Media and identity

The quality of user-generated content varies drastically from excellent to abuse and spam. As the availability of such content increases, the task of identifying high-quality content in sites based on user contributions-social media sitesbecomes increasingly important. Social media in general exhibit a rich variety of information sources: in addition to the content itself, there is a wide array of non-content information available, such as links between items and explicit quality ratings from members of the community. In this paper we investigate methods for exploiting such community feedback to automatically identify high quality content. As a test case, we focus on Yahoo! Answers, a large community question/answering portal that is particularly rich in the amount and types of content and social interactions available in it. We introduce a general classification framework for combining the evidence from different sources of information, that can be tuned automatically for a given social media type and quality definition. In particular, for the community question/answering domain, we show that our system is able to separate high-quality items from the rest with an accuracy close to that of humans.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

2. Sexting is often coercive. Sexting does not refer to a single activity but rather to a range of activities which may be motivated by sexual pleasure but are often coercive, linked to harassment, bullying and even violence. There is no easy line to be drawn between sexting and bullying, for instance, and much may be learned from anti-cyberbullying initiatives to address the problem of sexting. To achieve this, teachers, parents and other adults must be willing to discuss sexual matters and sexual bullying and cyberbullying with teenagers, including as part of existing anti-bullying initiatives.

""Postfeminist Education? challenges a contemporary postfeminist sensibility grounded not only in assumptions that gender and sexual equality has been achieved in many Western contexts, but that feminism has gone ‘too far’ with women and girls now overtaking men and boys - positioned as the new victims of gender transformations. The book is the first to outline and critique how educational discourses have directly fed into postfeminist anxieties, exploring three postfeminist panics over girls and girlhood that circulate widely in the international media and popular culture. First it explores how a masculinity crisis over failing boys in school has spawned a backlash discourse about overly successful girls; second it looks at how widespread anxieties over girls becoming excessively mean and/or violent have positioned female aggression as pathological; third it examines how incessant concerns over controlling risky female sexuality underpin recent sexualisation of girls moral panics. The book outlines how these postfeminist panics over girlhood have influenced educational policies and practices in areas such as academic achievement, anti-bullying strategies and sex-education curriculum, making visible the new postfeminist, sexual politics of schooling.

Moving beyond media or policy critique, however, this book offers new theoretical and methodological tools for researching postfeminism, girlhood and education. It engages with current theoretical debates over possibilities for girls’ agency and empowerment in postfeminist, neo-liberal contexts of sexual regulation. It also elaborates new psychosocial and feminist Deleuzian methodological approaches for mapping subjectivity, affectivity and social change. Drawing on two UK empirical research projects exploring teen-aged girls’ own perspectives and responses to postfeminist panics, the book shows how real girls are actually negotiating notions of girls as overly successful, mean, violent, aggressive and sexual. The data offers rich insight into girls’ gendered, raced and classed experiences at school and beyond, exploring teen peer cultures, friendship, offline and online sexual identities, and bullying and cyberbullying. The data illuminates how and when girls take up and identify with postfeminist trends, but also at times attempt to re-work, challenge and critique the contradictory discourses of girlhood and femininity. In this sense the book offers an opportunity for girls to ‘talk back’ to the often simplistic either wildly celebratory or crisis-based sensationalism of postfeminist panics over girlhood.

This book will be essential reading for those interested in feminism, girlhood, media studies, gender and education.""

Video games have become a huge success in contemporary pop culture, both as ludic devices and as narrative instruments. Because of their immense popularity they are also the didactic means in which a number of social constructs are spread and perpetuated. This is particularly true in the case of Diablo and World of Warcraft, two games produced by Blizzard Entertainment Inc. This study uses a hybrid method to study both games as texts, combining Fairclough's (2003) approach to critical discourse analysis and Corpus Linguistics. The main corpus was compiled by gathering texts about the characters in these two computer games, and their accompanying visual representations, from a) official Blizzard websites and b) user-edited websites and forums. Further data was gathered through the application of a questionnaire about male and female characters in these two games to fifty participants, and by playing each game and recording in-game interactions with non-playing characters and with other players. The linguistic data was examined using a concordancer, and then analysed following Fairclough's (2003) approach. The devised methodology places a strong emphasis in the correlation between linguistic and visual data. Through this correlation and analysis it was determined that there is a strong discourse of gender difference operating within these two games.

