New Media Spectacles And Multimodal Creativity In A Globalised Asia

This edited volume aims to unpack the digitisation of art and media within the dynamics of participatory culture, and how these changes affect the power relations between the production and consumption of these new forms in a globalised Asia. This follows the rise of new art forms and social media platforms in wake of rapid and ongoing digitisation, which has, in turn, produced far-reaching implications for changing media ownership and its role in social, cultural, economic, as well as political activities. New challenges arise every day in relation to digital art and design practices and social media communications, and their respective impact on identity politics. This book showcases a diverse range of interdisciplinary research on these concomitant changes and challenges associated with digital media and technologies within the context of a globalised Asia. The case studies included present perspectives on Asia’s evolving digital humanities landscape from Hong Kong, China, India, Korea and from across Southeast Asia, with topics that tackle organisational digital marketing, brand advertising and design, mobile gaming, interactive art, and the cultural activities of ethnic and sexual minority communities in the region. This book will of interest to scholars in digital humanities focused on new media and cultural studies.

This book is an upper-level student source book for contemporary approaches to media studies in Asia, which will appeal across a wide range of social sciences and humanities subjects including media and communication studies, Asian studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and Asian studies, it provides an empirically rich and stimulating tour of key areas of study. The book combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in one up-to-date and accessible volume, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today.

This book offers interdisciplinary examination of gender representations in cinema and SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) platforms in India. This book will identify how the so-called feminist enunciations in twenty-first century film and SVOD content in India are marked by an ambiguous entanglement of feminist and postfeminist rhetoric. Set against the backdrop of two significant contemporary phenomena, namely neoliberalism and the digital revolution, this book considers how neoliberalism, aided by technological advancement, re-configured the process of media consumption in contemporary India and how representation of gender is fraught with multiple contesting trajectories. The book looks at two types of media—cinema and SVOD platforms, and explores the reasons for this transformation that has been emerging in India over the past two decades. Keeping in mind the complex paradoxes that such concomitant process of the contraries can invoke, the book invites myriad responses from the authors who view the shifting gender representations in postmillennial Hindi cinema and SVOD platforms from their specific ideological standpoints. The book includes a wide array of genres, from commercial Hindi films to SVOD content and documentary films, and aims to record the transformation facilitated by economic as well as technological revolutions in contemporary India across various media formats.

How do film and television makers around the world depict public housing? Why is public housing so often chosen as the backdrop for drama, horror, social critique, rebellion, violence, artistic creativity, explorations of race relations and political intrigue? Home Screens answers these questions by examining the ways in which socialized housing projects around the world are represented on screen. The volume brings together a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars, who explore documentary and fictional portrayals of the architecture of public housing, and the communities that inhabit it, ranging from the 1950s to the present. Examining international film and media texts such as Die Architekten (1990), Swagger (2016), Cooley High (1975), Mee-Pok Man (1995), Treme (2010–2013), Mamma Roma (1962), The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), and Below the Lion Rock (1972–1976), essays within this book consider public and private attitudes toward socialised housing, explaining how onscreen representations shape perceptions of these ubiquitous, often-stigmatized urban locations.

A study of the complex role of the seaside as a leisure space in colonial Hong Kong. British sports were in many respects more meaningful in the empire than literature, music, art, or religion. They served as an instrument of cultural association and later of cultural change, promoting imperial union and then postimperial goodwill. Poon analyses the ways in which British colonists and Chinese leaders, backed by the rhetoric of public health and nationalism, respectively, transformed the Hong Kong seaside into a leisure space. She argues that the growing popularity of seaside resorts and sea bathing as a preferred form of leisure activity across the social and ethnic spectrums served an important role in shaping the racial relationship between Westerners and the Chinese population, as well as the Chinese people’s perception of the female body and the seaside, during the colonial period. The popularity of British leisure forms in colonial Hong Kong does not necessarily mean the triumph of “Britishness.” This book will be of great interest to historians with an interest in leisure and in Empire and Colonialism, as well as historians of Colonial Hong Kong and Modern China.

While a decade ago much of the discussion of new media in Asia was couched in Occidental notions of Asia as a "default setting" for technology in the future, today we are seeing a much more complex picture of contesting new media practices and production. As "new media" becomes increasingly an everyday reality for young and old across Asia through smartphones and associated devices, boundaries between art, new media, and the everyday are transformed. This Handbook addresses the historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, artistic and economic dimensions of the region’s new media. Through an interdisciplinary revision of both "new media" and "Asia" the contributors provide new insights into the complex and contesting terrains of both notions. The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia will be the definitive publication for readers interested in comprehending all the various aspects of new media in Asia. It provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, conceptually cutting-edge guide to the important aspects of new media in the region — as the first point of consultation for researchers, advanced level undergraduate and postgraduate students in fields of new media and Asian studies.

