Celebrating 25 years of Global Hypertext: World Wide Web!#♡@

March 12, 2014
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Celebrating 25 years of Global Hypertext: World Wide Web!#♡@

While Internet denizens celebrate the web’s “official” 25th anniversary today, we might pause to recognize how confusing and uncertain “inventions” and “births” sometimes are.
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Why Co-Produce? Elementary, Holmes.

March 11, 2014
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Why Co-Produce?  Elementary, Holmes.

What I mean by “transnational television co-production,” the tensions that shape it, and why I think it’s worth studying.
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Case Studies in Technological Change

March 10, 2014
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Case Studies in Technological Change

To paraphrase Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery in Film History: Theory and Practice, media depends on machines. Technology contextualizes industrial and stylistic change, reveals and obscures sites of cultural negotiation and meaning, and enables new modes of media production, circulation, and reception. The significance of technology to media studies has only become more acute...
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The Aesthetic Turn: Toward a Television Aesthetic (Again)

March 6, 2014
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The Aesthetic Turn: Toward a Television Aesthetic (Again)

How do we teach television aesthetics, and what does it mean to analyze or evaluate television aesthetics?
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Oscars 2014: It’s Time

March 4, 2014
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Oscars 2014: It’s Time

The 2014 Oscar theme may have been “Heroes in Hollywood,” but the narrative that formed was the film industry’s contestable progress and diversity.
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“Mother Daughter Sister Wife”: Gender on Comedy Central

February 27, 2014
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“Mother Daughter Sister Wife”: Gender on Comedy Central

Comedy Central has long courted young men with disconcerting portrayals of women, but several of its programs this spring provide small indications of a different politics of representation.
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Olympic commercials: A quick lesson in corporate ownership

February 25, 2014
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Olympic commercials: A quick lesson in corporate ownership

it’s not enough to talk about individual companies trading in on the Olympics: many of the corporate sponsors are making money off of other companies making money off of the Olympics
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A “Look Back” At What Exactly?

February 24, 2014
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A “Look Back” At What Exactly?

My Facebook "Look Back" video was so curiously curated, uneventful, and unrepresentative of how I perceive my Facebook use that I’m still thinking about it weeks after it was generated.
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Sucks to Be Ru: America’s new Russian Other

February 21, 2014
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Sucks to Be Ru: America’s new Russian Other

The unending string of hilarious #SochiProblems and daily stories of government gluttony have positioned Russia as a sort of shadow version of the American Way of Life.
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Julie D’Acci on the Emergent Qualities of Sublimating Circuits

February 18, 2014
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Julie D’Acci on the Emergent Qualities of Sublimating Circuits

Does circulating information influence, inflect, or inhibit material relations in empirically verifiable ways? And do strategic interventions in the super-structural sphere actually promote sustainable social effects?
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My TV Valentine: Big Block Sing Song

February 14, 2014
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My TV Valentine: <i>Big Block Sing Song</i>

"Part Flight of the Conchords, part sincere, part ethnographic in their understanding of how kids’ heads work, and funny, relaxing, and ear-wormy, they are my favorite thing on television."
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A Love That Can’t Be Denied: Disney’s Muppets

February 13, 2014
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A Love That Can’t Be Denied: Disney’s Muppets

I always thought I would remain a Muppet curmudgeon, raving about authenticity and the good ol’ days of Jim Henson Muppet Mania. But it turns out I’m just a fool in love, unable to deny my heart what it wants: more Muppets.
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Bring a Guest: Hall in the Ideological House

February 11, 2014
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Bring a Guest: Hall in the Ideological House

Memories of the late Stuart Hall.
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Television that I Love: A Valentine to Unpredictable Melodrama

February 10, 2014
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Television that I Love: A Valentine to Unpredictable Melodrama

Sometimes love surprises us; I never thought I’d love Sons of Anarchy.
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“She Loves You”: The Beatles, Girl Culture, and The Ed Sullivan Show

February 7, 2014
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“She Loves You”: The Beatles, Girl Culture, and <em>The Ed Sullivan Show</em>

The Beatles appealed to girls through familiar and comforting girl-group discourse, but they also became the “bad boys” who worried parents. Such rebelliousness, however, was managed through androgyny, not conventional masculinity.
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Bollywood, Hollywood — Trollywood?

February 6, 2014
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Bollywood, Hollywood — Trollywood?

Somewhere in the British/American relationship, a distinct genre of television has originated, which I propose to call “Trollywood.”
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