A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
Freeing the Thirty Minute Sit-Com
by: Ray Cha / Independent Scholar
YouTube and other video on demand services are changing the terms of television programming and distribution, as well as control and access over
televisual material.
Notes on Children Unlike Others
by: Olivier Tchouaffe / FLOW Staff
The recent media focus on former child soldiers from Africa serves to not only draw attention to the plight of similar youths, but make a compelling argument in favor of
pacifist politics.
8-Bit Porn: Atari After Dark
by: Eric Freedman / Florida Atlantic University
While I am not the first enthusiast to sketch out the basic lineup of adult titles designed to play on 2600 consoles, what most of the fan sites do not consider is the role these games may have played in larger industrial and cultural discourses about gaming.
Bringing the War Back Home: YouTube and Anti-War Street Theater
by: Chuck Tryon / Fayetteville State University
A YouTube video of a street theater performance by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) raises questions about the representations of the war in Iraq as mediated by both the mainstream media and the more participatory video sharing sites.
Feature Film: A ‘You Tube Narrative Model’?
by: Alex Munt / Macquarie University
Munt explores Hollywood’s reaction to the popularity of YouTube and its emerging “Clip Culture”
Glimpsing Utopia on Lost
by: Tim Gibson / George Mason University
What I felt in my bones when I watched this particular episode of Lost was a yearning for the collective life of the castaways. Whatever else happens, these people are in it together. When times are bad, they are bad for everyone. When times are good—like when Hurley liberates the
hatch’s food—they’re good for one and all alike.
Modern Love?
by: Judith Halberstam / University of Southern California
New York Times column “Modern Love” records the ups
and downs, the byroads and hidden paths of contemporary romance for urban, mostly white, mostly heterosexual men and women.
Mommy, Is That a Boy Text or a Girl Text?
by: Jonathan Gray / Fordham University
How do audiences come to understand a text as having a gender, and/or a gendered audience?
Adieu to The Sopranos; What Next for HBO?
by: Kim Akass and Janet McCabe
Exploring whether the series finale of The Sopranos will be the nail in the coffin for the company that defines itself as not TV, but rather HBO.
Hutto’s Children: Maddening Structures of Absence
by: Hector Amaya / Southwestern University
YouTube allows unseen detained children the chance to be witnessed, but is anyone watching?
Everything is Under Control
by: Daniel Chamberlain / USC
Celebrations of viewer control display a marked historical shortsightedness, reveal a familiar deployment of gendered discourse, and raise questions about inequality of access
in a rapidly tiering television environment.
The Edwardian Country House: An Exegesis
by: Alan McKee / Queensland University of Technology
In the 2002 British reality series The Edwardian Country House 21 people live just as they would have done in the first decade of the twentieth century. Six of them take the role of the family who own the house, while fifteen take the role of the servants. And they live those Edwardian lives – strictly – for three months.