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A daily battle for rights and freedoms in cyberspace is being waged in Asia. At the epicenter of this contest is China—home to the world’s largest Internet population and what is perhaps the world’s most advanced Internet censorship and surveillance regime in cyberspace. Resistance to China’s Internet controls comes from both grassroots activists and corporate giants such as Google. Meanwhile, similar struggles play out across the rest of the region, from India and Singapore to Thailand and Burma, although each national dynamic is unique. This book is the third volume from the OpenNet Initiative (a collaborative partnership of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the SecDev Group in Ottawa), and it examines the interplay of national security, social and ethnic identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace, offering accounts of national struggles against Internet controls as well as updated country reports by ONI researchers. The contributors examine such topics as Internet censorship in Thailand, the Malaysian blogosphere, surveillance and censorship around gender and sexuality in Malaysia, Internet governance in China, corporate social responsibility and freedom of expression in South Korea and India, cyber attacks on independent Burmese media, and distributed-denial-of-service attacks and other digital control measures across Asia.

Now synonymous with Sixties counterculture, LSD actually entered the American consciousness via the mainstream. Time and Life, messengers of American respectability, trumpeted its grand arrival in a postwar landscape scoured of alluring descriptions of drug use while lesser outlets piggybacked on their coverage with stories by turns sensationalized and glowing. This book offers the untold tale of LSD's wild journey from Brylcreem and Ivory soap to incense and peppermints. As the book shows, the early attention lavished on the drug by the news media glorified its use in treatments for mental illness but also its status as a mystical—yet legitimate—gateway to exploring the unconscious mind. The book's history takes readers to the center of how popular media hyped psychedelic drugs in a constantly shifting legal and social environment, producing an intricate relationship between drugs and media experience that came to define contemporary pop culture. It also traces how the breathless coverage of LSD gave way to a textbook moral panic, transforming yesterday's refined seeker of truths into an acid casualty splayed out beyond the fringe of polite society.

This book is a history of U.S.–French radio broadcasting in the twentieth century. Decades before satellite TV and the Internet, America and France interconnected regularly and instantaneously on a mass scale across the Atlantic. The book investigates how transatlantic radio developed into a dynamic field of cross-border circulation, cultural exchange, and geopolitics. Between 1931, when live broadcasts first linked U.S.–French listeners, and 1974, when France dissolved its public media monopoly, international broadcasting developed into a critical communication space that embodied turbulent interwar politics and the expansive tendencies of U.S. commercial networks; the cataclysmic events of World War II, including the German Occupation of France; contentious U.S.–French relations during the Cold War; French postwar international media expansion; and the effects of the 1960s on U.S.–French ties and media systems. The book examines the techno-aesthetics of radio as a technological medium linking two allied, but starkly different societies and cultures in new ways. The book complicates the paradigm of self-contained "radio nations" to demonstrate that throughout broadcast history, the challenges of developing and managing international interconnectivity required necessary partnerships that blurred lines of sovereignty, state control, and national cultural production. Radio’s development and usage prefigured the global, cross-border digital communication technologies, tools, infrastructure, and mediated geopolitics of today.

This book challenges the notion that advertising disappeared as a political issue in the United States in 1938 with the passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act, the result of more than a decade of campaigning to regulate the advertising industry. The book suggests that the war experience (World War II), even more than the legislative battles of the 1930s, defined the role of advertising in U.S. postwar political economy and the nation’s cultural firmament. Using archival sources, newspapers accounts, and trade publications, the book demonstrates that the postwar climate of political intolerance and reverence for free enterprise quashed critical investigations into the advertising industry. While advertising could be criticized or lampooned, the institution itself became inviolable. During the war, there were ongoing tensions between advertisers, regulators, and consumer activists. It was advertisers who turned a situation, that should have been disadvantageous to them, into an opportunity to cement their place in a postwar society defined by advertising and the consumer products it promoted. The book aims to uncover the significant political and economic forces that shaped the industry and the use of advertising to bolster the corporate system behind the products.

