Universal ideals in local realities: online viewing in South Korea, Brazil and India

The potential of the internet to act as a global distribution outlet for screen content has long come into conflict with the nationally-focused strategies of producers, broadcasters, governments and internet service providers. Online viewing therefore acts as a useful case study for interrogating how tensions between ‘global’ and ‘local’ manifest within an increasingly digitized media landscape. This article examines the online viewing markets in three countries at different stages of digital maturity (South Korea, Brazil, India) to consider how online viewing has evolved in each. It then examines audience questionnaire and interview data generated in each country to explore how viewers are making sense of and valuing online viewing services. By interrogating all three samples before focusing specifically on India in more detail, it examines two tensions within the global expansion of online film and television distribution: between global trends and local infrastructures, and between the ideals of online viewing services and the grounded realities of their daily use

New audiences, international distribution, and translation

The interconnectivity made possible by the technological advancements of the past three decades has changed the way how audiences engage with audiovisual content around the world. On the one hand, viewers have become empowered consumers who are also engaged in the distribution of content; on the other, companies serving global audiences have emerged as key players in the audiovisual market. With more access to content, through piracy or official channels, new consumption habits, such as binge watching, have become common among viewers. Non-professional subtitling has played a key role in the expansion of the audiovisual market, the configuration of international audiences and the development of new viewing traditions. By looking at non-professional subtitling as a constituent of the international media flows, this chapter proposes Translation Studies should look at the reception of non-professional subtitles at a global scale to understand the interplay between non-professional subtitling, its producers/users and the audiovisual market, as well as the societal impact of the phenomenon

Charlie-is-so-“English”-like: Nationality and the branded-celebrity person in the age of YouTube

The YouTube celebrity is a novel social phenomenon. YouTube celebrities have implications for the social and cultural study of celebrity more generally but in order to illustrate the features of vlogging celebrity and its wider dimensions, this article focuses upon one case-study – Charlie McDonnell and his video ‘How to be English’. The premise of YouTube – ‘Broadcast Yourself’ – begs the question ‘but what self?’ The article argues the YouTube celebrity is able to construct a celebrity persona by appealing to aspects of identity, such as nationality, and use them as a mask(s) to perform with. By situating Charlie’s ‘How to be English’ in the context of establishing celebrity, the article argues that the processes of celebrification and ‘self-branding’ utilise the power of identity myths to help assist the construction of a celebrity persona. Use of masks and myths allows for one to develop various aspects of their persona into personae. One such persona for Charlie is his ‘Englishness’. As the social experience of ‘Broadcasting Yourself’ necessarily asks one to turn ordinary aspects of their person into extra-ordinary qualities, Charlie’s use of Englishness allows ‘being English’ to become a mythological device to overcome the problem of ‘self-promotion’

YouTube: fragments of a video-tropic atlas

In this article I make a plea for human geographers to make use of the rapidly growing collection of video materials that can be found on Youtube. My tiny atlas of Youtube picks out three videos in order to exhibit the richness of audio-visual materials to be found there and also one potential way of analysing them. These videos are common amateur genres on Youtube: home movies of family occasions, a video-blog and the counter-surveillance of the police. I argue that geography is particularly will situated to turn toward the video itself on Youtube as a source of data on the temporal, embodied, bodily, material and mobile aspects of spatial practices. Brief analyses are also provided of the videos to demonstrate how they can be analysed in those terms but also toward understanding video practices within different settings. Finally, I present a case for selecting 'badly produced' videos for good analytic reasons

‘Contextualizing and Critiquing the Fantastic Prosumer: Power, Alienation and Hegemony’

Abstract The ‘prosumer’ has emerged to become a central figure in contemporary culture. Through the melding of production with consumption, both mainstream and progressive analysts conceptualize prosumption to be a liberating, empowering and, for some, a prospectively revolutionary institution. In this article, these fantastic associations are critically assessed using an approach that situates prosumption activities, including contemporary online applications often referred to as ‘cocreation’, in three social-historical contexts: capitalism as a political economy dominated by mediated abstractions; capitalist society as a hierarchical order; and alienation as a pervasive norm. Among other conclusions, we find that prosumption (particularly its Web 2.0 iterations), constitutes an emerging hegemonic institution; one that effectively frames and contains truly radical imaginations while also tapping into existing predilections for commodity-focused forms of self-realization

Popularity markers on YouTube’s attention economy: the case of Bubzbeauty

This article focuses on issues of attention and popularity development in YouTube’s beauty community. I conceptualise the role of views and subscriptions as popularity markers, based on a broader ethnographic examination of 22 months of immersed fieldwork on the platform. I consider the case of Bubz, a British-Chinese beauty guru, through a purposeful sample of 80 videos. A content typology is introduced, presenting four distinctive video categories: content-oriented, market-oriented, motivational, and relational. Drawing from the concepts of ‘attention economy’ and ‘metrics of popularity’, I explore content characteristics and affordances for the creation and maintenance of viewers’ attention. I argue that the guru’s uploads lead to two types of audiences–casual viewers and loyal subscribers. Vlogs renew attention and help maintain the interest first generated by tutorials, leading to treasured subscribers–an essential commodity within YouTube’s highly competitive environment

Digital voices: Posthumanism and the generation of empathy

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital