Toija Cinque

Who is he now? The unearthly David Bowie

The question that has led and organised this special edition on David Bowie draws provocative attention to the way his career has been narrated by the constant transformation and recasting of his star image. By asking who is he now? the edition recognises that Bowie is a chameleon figure, one who reinvents himself in and across the media and art platforms that he is found in. This process of renewal means that Bowie constantly kills himself, an artistic suicide that allows for dramatic event moments to populate his music, and for a rebirth to emerge at the same time or shortly after he expires. Bowie has killed Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke to name but a few of his alter-egos. In this environment of death and resurrection, Bowie becomes a heightened, exaggerated enigma, a figure who constantly seems to be artificial or constructed and yet whose work asks us to look for his real self behind the mask – to ask the question, is this now the real Bowie that faces us? Of course, the answer is always no because Bowie is a contradictory constellation of images, stories and sounds whose star image rests on remaining an enigma, and like all stars in our midst, exists as a representation. Nonetheless, with Bowie - with this hyper- schizophrenic, confessional artist – the fan desire to get to know him, to immerse oneself in his worlds, fantasises, and projections - is particularly acute. With the unexpected release of The Next Day ((Iso/Columbia) on the 8th March 2013, the day of his 66th birthday, Bowie was resurrected again. The album and subsequent music videos drew explicitly on the question of who Bowie was and had been, creating a media frenzy around his past work, fan nostalgia for previous Bowie incarnations, and a pleasurable negotiation with his new output. In this special edition, edited by life-long Bowie fans, with contributions from die-hard Bowie aficionados, we seek to find him in the fragments and remains of what once was, and in the new enchantments of his latest work.

The emerging televisual: technology futures and screens for all things

ABSTRACT The use of high-speed broadband and internet-enabled television sets (smart TVs) for movies, news, documentaries, and television programs, amongst other services – for the convenience of the listener/viewer at a time chosen by them (on-demand) – is vital to televisions survival through networked options for choice. Individuals engage with a variety of increasingly interconnected technological devices. Multiple open screens, akin to those switched between on the personal computer, are now available across a single ‘surface’. These can be displayed congruently, even on whole walls whereby multiple screens are able be placed next to each other to create a single continuous display with modularity in shape and size. In parallel to these technological developments, audiences are looking to the mobile-first platform of small globally connected mobile screens or scalable media. Consider too, that user-generated content streamed online is proving popular for a number of viewers. In this paper, we will explore todays complex and shifting mediascape, analysing survey data collected in Australia to consider which screen media are currently made use of, how frequently various media are interacted with, and in what settings and purposes they are used. Reaching outward, we additionally use pseudo-anonymous data drawn from TriSMA, an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analytics (TrISMA) developed by QUT, Curtin, Swinburne and Deakin universities to provide detailed analytics regarding Australian social media use, specifically in order to evaluate how social media production works within the overarching process of television production. Through this lens, we evaluate the future of new screen technology offering digital content production, curation and dissemination in order to ask ‘what now?’

Talking Miley: The Value of Celebrity Gossip

This chapter examines the value of celebrity gossip for young teenage women. Through a social media case study of Miley Cyrus, fan gossip is explored through the ways it is formally sanctioned and informally produced; speaks to gender identity and relations; and is interacted with, shared and transcoded by teenage women as they go about their daily lives. Social media was selected as a key resource for data collection and analysis because a number of sites are the primary spheres of engagement between teen celebrities and their adolescent fan base. Our overriding research questions are: (1) What is entertaining about this gossip? Why and how are teenage girls being entertained by it?; (2) Is the gossip in the service of gender norms or does it have productive outcomes and if so, what gendered themes emerge in the way teenagers talk about Miley? and (3) What cultural ‘value’ emerges from or out of the way gossip is produced and consumed?

Intersecting David Bowie

We had three intentions in mind when employing the circuit of culture model (du Gay et al. 1997) to ‘intersect’ the cultural significance of David Bowie. First, we felt that by traversing the five points on the circuit – representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation – all the ways in which David Bowie enters and circulates within contemporary culture would open out to us in richly vexing and dynamically connecting articulations. We felt that by unravelling David Bowie in this way would allow us to critically understand media culture more broadly. By running David Bowie through the circuit of culture we would not only get to understand his stardom and celebrity but how cultural forms are established, maintained, circulated and circumnavigated. Exploring Bowie in this way would allow us to historicize and contemporize media culture in equally exciting and provocative ways. Second, we wanted to, both demonstrate the usefulness, and some of the limitations, of the circuit of culture model in fostering cultural understanding. The intention was to extend its application beyond products, goods and services. In essence, we wanted to embody the circuit of culture. Third, we wanted to recognize the significance and legacy of Stuart Hall’s later cultural studies work, particularly the way new forms of cultural empowerment flooded his writing and reignited his understanding of, and belief in, active agency and ideological resistance. The circuit of culture is an analytical device that allows one to explore a cultural artefact, form, or phenomena across five intersecting nodes or points: (1) production, (2) consumption, (3) representation, (4) identity and (5) regulation. The argument runs that only by assessing a cultural form or formation in and across these nodes will one get to comprehend all the articulations that render a cultural text meaningful. No one node or point is more important than the other and they all intersect and cross-connect in a myriad of both competing and complimentary ways, creating the spaces for negotiation, opposition and transformation. Unlike Marxist models of power, then, where the forces of production shaped all material, social and economic realities in their wake, the circuit of culture equals out the power capillaries that operate within its scintillating structures. Taking the relationship between production and consumption, for example, the latter is ‘increasingly seen as an activity with its own practices, tempo, significance and determination’ (Mackay 1997, 4), best encapsulated through the way consumers can appropriate or transcode the material of ‘mass culture’ to their own ends, through a range of everyday creative and symbolic practices including hair and body modification, scratching and sampling (records), and fan fiction. Such appropriation often shows itself as protest and resistance against the dominant ideology embedded in the cultural form from which it came. With David Bowie, of course, resistance was very often embedded in the material from which his star images were made.

The subversion of an exquisite corpus: against the grain with David Bowie

Abstract The critical need for identity formation has been underlined by the theory that ‘language’ and culture provide representations that produce meanings, and these meanings regulate social practices. Regulation is understood here to comprise intersections between various structures within a culture that might limit or delimit the use of a ‘text’ be it art, music or film. That is, regulation is an articulation of a number of formal and informal processes that lead to contingent and variable outcomes for (on a micro-level) listening/viewing bodies and (at the macro level) societies in general. Widely divergent perspectives on the weight of creative texts in society exist, offering complexity to the study of media as more than simply industries and technologies on one hand, and audiences and what they ‘do’ with the media on the other. This article considers that the ways David Bowie has become significant within the media-rich world around us. The purpose is to comprehend David Bowie via regulation on the circuit of culture in an interpretive analysis of this ‘moment’ with a specific focus on exploring ontological issues to do with the cultural politics of key forms of regulation brought forth by and surrounding David Bowie’s dynamic and frequently contested works.