In 2002, when Lynn Schofield Clark began the research that led to her new book on raising children in a dot.com world, the media landscape was a simpler place. Facebook had yet to debut; Twitter was a just a word that described the chatter of birds; and "sexting" was widely regarded as a typographical error.

Introduction: The term incidental sex work refers to forms of casual, occasional, unsolicited commercial sex, arranged between gay, bisexual, and queer men on social media platforms such as Grindr. This paper explores the limits of labelling sexual identities, and how definitions of "sex" and "work" have become increasingly unstable in the digital age.
Methods: This study used mixed methods, with the primary mode of data collection being qualitative interviews with young gay, bisexual, and queer men conducted between May 2015 and April 2016. The interviews incorporated a nine-point sexuality scale and photo-elicitation procedures to prompt further discussions. Through the participant recruitment process, the study also generated an informal survey of 1473 Grindr users aged 18 to 28, finding that 14.6% had been paid for sex, most of whom (8.2%) had done so "incidentally."
Results: The 50 interview participants discussed being paid for sex 358 times. This paper focuses on their narratives of labelling, identity politics, sexual normativity, and social stigma. All participants distanced themselves from labels such as "prostitute," "rent boy," or "sex worker" given that their behaviours were not seen as "regular" or "professional" enough, alongside seeking to avoid association with stigmatising stereotypes of sex work. These results are compared with the participants' experiences of coming out as gay, bisexual, and queer.
Discussion: These narratives are interpreted using queer theory to understand those whose behaviours and identities do not conform to normative (legal, medical, social) discourses of sex work. The implications of this hidden population for campaigners, policymakers, and healthcare practitioners are discussed, contributing to ongoing debates around harm reduction and social policy.

This paper presents a case study of a community
technology center (CTC) located in a lower income
neighborhood of a high-tech city. Participant observation
and interview-based research determined that while the
CTC was popular among its targeted constituents, its use
was not consistent with what the center’s supporters and
policymakers envisioned. The emergent discrepancy
between policymaker rhetoric and actual use is analyzed in
light of different understandings of how internet access is
perceived as a social good by policymakers, funders, and
among disadvantaged communities. The article raises
questions and suggests policy implications regarding how
those most at-risk use community technology centers, how
those centers may be funded, and how the relationship of
computers and the social good must be reconceptualized
to better address the issues of the digital divide that extend
beyond the technological realm.

This paper challenges post-feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful ‘achieving’ girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible
ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools and beyond. We map how girls negotiate contradictory neo-liberal discourses of girlhood that dominate in popular culture; what McRobbie calls the new ‘post-feminist masquerade’, which portends that girls can be/come anything
they want, so long as they simultaneously perform ‘hyper-sexy’, the new aspirational feminine ideal. Drawing on individual case studies from four qualitative research projects with teen girls in urban and rural working class communities across England and Wales, we explore how specific ‘working-class’ girls struggle to
negotiate this contradictory terrain of girlhood through imaginary ‘lines of flight’ in their narratives. Specifically, we are interested in applying Deleuze and Guatarri’s writings on immanence and the productive, social status of desire and fantasy through an analysis of girls’ (violent, aggressive or utopian) fantasies in ways that move beyond the binary of ‘real/not real’, and thus reject a reading of fantasy as futile, ‘escapist’ or ‘pathological solutions to working class life’. We suggest fantasy might operate as a space of survivability, political subjectivity and resistance to girls’ subordination within Butler’s ‘heterosexual matrix’.

Tsotsitaal is a linguistic phenomenon which is inseparable from a style adopted by many youth living in urban townships in South Africa. The style is signalled by the unique and innovative lexicon of Tsotsitaal, and additionally indicated by clothing and other identity markers. Features of the style are ‘urban-ness’, consumerism (in terms of brand names) and cultural iconography, such as music and sports. While many of these items are influenced by, or even drawn from,global cultures (particularly in the diaspora), they are transformed into uniquely South African cultural currency by a process of recontextualisation in township spaces and between individuals. There has been a dialogue between the Tsotsitaal style and the global since at least the 1940s, which should put to rest fears that increased global influence since the end of apartheid will diminish the integrity of local South African cultures.

This paper examines New Zealand print media representations of assisted reproductive and related biogenetic technologies, conceptualised as the products of a concordance of interest between media workers and reproductive specialists, biogenetic scientists, and consumers. Such concordance is evident in the predominant use of media frames of anecdotal personalisation and technoboosterism, which typically amplify the voices of proponents of emerging technologies whilst marginalising and delegitimising counterdiscourses. Thus, the perspectives of consumers and 'expert' sources are privileged at the expense of a more balanced assessment of the value and social, ethical, legal and health implications of assisted reproductive and related biogenetic technologies.

With the arrival of globalization and digitalization and the intensification of trans-national, trans-urban, and trans-local dynamics, cities, particularly global cities, are now emerging as strategic sites for understanding key economic, political, and cultural dynamics (Sassen, 2010). Myria Georgiou's book Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference contributes to this literature by focusing on "cultural networks and mediated negotiations of spaces of we-ness, other-ness, inequalities and exclusions" (p. 19) in global cities. Studying the global

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2011. Community and school choice: Geographies of care and responsibility. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 21 (1), 1-13

This paper draws on elements of critical discursive psychology in order to explore some of the issues and concerns raised by parents’ responses to the policy and practice of school choice. Drawing on data from a group of mothers of diverse social class and racial backgrounds, this paper examines the dilemmas some mothers engage with in their role as chooser – reconciling competing rationalities for choosing or trying to manage contradictions. A central argument of this paper is that the policy and political context shaping the emergence of school choice in Britain has provisionally secured the development of certain trends in education – consumerism, individualism and competition. Alongside and coupled with this has been the veneration of a narrow utilitarian conception of parents as consumers of education services, defined as people who share the capacity and willingness to maximise the utility of their decisions in a rationally self-interested way. This paper questions the value of this approach as a framing for understanding the aspirations, motivations and fantasies informing parents’ school choice and highlights instead the ways in which some mothers articulate the imaginary of community in their decision-making practices.

Abstract
This paper addresses Giddens’ assertion that self-help books are democratising, and may help to bring about a ‘reconciliation’ of the sexes. It investigates a selection of best-selling relationship manuals for their conceptions of love and their prescriptions and proscriptions for self-formation. It considers Giddens’ notion of democracy in the light of these, and suggests that this is a narrow and particular one. It is further argued that, by characterising love as a (biochemical) pathology, and men as being defective or dangerous, the relationship manuals in this study prescribe emotional detachment and self-mastery rather than ‘reconciliation’.

The article discusses some of the major omissions and simplifications created by established approaches to European communication, in particular the inclination to think of Europeanization primarily, and often exclusively, in relation to things national. It points to the simplistic narrative that sees transnational communication in Europe as a very recent phenomenon, and demonstrates how this narrative glosses over various historical forms of transnational communication in Europe. It then briefly addresses the intellectual roots of this narrative, and argues that they also lead to neglecting the existence of diverse, often competing contemporary forms of Europeanization and transnationalization in public communication. Finally, the article argues that more sustained attention should be paid to subnational patterns of stratification of European communication, particularly those arising along class divisions.

In this paper I explore the way everyday forms of creativity responded to the first wave of the coronavirus. I argue that these creative responses did two things. First, they demonstrated the rich agency that ordinary people have in shaping and sharing their experience of lonely isolation. Second, through the creative works generated and circulated, a critical lens was placed on the way that the pandemic carried forward the inequalities inherent in modern systems of governance. The article is divided into two main sections: the first looks at a range of creative works made by ordinary people to reconnect them to the social world. The second section looks at the creative works that were explicitly politicized and activist in nature, turning loneliness into a political project.