In the American world, the presence of African culture is sometimes fully embodied and sometimes leaves only a trace. This book explores this presence, examining Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Disney World, each of which repackages African visual culture for consumers. Because these cultural icons permeate American life, they represent the broader U.S. culture and its relationship to African culture. This study integrates approaches from art history and visual culture studies with those from culture, race, and popular culture studies to analyze this interchange. Two major threads weave throughout. One analyzes how the presentation of African visual culture in these popular culture forms conceptualizes Africa for the American public. The other investigates the way the uses of African visual culture focuses America’s own self-awareness, particularly around black and white racialized identities. In exploring the multiple meanings that “Africa” has in American popular culture, the book argues that these cultural products embody multiple perspectives and speak to various sociopolitical contexts: the Cold War, Civil Rights, and contemporary eras of the United States; the apartheid and post apartheid eras of South Africa; the colonial and postcolonial eras of Ghana; and the European era of African colonization.

This book explores how the Internet presents radical ways of organising and producing media that offer political and cultural alternatives, both to ways of doing business and to how we understand the world and our place in it. It is characterised by in-depth case studies. Topics include the media of new social movements and other radical political organisations (including the far right); websites produced by fans of popular culture; and media dedicated to developing a critical, ‘public’ journalism. The book locates these studies in appropriate theoretical and historical contexts, while remaining accessible to a student audience. Major themes include: the use of the Internet by political groups such as the anti-capitalist and environmental movements, as well as the far right; radical forms of creativity and distribution — the anti-copyright and sampling/file-sharing movements, and their role as cultural critics in a corporate world; the development and maintenance of a global, ‘digital public sphere’ of protest through such practices as ‘hacktivism’; the use of new media technologies to transform existing media forms and practices, such as news media and Internet radio.

Large public screens have now become a ubiquitous part of the contemporary cityscape. Far from being simply oversized televisions, the media experts contributing to Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces put forward a strong case that such screens could serve as important sites for cultural exchange. Advances in digital technology spell the possibilities of conducting mobile modes of interaction across national boundaries, and in the process expose the participants to novel sensory experiences, giving rise to a new form of public culture. Understanding this phenomenon calls for a reconceptualization of "public space" and "ambience," as well as connecting the two concepts with each other. This pioneering study of the impact of media platforms on urban cultural life presents a theoretical analysis and a history of screens, followed by discussions of site-specific urban screen practices on five continents. There is also a substantial examination of the world's first real-time cross-cultural exchange via the networking of large public screens located in Melbourne and Seoul.

Hollywood has a growing fascination with America's past. This is evidenced in the release of a rash of films of this genre in the past twenty-five years. This book offers an analysis of how and why contemporary Hollywood films have sought to mediate American history. It explores, comprehensively, the post-Cold War period of filmmaking, and considers whether or how far contemporary films have begun to unravel the unifying myths of earlier films and periods. The book also considers why such films are becoming increasingly integral to the ambitions of a globally focused American film industry. The relationship between film and history — the way in which film mediates history and vice versa — is a complex one. This book works from two main assumptions. First, that films revise events to challenge or, perhaps more typically, to reaffirm traditional historical interpretations. Second, that this process can only be understood in the context of contemporary debates about identity politics, America's role in world affairs, and the globalisation of the American film business.

This is a biography of Anna May Wong, legendary Chinese American actress. Its covers her upbringing as second-generation Chinese America in Los Angeles. It uncovers early career in Silent Films, struggling to maximize value of her popularity move to Europe to gain greater fame and resist stereotyped racial roles. The book reflects her immense stardom in 1920s and 1930s and controversy over yellow-face casting in film The Good Earth. The reaction to Wong in Europe and her controversial reputation in China are also discussed. The book also mentioned her fifty-five films, television and radio shows and stage performances. Her personal struggles and accomplishments, support for China during World War II and later life can be seen through the book. It concludes with Wong's impact on Asian American cinema.

