The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media


Book Description

The impact of mass media on individuals and society is to a great extent based on human emotions. Emotions, in turn, are essential in understanding how media messages are processed as well as media’s impact on individual and social behavior and public social life. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of emotions within a mass media context, the Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media addresses areas such as evolutionary psychology, media entertainment, sociology, cultural studies, media psychology, political communication, persuasion, and new technology. Leading experts from across the globe explore cutting-edge research on issues including the evolutionary functions of mediated emotions, emotions and media entertainment , measurements of emotions within the context of mass media, media violence, fear-evoking media, politics and public emotions, features , forms and functions of emotions beyond the message, and provide the reader a glimpse into future generations of media technology. This compelling and authoritative Handbook is an essential reference tool for scholars and students of media, communication studies, media psychology, emotions, cultural studies, sociology, and other related disciplines.




China's Digital Nationalism


Book Description

Nationalism, in China as much as elsewhere, is today adopted, filtered, transformed, enhanced, and accelerated through digital networks. And as we have increasingly seen, nationalism in digital spheres interacts in complicated ways with nationalism "on the ground". If we are to understand the social and political complexities of the twenty-first century, we need to ask: what happens to nationalism when it goes digital? In China's Digital Nationalism, Florian Schneider explores the issue by looking at digital China first hand, exploring what search engines, online encyclopedias, websites, hyperlink networks, and social media can tell us about the way that different actors construct and manage a crucial topic in contemporary Chinese politics: the protracted historical relationship with neighbouring Japan. Using two cases, the infamous Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and the ongoing disputes over islands in the East China Sea, Schneider shows how various stakeholders in China construct networks and deploy power to shape nationalism for their own ends. These dynamics provide crucial lessons on how nation states adapt to the shifting terrain of the digital age and highlight how digital nationalism is today an emergent property of complex communication networks.




Affect and Emotion


Book Description

"Absolutely essential reading for those wanting to understand the recent ′turn′ to affect. Offering an extensive analysis of all the perspectives available, including the psycho, neuro, bio and social, Margie Wetherell treads a magisterial path through the radically different offerings, one that illuminates key ideas and will save the uninitiated wandering down many pointless avenues. A path-setting book." - Professor Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths In recent years there has been a huge surge of interest in affect and emotion. Scholars want to discover how people are moved, and understand embodied social action, feelings and passions. How do social formations ′grab′ people? How do roller coasters of contempt, patriotism, hate and euphoria power public life? A new social science understanding of affect and emotion is long overdue and Margaret Wetherell′s voice is timely, providing a coherent and pragmatic text. It will be invaluable reading for those interested in this fascinating field across the social and behavioural sciences.




Mediatization of Communication


Book Description

This handbook on Mediatization of Communication uncovers the interrelation between media changes and changes in culture and society. This is essential to understand contemporary trends and transformations. “Mediatization” characterizes changes in practices, cultures and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies themselves. This volume offers 31 contributions by leading media and communication scholars from the humanities and social sciences, with different approaches to mediatization of communication. The chapters span from how mediatization meets climate change and contribute to globalization to questions on life and death in mediatized settings. The book deals with mass media as well as communication with networked, digital media. The topic of this volume makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of contemporary processes of social, cultural and political changes. The handbook provides the reader with the most current state of mediatization research.




Cultures of Mediatization


Book Description

What does it mean that we can be reached on our mobile phones wherever we are and at all times? What are the cultural consequences if we are informed about ‘everything and anything important’ via television? How are our political, religious and ethnic belongings impacted through being increasingly connected by digital media? And what is the significance of all this for our everyday lives? Drawing on Hepp’s fifteen-year research expertise on media change, this book deals with questions like these in a refreshingly straightforward and readable way. ‘Cultures of mediatization’ are described as cultures whose main resources are mediated by technical media. Therefore, everyday life in cultures of mediatization is ‘moulded’ by the media. To understand this challenging media change it is inappropriate to focus on any one single medium like television, the press, mobile phones, the Internet or other forms of digital media. One has to capture the ‘mediatization’ of culture in its entirety. Cultures of Mediatization outlines how this can be done critically. In so doing, it offers a new way of thinking about our present-day media-saturated world.




Vertical Classification


Book Description




Boys' Love Manga


Book Description

"Boys' love," a male-male homoerotic genre written primarily by women for women, enjoys global popularity and is one of the most rapidly growing publishing niches in the United States. It is found in manga, anime, novels, movies, electronic games, and fan-created fiction, artwork, and video. This collection of 14 essays addresses boys' love as it has been received and modified by fans outside Japan as a commodity, controversy, and culture.




Fandom At The Crossroads


Book Description

Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships is an in-depth exploration of the reciprocal relationship between a groundbreaking cult television show and its equally groundbreaking fandom. For the past six years the authors have inhabited the close-knit fan communities of the television show Supernatural, engaging in criticism and celebration, reading and writing fanfiction, and attending fan conventions. Their close relationships within the community allow an intimate behind-the-scenes examination of fan psychology, passion, motivation, and shame. The authors also speak directly to the creative side in order to understand what fuels the passionate reciprocal relationship Supernatural has with its fans, and to interrogate the reality of fans’ fears and shame. As they go behind the scenes and onto the sets to talk with Supernatural’s showrunners, writers, and actors, the authors struggle to negotiate a hybrid identity as “aca-fans”. Fangirls one moment, “legitimate” researchers the next, the boundaries often blur. Their repeated breaking of the fan/creative side boundary is mirrored in Supernatural’s reputation for fourth wall breaking, which has attracted journalistic coverage everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Times. Written with humor and irreverence, Stalking Fandom combines an innovative theorizing of fandom and popular culture, which will be useful in a variety of courses, with a behind-the-scenes story that anyone who’s ever been a fan or wondered why others are fans will find fascinating.




Discourse and Contemporary Social Change


Book Description

This book draws together a rich variety of perspectives on discourse as a facet of contemporary social change, representing a number of different disciplines, theoretical positions and methods. The specific focus of the volume is on discourse as a moment of social change, which can be seen to involve objects of research which comprise versions of some or all of the following research questions: How and where did discourses (narratives) emerge and develop? How and where did they achieve hegemonic status? How and where and how extensively have they been recontextualized? How and where and to what extent have they been operationalized? The dialectical approach indicated above implies that discourse analysis includes analysis of relations between language (more broadly, semiosis) and its social 'context'.




Embodied Visions


Book Description

Embodied Visions presents a groundbreaking analysis of film through the lens of bioculturalism, revealing how human biology as well as human culture determine how films are made and experienced. Throughout his study, Torben Grodal uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explain central features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience-what he terms the PECMA flow model-that demonstrates the movement of information and emotions in the brain when viewing film. Examining a wide array of genres-animation, romance, pornography, fantasy, horror-from evolutionary and psychological perspectives, Grodal also reflects on social issues at the intersection of film theory and neuropsychology. These include moral problems in film viewing, how we experience realism and character identification, and the value of the subjective forms that cinema uniquely elaborates.