As culture becomes increasingly digitized, arguments for the “dematerialization” of media are becoming commonplace. However, media have always been, and remain, embedded in and structured by material objects, networks, and practices that delimit their uses and meanings.
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TV
The Materiality of Media
The Rise and Fall of @Sutterink: Showrunners [Off] Twitter III
While it was perhaps inevitable that Sutter’s lack of a filter would result in his Twitter account becoming a liability, the rise and fall of “@sutterink” has more to do with public perceptions of Twitter than with his actual commentary.
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How the Categories Got Their Shapes: Eligibility & the Emmy Nominations
While we are often quick to point out the flaws in the Emmy nomination process, lamenting the absence of our favorite programs, often the nominations are guided as much by eligibility as by voter subjectivities.
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You Have Friends That Want You Back Home
Treme’s focus on how its culture and cultural economies are created and presented through music and cuisine has meant a majority of its almost 22 narrative hours watching musicians struggle with bar owners, the recording business, the law and each other.
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Whatever Happened to the Devil’s Music?
Surely in the final minutes of the last day of the Glastonbury rock festival, people are supposed to look sick, bedraggled and filthy, following a weekend of unfettered debauchery, but those kids are just too clean!. Come to think of it, why is Beyonce headlining anyway?
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The Guilty Pleasure of the Red Carpet Fashion Smackdown
Fashion Police is a bundle of contradictions—it is both celebratory and critical, sophisticated and vulgar, insightful and adolescent.
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Salvaging the Sinking Soaps?
Could the demise of so many daytime soaps be causing a return to form for a genre fans have long felt was losing its way? The rapidly changing world of U.S. daytime television has as many highs and lows as a juicy soap storyline these days.
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Tremé: Feels Like Joy and Pain
The challenge facing Tremé (and every other media representation of New Orleans) is finding a way to balance a celebration of the city’s unique cultural contributions with an acknowledgment of its more conventional, and often more damning, histories, memories, and contemporary realities. Week 6’s episode “Feels Like Rain” responds to this challenge, self-consciously,...
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Glee: The Countertenor and The Crooner, Part 3
Just as Chris Colfer provides a model for queer kids who have not yet been represented, so Darren Criss provides an equally significant alternative model for queer straightness.
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Neil Gaiman’s Doctor Who: Fan Service Meets the Junkyard Look
There's an illusion of transformative work here – although this seems to alter the rules of the Whoniverse, in fact it leaves all the game pieces in play as they were.
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The Rhythm of a City Out of Sync: The Disrupted Spaces of Treme
While season one seemed to chart the resiliency of New Orleans as a place, defined by its people and its culture, season two is digging into localized spaces and demonstrating their continued vulnerability in the wake of the storm.
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Glee: The Countertenor and the Crooner, Part 2
Chris Colfer’s is the first solo voice in recent memory to break into the mainstream as gender-queer, and as such, has become the site of both euphoria and anxiety.
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Dumpster Divers or Culture Jammers?: TLC’s Extreme Couponers
The Learning Channel's Extreme Couponing evokes surprise, and even disgust for the lengths to which people go to accumulate coupons, acquire products, and display their stockpiles. It fails, however, to thoroughly explore people’s motivations for their actions.
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Glee: The Countertenor and The Crooner
The popularity of Glee, and, in particular, these two singers, has made me think that American culture may finally be starting to break with the gender norms of male singing performance that have persisted for the last 80 years.
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Spaces of Speculation: How We Learned Osama Bin Laden Was Dead
As one of the first events of this magnitude that has taken place squarely within the Twitter era, Osama Bin Laden's death reveals the challenge facing traditional media outlets when Twitter runs rampant with speculation (and real reporting).
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