This book addresses popular and academic concerns that the institution of work is being irreparably damaged by digital/media technologies. The book considers three specific concerns (each in a separate chapter): 1) that all jobs may soon be automated out of existence, 2) that the sharing economy will degrade the few jobs that remain, and 3) that services like Facebook and Instagram are turning leisure into work, exploiting users in their so-called free time. Through an in-depth examination of these concerns, the book proposes that what really concerns these writers is not that work is being degraded or may soon disappear altogether, but rather that society itself is under attack, and more specifically the bonds of responsibility on which social relations depend. Drawing from recent work on affect/emotion and from the controversial antisocial thesis in queer theory, the book argues that the anxiety surrounding these transformations aims primarily not to slow or reverse these changes, but rather to solicit readers to identify with the social: to stop being irresponsible, unaccountable, lazy, self-serving, and hedonistic, and to once again engage in the hard work of being a productive member of society.

This book is a defence of narrative in an age of information. Stressing interpretation and experience alongside affect and sensation, it argues that narrative is key to contemporary forms of cultural production and to the practice of contemporary life. Re-appraising the prospects for narrative in the digital age, the book insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture and provokes a critical re-appraisal of how innovations in information technology as a material cultural form can be understood and assessed. It offers a careful exploration of narrative theory, a critique of techno-cultural writing, and a series of tightly focused case studies. All of which point the way to a restoration of a critical — rather than celebratory — approach to new media.

This book traces the evolution of the archive across the centuries by looking at primitive, Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and contemporary archives. Crucially, the book evidences the fluidity and potential inter-changeability between libraries, archives and museums. A number of case studies offer an insight into the operation of a variety of different types of archives, including cabinets of curiosity, archival artforms, architectures, performances, road-shows, time capsules, social media documentation practices, databases, and a variety of museological web-based heritage platforms. The archive is shown to play a crucial role in how individuals and social groups administer themselves through and within a burgeoning social memory apparatus. This is why at the heart of every industrial revolution thus far, the archive continues to contribute to the way we store, preserve and generate knowledge through an accumulation of documents, artifacts, objects, as well as ephemera and even debris. The archive has always been strategic for different types of economies, including the digital economy and the internet of things. Shown here to increasingly affect to the way we map, produce, and share knowledge, the apparatus of the archive, which allows us to continuously renew who we are in relation to the past, so that new futures may become possible, now effectively pervades almost every aspect of our lives.

Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic through which to reconsider entrenched paradigms of medium- and disciplinary-specificity. Contesting an endemic, medium-specific framework that would reinforce film’s proper place within the cinematic theater, the Expanded Cinema sought to displace the moving image from its established situation within the cinematic theatre so as to initiate a series of disruptive encounters across interdisciplinary institutions of artistic exhibition and spectatorship. While existing scholarship on Expanded Cinema has typically focused on European practices of the 1970s, this study explores its earlier emergence within mid-‘60s New York alongside the rise of Minimalist aesthetics and compositional revolution inaugurated by John Cage. The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2) to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and performance stage (chapter 4), before the incorporation of real-time video feedback begins to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse institutions of televisual culture (chapter 5).

This book provides an original, sometimes critical, examination of contemporary journalism, both on- and offline, and proposes a new standard for journalism (wisdom journalism) that brings together the more rarified forms of reporting to provide an informed, insightful, interpretive, explanatory, and even opinionated take on current events. The book argues that, for a century and a half, journalists have made a good business out of selling the latest news or selling ads next to that news. Now that news pours out of the Internet and our mobile devices—fast, abundant, and mostly free—that era is ending. Our best journalists, the book suggests, must instead offer original, challenging perspectives—not just slightly more thorough accounts of widely reported events. Most attempts to deal with journalism's current crisis emphasize technology; this book emphasizes mindsets and the need to rethink what journalism has been and might become. The book finds inspiration for a more ambitious and effective understanding of journalism in examples from twenty-first-century articles and blogs, from a selection of outstanding examples of twentieth-century journalism and from Benjamin Franklin's eighteenth-century writings.

Bioethical dilemmas, including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion, have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, and among the public, professionals, and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media is the transformation of the very notion of life. This book examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, it goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose an “ethics of life” rooted in the relationship between the human and the non-human (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop. The author describes three cases of “bioethics in action,” through which the concepts of “the human,” “animal,” and “life” are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of “bioart” as Eduardo Kac’s infamous fluorescent green bunny. The book addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, the author makes the case for a new non-systemic, non-hierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.

