings show those expected patterns and highlighted issues that need to be further investigated in a novel application development. A mismatch between the users wishes at the interviews and their actual usage was noted. In general, students found most of the provided features were beneficial for their studies.

Smart New Audiences: A Pilot Study (DVD Bonus Features—A New Form of Cineaste Experience!)

After several literature review projects, including: New Media—New Pleasures (Kerr, Kücklich, and Brereton 2006), culminating with my 2012 Smart Cinema book, which focused on the convergence between “old” and “new” media, I want to test some hypotheses raised using a number of core questions to help test and evaluate some of the assumptions posed in these and other studies across a number of targeted audiences. As many scholars affirm, new media industries certainly create opportunities for audiences to be more active and engaged. The notion of active audiences and interactive media remain the focus of extensive new media debates and research. For new generations especially—so called digital natives—it seems natural to expect more influence and control over media content. Such changes can be further explained with reference to the media’s need to sustain their position in the face of increased competition from a broadening, yet at the same time converging media landscape. As illustrated in Smart Cinema, DVDs and their use of bonus features remains just one example of this process and serve to illustrate the multiplicity of evolving new audience pleasures and modes of engagement. Essentially, I argued that DVD bonus features represent a bridge between the text and the creative makers of a film, who in turn speak directly to their niche audiences, often outside of the confines of the specific filmic text. Smart Cinema explores how cinema has been transformed with the growth of new generational producers/consumers, across the American-European axis—not to mention the African, Asian and Indian mega-markets—while specifically signaling how DVD addons can strengthen the overall appeal of this fan driven medium that coincidentally or not incorporates significant educational applications. A preoccupation is growing with convergence across new media research, alongside bridging and expanding possibilities through a range of radically new technological innovations, such as the ubiquitous mobile phone apps, alongside other web-based innovations. The DVD modalities—at least up to recently, as it becomes overtaken by online modes of delivery—provide a useful bridge between scholarly new media research and conventional film studies and by all accounts affords a clear example of how new-generational cineastes might connect with this radically evolving medium. As continually asserted by a range of scholars, there remains a pervasive need to engage with a number of audience research protocols and reception methodologies, together with examining the potentiality of new modes of distribution and consumption, to help tease out some of the well-established assumptions embedded within much of the textual film studies literature, which can in turn actively transform and facilitate the development of the discipline into the future.1

An Ecological Approach to the Cinema of Peter Weir

The ecocritic Lawrence Buell defines “ecocentric” forms of literary imagining as characterized especially by nature writings in the Thoreauvian tradition, arguing that a reorientation of human attention and values to a stronger ethic of care for the non-human environment would make the world a better place for all life on the planet. Furthermore, as sociologist Ulrich Beck remarks about debates over species extinction: “only if nature is brought into people’s everyday images, into the stories they tell, can its beauty and its suffering be seen and focused on” (quoted in Buell 1). I suggest that this drive and ambition can be extended to many forms of filmic representation and becomes a benchmark for this study of Peter Weir’s films, which frequently deal with outsiders who find themselves out of their depth in unusual places. An ecocritical reading of Weir’s films can be mapped across their representation of natives and nature itself as characters, alongside the representation of lived relations with/in the natural, non-human world. As Bryan Norton puts it, environmentalism needs to educate the public “to see problems from a synoptic, contextual perspective” (xi). Concurrent with this educational objective, Paul Taylor effectively consolidates an environmental ethic that includes: an ultimate moral attitude of “respect for nature”; a belief system that he calls “the biocentric outlook”; and a set of rules of duty that express “the attitude of respect” (Quoted in Gruen, 43).1 Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema categorizes ecological values across a light/dark spectrum using Jonathan Porritt’s and Arne Naess’ definitions of light and deep ecology that continue to inform ecocriticism (see Brereton, 2005: 26–31).2 Mapping Weir’s oeuvre along this spectrum, as exemplified by Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Witness (1985), Mosquito Coast (1986) and Master And Commander (2003) helps promote this loosely educational agenda. Frank Cossa, for instance, points to Weir’s consistent vision that ostensibly signals why he is a suitable candidate for an ecocritical study, when he notes that “in virtually all his films something–often quite literally someone–gets lost. Innocence, idealism, and faith are the usual casualties. Moreover there is nearly always a clash of cultures. His characters are thrown into a milieu they are not equipped to understand, one that seems hostile and threatening, if only for its strangeness” (1). It is this very strangeness and clash of cultures that allow Weir to create a sustained meditation on nature, landscape, and ecological expression in his Australian and American films, thus justifying his classification as an eco-auteur.3 Weir’s films cross two continents and can be read as presenting varying ethical