Category Mediated Matters

Entries 19 Total Description

Welcome to Mediated Matters, a regular weekly column series by Casey Brienza on the sociology of the media and culture. New installments are posted on Monday.

Academia 2.0

Apr 4, ’12 8:00 AM

Do ‘prestigious’ journals make academics lazy? An unlikely parallel with the art world

  1. Training, teaching or empowering people with social media?
  2. A case study of a university’s digital strategy
  3. Podcast with Martin Eve about Open Source Academic Publishing
  4. The ‘prestige’ of journals in a social media age
  5. Cite or Site? The current view of what constitutes ‘academic publishing’ is too limited. Our published work must become truly public.
  6. The search for the academic arctic monkey: why we must maximise the exposure of research through a blend of traditional and new methods of publication
  7. Continual publishing across journals, blogs and social media maximises impact by increasing the size of the ‘academic footprint’.
  8. Continuous publishing has changed my experience of developing ideas and I’m more attentive to my ‘provisional outputs’ than my handwritten notes: I can’t imagine working in any other way
  9. Support, engagement, visibility and personalised news: Twitter has a lot to offer academics if we look past its image problem

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Why Videos Go Viral

Mar 9, ’12 8:00 AM

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SI Top 10 #10 – Comics and Censorship: Is It Really about You?

Jan 1, ’12 8:00 AM

News broke this past Friday of an American citizen arrested by a Canadian Customs officer at the US-Canada border after manga deemed to be child pornography was discovered on his laptop. Although no real children were harmed in the creation of drawn images such as those possessed by this man in his mid-twenties, he faces a minimum of a year in prison if convicted.

The US-based Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) is currently raising funds for his legal defense. This is the second time they have rallied around the legal plight of a private US citizen caught with ‘obscene’ manga in the past five years. The CBLDF was also involved in the case of Christopher Handley, an Iowa man who ultimately pleaded guilty and was convicted for ‘possession of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children’.

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Women and Muscles: a history in image

Dec 5, ’11 8:00 AM

Venus with Biceps: a Pictorial History of Muscular Women by David L. Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky is an invaluable collection of rare images of athletic women in the 19th and 20th centuries. Maria Popova at Brainpickings has written a fantastic review which you can read here.

source: http://www.brainpickings.org/

One of the archival images in 'Venus with Biceps' (image source: Brainpickings.com)

P.S. Thanks to this, we have also discovered Brainpickings: definitely an online space we’ll be watching!

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History of data journalism

Nov 30, ’11 8:00 AM

The Guardian reminds us that data journalism is a little older than most of us think. Why is that significant? Because our historical memories are very short and it is important to be reminded of history in order to give food to our sociological imaginations! Here is an example of an informative data table on schools in Manchester, from 5 May 1821:

Source: The Guardian (click on the image three times to see the largest size

Read the article in the Guardian here

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Review of ‘Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism’ by Sarah Sobieraj

Jul 18, ’11 8:00 AM

In her introduction to Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism (NYU Press, 2011), sociologist and Tufts University professor writes, ‘I thought this would be a book about how activist groups use presidential elections as moments of political opening, but as I spent time with activists engaged in campaign-related work I came to realize that first and foremost this is a story about activists and the news media’ (2). While it perhaps comes as no surprise to those familiar with Habermasian public sphere theory that collective attempts to transform or reform civil society become involved with the mass media, her findings may shock the technologically optimistic: Media-orientated activist strategies seeking to draw attention to a political message almost always fail.

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Comics and Censorship: Is It Really about You?

Jun 27, ’11 12:00 AM

News broke this past Friday of an American citizen arrested by a Canadian Customs officer at the US-Canada border after manga deemed to be child pornography was discovered on his laptop. Although no real children were harmed in the creation of drawn images such as those possessed by this man in his mid-twenties, he faces a minimum of a year in prison if convicted.

The US-based Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) is currently raising funds for his legal defense. This is the second time they have rallied around the legal plight of a private US citizen caught with ‘obscene’ manga in the past five years. The CBLDF was also involved in the case of Christopher Handley, an Iowa man who ultimately pleaded guilty and was convicted for ‘possession of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children’.

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On Visually-Mediated Professional Lives

Jun 13, ’11 12:00 AM

If you currently live in the United States, or are one of The Daily Show‘s horde of global fans, you have surely heard about the latest sex scandal involving New York Congressional Representative Anthony Weiner. If, though, you do not fall into either of those categories, there’s an off-chance that you do not yet know that Weiner recently got caught sending webcam photos of his, err, ‘weiner’ on Twitter to a young female follower. (Cue an interminable parade of puns and penis jokes in the media.) Further revelations of the Congressman’s online dalliances, some of them after his marriage—along with more ill-advised photos—were subsequently revealed.

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Creative Labour is Still Labour

Jun 6, ’11 8:00 AM

Yesterday I attended a book launch at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco for the new graphic novel King of RPGs Vol. 2, written by Jason Thompson and illustrated by Victor Hao. The launch was a raucous, ad hoc affair in the middle of the exhibit space, plenty of greasy food and alcohol, a roleplaying game in the back room. I became acquainted with Jason several years ago and thought I ought to celebrate the start of my stay in the Bay Area by showing support. Yet what struck me most during the authors’ presentation was this time-lapsed video of Victor at work:

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New Contribution to The Comics Grid

May 23, ’11 5:30 PM

In lieu of a new Mediated Matters column this week, I direct you instead to my contribution to The Comics Grid, where I report on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2011, the premier indie comics event in Canada. In that context, I interrogate the rights and responsibilities entailed by public, free-for-all events. Please check it out!

Casey Brienza is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and Sociological Imagination’s Mediated Matters columnist.

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