This edited volume brings together cutting-edge studies from emerging scholars of East/Southeast Asia who explore the role of mobile media in the contemporary transformation of the region’s social intimacies, from the romantic to the familial to the communal. By providing a regional and transnational overview of such studies, it affords new insights into how these mobile technologies have contributed to the rise of ‘glocal intimacies’. This pertains to the normalisation and intensification of how people’s relationships of closeness are entangled in the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. In providing case studies of mobile media and glocal intimacies, the chapters in the volume attend to a broad range of countries that include China, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. This illustrates the differing ways in which mobile media might be embedded in the region’s divergent articulations of social intimacies, which reflect the ongoing tensions between Western and Asian imaginaries of modernity. The chapters also discuss a wide array of mobile media that people use, from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, to messaging apps like KakaoTalk and WhatsApp, to dating apps like Tinder and Blued. This allows for a mapping out of the different levels of impact that mobile media might have on social intimacies in a region that contains some of the most technologically advanced as well as the most technologically behind societies in the world. In summary, this book allows readers to take a comparative approach to understanding the complexity of the glocal intimacies that are emerging from the ways people in Asia use mobile media to reconfigure their local ties and to enact global relationships. This volume will benefit students, academics, and researchers who are keen in media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and Asian studies. “This exciting and much-needed book will greatly advance our efforts to decolonise media and communications research. The chapters offer empirically rich and nuanced accounts that challenge the dominant paradigms about mediated intimacy.” Mirca Madianou, Goldsmiths, University of London “This collection develops the original concept of ‘glocal intimacies’ to describe how mobile media have become a crucial site where new social intimacies are enacted, reinforced and transformed in Asia. It introduces fresh empirical research from emerging scholars to furnish deep theoretical insights into these imaginaries and practices.” Audrey Yue, National University of Singapore

This book explores people’s everyday experience of the media in Asian countries in confrontation with huge social change and transition and the need to understand this phenomenon as it intersects with the media. It argues for the centrality of the media to Asian transformations in the era of globalization. The profusion of the media today, with new imaginations, new choices and contradictions, generates a critical condition for reflexivity engaging everyday people to have a resource for the learning of self, culture and society in a new light. Media culture is creating new connections, new desires and threats, and the identities of people are being reworked at individual, national, regional and global levels. Within historically specific social conditions and contexts of the everyday, the chapters seek to provide a diversity of experiences and understandings of the place of the media in different Asian locations. This book considers the emerging consequences of media consumption in people’s everyday life at a time when the political, socio-economic and cultural forces by which the media operate are rapidly globalizing in Asia.

This book investigates economic, political, and cultural conditions that have led to transnational flows of culture in Asia. Coverage also looks at the consequences of an increasingly interconnected Asian regional culture as well as policy makers and cultural industries' response to it. The book features essays written by researchers from different countries in Asia and beyond with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The volume also contains engaging examples and cases with comparative perspectives. The contributors provide readers with grounded analysis in the organizational and economic logics of Asian creative industries, national cultural policies that promote or hinder cultural flows, and the media convergence and online consumers' surging demand for Asianized cultural products. Such insights are of crucial importance for a better understanding of the dynamics of transnational cultural flows in contemporary Asia. In addition, the essays aim to “de-westernize” the study of cultural and creative industries, which draws predominantly on cases in the United States and Europe. The contributors focus instead on regional dynamics of the development of these industries. The popularity of J-Pop and K-Pop in East and Southeast Asia (and beyond) is now well known, but less is known about how this happened. This volume offers readers theoretical tools that will help them to make better sense of those exciting phenomena and other rising cultural flows within Asia and their relevance to the global cultural economy.

This book argues that ubiquitous media and user-created content establish a new perception of the world that can be called ‘particulate vision’, involving a different relation to reality that better represents the atomization of contemporary experience especially apparent in social media. Drawing on extensive original research including detailed ethnographic investigation of camera phone practices in Hong Kong, as well as visual analysis identifying the patterns, regularities and genres of such work, it shows how new distributed forms of creativity and subjectivity now work to shift our perceptions of the everyday. The book analyses the specific features of these new developments – the components of what can be called a ‘general aesthesia’ – and it focuses on the originality and innovation of amateur practices, developing a model for making sense of the huge proliferation of images in contemporary culture, discovering rhythms and tempo in this work and showing why it matters.