Perspectives

With the widespread use of Twitter and Tumblr, official and fan-produced transmedia increasingly share the same media spaces.
Read more »

Batman cannot survive as a single, fixed figure. Batman is a virus, a folk hero, an icon, an infection. He belongs to the people. He belongs to us.
Read more »

Despite generic familiarity and a solid first season, Hulu's Battleground has struggled to draw the attention of critics and viewers alike as the site's first original fictional series.
Read more »

HBO's Veep may have a veneer of frivolity, but it's part of HBO's larger move towards politically relevant material in 2012.
Read more »

This post identifies a couple of key tensions that emerge in trying to reposition Islam as a global brand through marketing Islamic superheroes The 99 as global cultural commodities.
Read more »

Eastbound and Down’s primary character Kenny Powers is the ultimate in camp masculinity. Kenny’s character reeks of white masculine power, and as cultural critics, we need to ask how this type of supremacist rhetoric functions in America’s “postracial” political climate.
Read more »

Do public spaces increase democratic participation through public discourse and visibility? Does a mediated non-profit ‘public forum’ help to promote the ‘promise’ of American democracy? These questions still provide grounds for healthy debate over the purpose of media studies, as well as a coherent logic for media research.
Read more »

After two episodes of trying to decide how I feel about the show, I started to wonder: Who does HBO hope will watch Girls? Girls’ small initial audience suggests that its audience “isn’t easily defined.”
Read more »

Last week’s South Park episode, “Jewpacabra,” is just the latest in the program’s intermittent efforts to use their medium to introduce otherwise silenced elements of society and culture into the public sphere. Though packaged in exactly the sort of silliness and Jew jokiness that the title implies, the episode actually features one...
Read more »

It isn’t difficult to find feminist game studies, or feminist gamers. The reputation of misogyny in video game culture, lack of women and racial minorities in the industry, the perpetuation of player stereotypes in games marketing and the popular press, and the dearth of non-white, female, or queer characters in games has provided plenty...
Read more »

I demand a moratorium on breathless distribution announcements from cable companies until they upgrade the user interface. We all know the technology exists.
Read more »

The Media Industries Project (MIP) examines the rapid and dramatic changes affecting the media industries worldwide, focusing especially on globalization, digitization, and creative labor. As a research program of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara, we generate a range of critical analyses and innovative resources in collaboration with industry practitioners, policy experts, and...
Read more »

I found myself in Cleveland last week.  My friend Amy Rigby, a musician who plies her trade in one of the parallel music industries that I talked about in my recent post about the Grammy Awards, had things to do in Cleveland.  I’d been threatening for months to take advantage of being on sabbatical...
Read more »

When NBC aired its "Brotherhood of Man" promotion before the Super Bowl on Sunday, it provided a useful take on the network's biggest strength...and its potential weakness.
Read more »

What does Madonna’s half-time performance mean?
Read more »