Most people have, at some point, experienced powerful, often strange and disconcerting, responses to films and television programmes of which they cannot always make sense. Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, this book argues that the seemingly mundane and everyday activity of film and television viewing in the home is in fact extraordinary.
Psychosocial studies challenges the traditions of psychology and sociology from a genuinely transdisciplinary perspective. The book reflects this agenda in its varied theoretical and empirical strands, producing a newly contextualised and restless body of understanding of how 'psychic' and 'social' processes intertwine.
Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture offers a comprehensive account of our contemporary media environment—digital culture and audiences in particular—by drawing on psychoanalysis and media studies frameworks. It provides an introduction to the psychoanalytic affect theories of Sigmund Freud and Didier Anzieu and applies them theoretically and methodologically in a number of case studies. Johanssen argues that digital media fundamentally shape our subjectivities on affective and unconscious levels, and he critically analyses phenomena such as television viewing, Twitter use, affective labour on social media, and data-mining. How does watching television involve the body? Why are we so drawn to reality television? Why do we share certain things on social media and not others? How are bodies represented on social media? How do big data and data mining influence our identities? Can algorithms help us make better decisions? These questions amongst others are addressed in the chapters of this wide-ranging book. Johanssen shows in a number of case studies how a psychoanalytic angle can bring new insights to audience studies and digital media research more generally. From audience research with viewers of the reality television show Embarrassing Bodies and how they unconsciously used it to work through feelings about their own bodies, to a critical engagement with Hardt and Negri's notion of affective labour and how individuals with bodily differences used social media for their own affective-digital labour, the book suggests that an understanding of affect based on Freud and Anzieu is helpful when thinking about media use. The monograph also discusses the perverse implications of algorithms, big data and data mining for subjectivities. In drawing on empirical data and examples throughout, Johanssen presents a compelling analysis of our contemporary media environment.
The field of fan studies has seen exponential growth in recent years and this companion brings together an internationally and interdisciplinarily diverse group of established scholars to reflect on the state of the field and to point to new research directions. Engaging an impressive array of media texts and formats and incorporating a variety of methodologies, this collection is organized into six main sections: methods and ethics, technologies and practices, identities, race and transcultural fandom, industry, and futures. Each section concludes with a conversation among some of the field’s leading scholars and industry insiders to address a wealth of questions relevant to each section topic.
The reference will discuss mass media around the world in their varied forms—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film, books, music, websites, and social media—and will describe the role of each in both mirroring and shaping society.
This book argues that cultural fascination with the “madperson” stems from the contemporaneous increase of chronically mentally ill persons in public life due to deinstitutionalization—the mental health reform movement leading to the closure of many asylums in favor of outpatient care. Anthony Carlton Cooke explores the reciprocal spheres of influence between deinstitutionalization, representations of the “murderous, mentally ill individual” in the horror, crime, and thriller genres, and the growth of public associations of violent crime with mental illness.
Gilbert Simondon: Information, Technology and Media is a comprehensive introduction to the work of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. In particular it examines Simondon's original informational ontology, as developed from a synthesis of Cybernetics, thermodynamics and French epistemology, The book goes on to delineate the role this ontology plays in developing an original account of individuation in the physical, biological and psycho-social regimes. This is done, in part, through reading Simondon with and against other figures in these fields such as Merleau-Ponty and Stuart Kauffman. Additionally, Mills explores Simondon's contribution to epistemology and invention, including an analysis of his important theories of the image-cycle and transindividuality. He also examines Simondon's influence on several contemporary thinkers, including Bernard Stiegler and Bruno Latour, before exploring the relevance of Simondon's work for theorising contemporary media technology.
How do women experience the identity changes involved in becoming mothers for the first time? Throughout in depth case examples, Wendy Hollway demonstrates how a different research methodology, underpinned by a psychoanalytically informed epistemology, can transform our understanding of the early foundations of maternal identity.
With a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, this book explores the Father Function in the East in the process of 'Modernisation', arguing that 'Modernisation' and 'Westernisation' are euphemisms for the advent of capitalism in Asiatic and African societies which lead to fatal transformations of the cultural and political incarnatations of the Oriental Father.
Offering a uniquely 'psycho-cultural' take on the emotional dynamics of UK political culture this book uses theories and research in psychoanalysis, cultural and media studies and political sociology. It explores the cultural and emotional processes that shape our relationship to politics in a media age, referencing Joanna Lumley to Nigel Farage.