Authors have repeatedly argued that a nearly exclusive focus on the dominant form of masculinity limits our knowledge of masculinity. Qualitative masculinities researchers have revealed multiple masculine forms, but quantitative researchers have not yet assessed them. This study adopted a social identity approach to examine endorsement of ten typically male images (Average Joe, Businessman, Family Man, Jock, Nerd, Player, Rebel, Sensitive New-Age Guy, Stud, Tough Guy) and their connections to gender norms and traits. Data from 340 male and 348 female adults revealed that identification with each image was related to a particular pattern of norm conformity and trait endorsement. Patterns varied by sex. Findings suggested that distinctions across images may be assessed quantitatively. Implications for quantitative research on masculinities were discussed.

This article examines how involvement in high school journalism contributes to socialization into citizenship and, most crucially, to the development of a collective sensibility. Recent work by W Lance Bennett (2008), Zukin and his colleagues (2006), and Sara-Ellen Amster (2006) provides an interpretive lens for considering young people’s experiences with journalism and with citizenship. Interviews with 45 high school journalists from 19 different schools are analyzed, highlighting emerging definitions of citizenship as reflected in how young people discuss their work as student journalists. The study suggests that participation in the culture of high school journalism can provide young people with opportunities to develop the skills and experiences necessary for civic engagement, including the experience of collective decision-making. This study also argues that some young people come to understand the costs of engaged citizenship after negative experiences with their school’s administration, as such experiences reveal differing understandings of the roles of authority, journalism, and collective responsibility within the high school community that its high school journalism is meant to serve.

In 2008, a Dutch member of parliament released a short anti-Islamic film entitled Fitna, which stirred a huge public controversy and provoked public condemnations around the world. In response to the film, hundreds of videos were uploaded on YouTube, mostly with the aim to provide a more positive representation of Islam, express support for the author and his views, or defend his freedom of speech. Drawing on interviews with YouTube users who posted the videos, this paper reflects on the capacity of the Internet to sustain cosmopolitan communication and examines how cosmopolitan attitudes and practices on-line differ depending on the participants' cultural and social background, especially their religious affiliations. Particular attention is paid to how the opportunities for cosmopolitan communication are shaped by the unequal distribution of cosmopolitan attitudes and practices among groups, and by global inequalities of power. In addressing these issues, the paper also engages with broader debates about cosmopolitanism, and argues for an understanding of cosmopolitanism as a quest for universalism, which remains anchored in the particular, but involves communication across difference, and requires openness to the possibility that the other is right.

This article addresses how capacity is conceived of and understood in youth media/civic education programming, and how beliefs about agency, development, relationality and youth manifests in the discourses, programs, and practices of organizations operating youth media programs. Through attention to a youth media and development program in rural Nicaragua, the article addresses a key gap in theorizing how capacity operates within discourses and related practices that constitute 'youth media' and, in particular, it critically investigates how youth media discourse rest on an assumed foundation where capacity is defined as agency, empowerment, or voice. This article situates youth media production within modernist discourses about education, development and 'change', in order to reconceptualize agency through a mobilities framework that more fully attends to the complex and affective moments in youth media discourses.

Considerable scholarly discussion has been given to the idea that we are moving toward a state of “posthumanism.” This essay examines some possible implications of a posthuman existence, specifically as it relates to that most basic of human needs—sexuality. I explore the spiritual aspects of sexuality to see what is lost and what is gained in technologically mediated forms of sexuality. To that end, I consider the interplay between sexual behavior and our conceptions of the sacred, how technologies are changing our views of—and realities concerning—our bodies, and the potential for a sacred posthuman sexuality.