This book explores the globalization of African American television and the way in which foreign markets, programming strategies, and viewer preferences have influenced portrayals of African Americans on the small screen. Television executives have been notoriously slow to recognize the potential popularity of black characters and themes, both at home and abroad. As American television brokers increasingly seek revenues abroad, their assumptions about saleability and audience perceptions directly influence the global circulation of these programs, as well as their content. This book aims to reclaim the history of African American television circulation in an effort to correct and counteract this predominant industry lore. Based on interviews with television executives and programmers from around the world, as well as producers in the United States, the book traces the shift from an era when national television networks often blocked African American television from traveling abroad to the transnational, post-network era of today. While globalization has helped to expand diversity in African American television, particularly in regard to genre, it has also resulted in restrictions, such as in the limited portrayal of African American women in favor of attracting young male demographics across racial and national boundaries. The book underscores the importance of examining boardroom politics as part of racial discourse in the late modern era, when transnational cultural industries like television are the primary sources for dominant representations of blackness.

The US-Mexico border zone is one of the most visualized and imagined spaces in the United States, not just for the mythology of the Southwest as the cornerstone of US identity but as a place under continual crisis, permanent visibility, and territorial defense. Border Optics argues that the border is both a laboratory and an archive that indexes an optical regime and a way of seeing drawn from maps, geographical surveys, military strategic plans, illustrations, photographs, postcards, novels, film, and television—all of which combine fascination with the region with the visual codes of surveillance and survey. Optics signals a complete visual apparatus, from recording and representation to the infrastructure and institutions that support the visual regime. The border optic refers to the expanded vision of the border as a consequence of the interface of militarism, technology, and the media archive of the region. The primary aim of this complex of industry, state, and private endeavors is not simply enforcement but control, particularly of the movement of goods and people in accordance with the split codes of the border-security imaginary. This book explores several related cultural media and apparatuses that have shaped a dominant way of seeing informed by the history of the region. This includes a countervision apparent in revisionist border historical accounts, art, media, architectural design, and activist movements, along with the strains of subversion within the dominant view.

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was reported by some of the most eminent journalists of the twentieth century and was the subject of reportage that still endures in public memory. However, this represents just a small fraction of the total news coverage of the war, raising the possibility that it provides a partial, even atypical, view of the international media's engagement with, and performance in, the conflict. This book provides the most extensive and detailed analysis of the reporting of the conflict ever undertaken, examining the personalities, routines, pressures, and structures that shaped news coverage of the war in Britain as it unfolded. The book combines a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on the role of the news media in the conflict, with a vast amount of new evidence, gleaned from the author's detailed investigations in a range of official and media archives.

This is a study of the British state's generation, suppression and manipulation of news to further foreign policy goals during the early Cold War. Bribing editors, blackballing ‘unreliable’ journalists, creating instant media experts through provision of carefully edited ‘inside information’ and exploiting the global media system to plant propaganda – disguised as news – around the world: these were all methods used by the British to try to convince the international public of Soviet deceit and criminality and thus gain support for anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad. Britain's shaky international position heightened the importance of propaganda. The Soviets and Americans were investing heavily in propaganda to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the world and substitute for increasingly unthinkable nuclear war. The British exploited and enhanced their media power and propaganda expertise to keep up with the superpowers, and to preserve their own global influence at a time when British economic, political and military power was sharply declining. This activity directly influenced domestic media relations, as officials used British media to launder foreign-bound propaganda and to create the desired images of British ‘public opinion’ for foreign audiences. By the early 1950s, censorship had waned, but covert propaganda had become addictive. The endless tension of the Cold War normalised what had previously been abnormal state involvement in the media, and led it to use similar tools against Egyptian nationalists, Irish republicans and British leftists. Much more recently, official manipulation of news about Iraq indicates that a behind-the-scenes examination of state propaganda's earlier days is highly relevant. The author draws heavily on recently declassified archival material for this book, especially files of the Foreign Office's anti-Communist Information Research Department propaganda agency and the papers of key media organisations, journalists, politicians and officials. Readers will therefore gain a greater understanding of the depth of the state's power with the media at a time when concerns about propaganda and media manipulation are once again at the fore.