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.
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.
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.
Indigeneity for Life: Bro’town and Its Stereotypes
by: Ilana Gershon / Indiana University
The writers of Bro’town insist on a distinction between stereotypes used to reinforce historically and economically grounded inequalities and stereotypes used to indicate differences without consequences.
Beyond DRM
by: John McMurria / DePaul University
With the divide growing between consumer groups, global corporations, government agencies, and end users, there are increasing calls for genuine change in the way digital music is disseminated. Is the time right for compulsory licensing as a viable alternative?
Why Do I Love Television So Very Much?
by: Alan McKee / Queensland University of Technology
Why is television my favourite medium, moreso than cinema, radio, even than books? Why does art make me so angry, television so joyful?
by: Debbie James Smith / Wayne State University
My Name is Earl, a catfight, and the cultural debate over what is acceptable behavior for lower class mothers.
Sex, Love, Television – Part 1
by: Judith Halberstam / University of Southern California
What draws American viewers to Desperate Housewives, a show about infidelity, teenage promiscuity, scandal, secrecy, murder and deceit?
Online Game Talk and the Articulation of Maleness
by: Avery Alix / University of Washington
How is masculinity constructed and policed in gamers’ online communications?
Commercial Media, Media Reform, and an Arlington Church Basement
by: Tim Gibson / George Mason University
The popular critique of media commercialism has deep cultural roots, and you don’t have to be fire-breathing Marxist to be disgusted with the moral consequences.
Primetime’s Incompetent Liberalism
by: Shawn Shimpach / University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Primetime’s liberalism is both the problem and solution to its perceived red state/blue state divide.
Borat In (Next To!) The Balkans
by: Daniel Marcus / Goucher College
For those in the former Yugoslavia, Borat offers a rich field of representations to express and explore their self-definitions as emerging participants in Western culture and social practices.
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