This article examines a number of digital initiatives where refugees and migrants speak with/to Europe in the context of the “migration crisis.” The analysis of four institutional and grassroots initiatives illustrates digital Europe’s symbolic articulations of borders that divide people and territories. As argued, the mediated visibility and voice of refugees and migrants matter precisely as the order of appearance (in Arendt’s terms) in digital Europe represents a fundamental dimension of the continent’s communicative order: revealing who speaks and who is silenced, which actors are heard and which are sidelined in the context of Europe’s “migration crisis.” The incorporation of refugee and migrant voices in digital Europe shows that voice does not guarantee recognition; rather, its incorporation reveals the complex politics of digital representation: on occasions challenging hegemonic power structures but most often digitally reaffirming bordering power and its symbolical articulations.

This article argues that we need to understand media as spaces where minorities increasingly communicate interests, make claims and mobilize identities. With a focus on diasporic groups, the article looks at the multi-spatial character of communication and mobilization and its consequences for expression and communication of cultural and political belonging. Diasporic groups represent some of the most significant minorities across European nation-states. While living in – and in many cases being citizens of – European nation-states, they also sustain political and cultural connections across boundaries, largely through the media. This article argues that diasporic minority groups use the media in complex ways that feed back into their sense of cultural and political belonging. Only if we examine the diverse and complex ways in which minorities use the media to make sense of the world around them, can we begin to understand the wider significance of media and communications for minorities’ cultural and political representation and belonging.

This paper examines the role of transnational television in supporting transnational subjects’ ontological security in a world of information, risk, interconnected spaces, but fragmented social relations. The discussion draws on Silverstone’s and Giddens’ work on ontological security and modernity. It revisits Silverstone’s (1993, 1994) analysis of television as a core system for managing modern subjects’ ontological insecurities and relocates this thesis in a transnational context. In its ordinariness and ever-presence, transnational television frames a ‘safe’ and ‘secure’ space for everyday life for many diasporic and migrant audiences. Enabling symbolic as well as physical co-presence, the space around television becomes a contradictory, yet important, frame for managing everyday angst. This is particularly the case for people torn by anxieties associated with separation, political instability in their region of origin, and the precariousness of migrant life. With reference to empirical research with Arab audiences across Europe, the paper shows that television sustains its central role, even when new media make significant advances.

The copper mining city of of Alto Hospicio, Chile and GoodPath town, a factory city in China both seem to be archetypal neoliberal cities. They epitomize the circulation of goods, people, and ideas through their export-based economies, large migrant populations, and high penetration of Internet and social media use. Yet, we find that in migrants' social media use, there are stark contrasts in the significance they place on their movement and the identities they form around these migrations. In China, factory workers take to the 'online world' to escape harsh realities and engage in identity formations that privilege cosmopolitan aspirations. In Chile, mining workers express the harshness of their lived reality, using social media to build identities around a sense of pride in their abrasive conditions. This comparative essay reveals how processes associated with neoliberal capitalism-including migrations of people, goods, and information, and the commodification of identities-is preconditioned by local contexts. We find that the processes of neoliberal capitalism sometimes yield starkly different consequences, even when local circumstances seem to be similar. This demonstrates that even as media (and particularly social media) connect people more closely, their effects are anything but homogenizing.

The “language-communication-society” triangle defies traditional scientific approaches. Rather, it is a phenomenon that calls for an integration of complex, transdisciplinary perspectives, if we are to make any progress in understanding how it works. The highly diverse agents in play are not merely cognitive and/or cultural, but also emotional and behavioural in their specificity. Indeed, the effort may require building a theoretical and methodological body of knowledge that can effectively convey the characteristic properties of phenomena in human terms.

New complexity approaches allow us to rethink our limited and mechanistic images of human societies and create more appropriate emo-cognitive dynamic and holistic models. We have to enter into dialogue with the complexity views coming out of other more ‘material’ sciences, but we also need to take steps in the linguistic and psycho-sociological fields towards creating perspectives and concepts better fitted to human characteristics.

Our understanding of complexity is different – but not opposed – to the one that is more commonly found in texts written by people working in physics or computer science, for example. The goal of this book is to extend the knowledge of these other more ‘human’ or socially oriented perspectives on complexity, taking account of the language and communication singularities of human agents in society.

La implementación de proyectos de intervención en donde colaboran dos o más sistemas educativos es enriquecedor y al mismo tiempo comple-jo, ya que requiere negociar, organizar y reformular dinámicas propias, así como las que surgen en la actividad compartida. Ante esta situación el asesoramiento se vuelve una herramienta útil para llegar a acuerdos y consolidar objetivos comunes. Desde la perspectiva histórica cultural de la teoría de la actividad, la investigación-acción y la metodología et-nográfica para la recolección de datos, en este artículo se presenta la re-construcción y análisis de un proceso de asesoramiento y se revisan las contradicciones y dificultades de la implementación del modelo Shere Rom en un colegio de nivel primaria en la ciudad de Barcelona. A partir del diálogo y reflexión entre los participantes de los sistemas (asesores-in-vestigadores y profesores) se lograron negociar los objetivos de Shere Rom dando como resultado su rediseño adaptado a las necesidades del colegio. The implementation of intervention projects where more than two educational systems collaborate is very enriching but, at the same time, complex , since it obliges to negotiate, organize and reformulate the dynamics of one's own and those that arise during the shared activity. Facing this situation guidance becomes a very useful tool in order to reach agreements and to consolidate common objectives. Starting from the historic-cultural perspective of activity theory, the action research and the ethnographi-cal methodology for data gathering, this paper offers a reconstruction and analysis of a guidance process and revises the contradictions and difficulties observed when implementing the Shere Rom model in a primary classroom in Barcelona (Spain). From this dialogue and reflection amongst the participants belonging to the two systems (consultant-researchers and teachers) they achieved to negotiate the Shere Rom and brought as result its redesign adapted to the school's needs. Palabras clave Asesoría del profesorado Investigación-acción

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual popular music event that attracts
millions of people who consume it with enthusiasm, irony, humour, but also sometimes
with anger. The contest has been increasingly dressed with numerous stereotypes about
the nation, Europe and cultural difference. This paper looks at two different groups of
ESC audiences in the UK and analyses their engagement with the event and the
stereotypes around it. The first audience group consists of participants in the BBC Online
Forum debates and the second group consists of committed Eurovision audience
members participating in focus group discussions. Findings show that the stereotype
becomes a powerful, political, yet ambivalent, tool in making sense of cultural difference.

In Britain public opinion has been conceived as entering the public sphere via certain set channels, for instance via protest repertoires, such as strikes, public meetings and demonstrations; via the ballot box; through the media, in the letter columns of newspapers; and via opinion polls. For the majority of the public, attitude expression was seen as being confined largely to voting in various elections. 1 These channels were viewed as fairly stable routes through which the public could express its views on political matters. However, this picture is changing fast. Public political attitude expression is undergoing a transformation. It is no longer confined to certain events such as elections nor does it necessarily require the co-presence of others. The public can articulate its views on political matters via a greatly expanded series of protest repertoires 2 and media outlets, and via new technologies. As the number of issues coming to the public's attention has increased, attitude expression is less and less confined to national issues and conventional politics. Further, members of the public now exist in a political environment where they are continually encouraged to vocalize their views by various organizational actors, whether this is opposition to the activities of governments or transnational corporations; support for environmental regulations; or complaints about a company or local authority services.

How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics and control—in short, new social practices. Anthropologists studying media have been modifying the analytical tools that linguistic anthropologists have developed for language to uncover when and how media are understood to provide the possibilities for social change and when they are not. Taking coordination to be a vulnerable achievement, I address recent work that elaborates on the ways that linguistic anthropology segments communication to explore how a particular medium offers its own distinctive forms of authorship, circulation, storage, and audiences.

Let us mention an antidote illustrating our study on male gazes and geek culture. In Spring Term 2009, I (Wai-hung Yiu) taught a course titled Consuming Japan: Beauty, Fashion and Subculture. After a lecture on the trends of moe influencing the teenaged female models in Hong Kong, who become the goddesses at the gazes of college boys, a female student specifically suggested a new class discussion topic: the consumption of moe shapes the aesthetic judgments on female body as a mate-selection criterion by taking the perspectives of geeks. However, the culture of geeks (otaku in Japanese), especially amine and manga maniacs, is conservative of actual perversions of girl dating and objects both pedophiles and homosexuals, but otaku are obsessive with perverse images. 2 Still I remain reticent of the eros of otaku in my response to her curiosity. Otaku are despised as lower class -especially in terms of lifestyle and taste -for their social ostracism. The curiosity of my female student is only a voice outside the boundaries of otaku culture. But the fetishes of female body in manga, in video games, and in forms of figurines are circulating around the center of otaku seemingly endlessly.

"In this paper, through an examination of mostly British make-over television programs we examine how the feminine has become a new site of limitless possibility and endless consumption, the fulcrum of intensifying processes of neo-liberal reinvention of continuously making over the self into successful, post-feminist bourgeois subjects. We argue that the central premise of contemporary make-over programs is the question: “Is the transformation of abject subjects possible?” We also suggest the focal object of transformation in many shows is the working class woman who fails both as subject/object of self-reflexivity, desire, and consumption. We argue it is her mind and body that represents a core site of abjection—a subjectivity designated as uninhabitable and therefore also a central site of regulation. It is upon the working class woman’s
mind and body that the drama of possibility and limitation of neo-liberal reinvention is played out. We also argue that it is perhaps in reference to that which is made abject and uninhabitable that it becomes possible to talk about class as a dynamic of identifying against what we must not be, and which fuels incessant attempts to refashion selves into generalized and normalized bourgeois
feminine subjects."

This article reviews the complex relationship between religion and film-viewing among the Moroccan diaspora in Antwerp (Belgium), an ethnically and linguistically diverse group that is largely Muslim. A media ethnographic study of film culture, including in-depth interviews, a group interview and elaborate fieldwork, indicates that film preferences and consumption vary greatly along socio-demographic and linguistic lines. One particular religious film, however, holds a cult status, Ar Risalah (The Message), a 1976 historical epic produced by Mustapha Akkad that deals with the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The film’s local distribution is discussed, as well as its reception among the Moroccan diaspora. By identifying three positions towards Islam, different modes of reception were found, ranging from a distant and objective to a transparent and subjective mode. It was found that the film supports inter-generational religious instruction, in the context of families and mosques. Moreover, a specific inspirational message is drawn from the film by those who are in search of a well-defined space for Islam in their own lives.

In light of an ambiguous legal situation in countries like Lebanon and Egypt concerning homosexuality, this article looks at how some individuals are able to reconfigure their identities and sexual desires through the online dating app Tinder, and the negotiation of sociopolitical identity signifiers in a Lebanese context. On the other hand, LGBTIQ individuals and those with non-normative sexualities are persecuted by the Egyptian state as a result of those same practices, resulting in a collapse in the online/offline binary.

This essay studies the covert, market driven forces at work in our choices of images for the avatars inhabiting cyberspace, in order to understand the dangers of the exchange of self-images for advertisements. To forge a set of alternative resistant and forceful conditions for imaging what SherryTurkle has termed "the second self," tactics based in imaging, language, and psychology can be opposed to the insidious and covert co-optation of the self by commodities. This essay is an attempt to examine the construction of alternative figures as models of resistance. The Manifesto for Avatars offers a formal set of oppositional strategies for constructing unconsumable self-images. The apparent freedom of identity and gender enjoyed by the participants in multi-user domains and the Internet in general (Langley, Stone) is a dangerous illusion, masking the corporate agendas dominating the nature and spirit of the construction of cyberspace and avatars. Imagine an internet chat room wherew e are all represented by the commodity of our choice. Much like the large, recognizable logos that corporeal jackets, sneakers, tee-shirts, and hats model, in this virtual environment our veryr epresentation, our self image, becomes an emblem of the production and accumulation of goods. The irony in the physical world is that we choose to wear these commodities and we willingly pay multi-national corporations for the privilege of advertising their products. Through this transaction we express personal fantasies, achieve a fleeting sense of democracy and individual expression, and fulfill various levels of desire.