Alcohol content in the 'Hyper-Reality' MTV show 'Geordie Shore'

Aim: To quantify the occurrence of alcohol content, including alcohol branding, in the popular primetime television UK Reality TV show 'Geordie Shore' Series 11. Methods: A 1-min interval coding content analysis of alcohol content in the entire DVD Series 11 of 'Geordie Shore' (10 episodes). Occurrence of alcohol use, implied use, other alcohol reference/paraphernalia or branding was recorded. Results: All categories of alcohol were present in all episodes. 'Any alcohol' content occurred in 78%, 'actual alcohol use' in 30%, 'inferred alcohol use' in 72%, and all 'other' alcohol references occurred in 59% of all coding intervals (ACIs), respectively. Brand appearances occurred in 23% of ACIs. The most frequently observed alcohol brand was Smirnoff which appeared in 43% of all brand appearances. Episodes categorized as suitable for viewing by adolescents below the legal drinking age of 18 years comprised of 61% of all brand appearances. Conclusions: Alcohol content, including branding, is highly prevalent in the UK Reality TV show 'Geordie Shore' Series 11. Two-thirds of all alcohol branding occurred in episodes age-rated by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) as suitable for viewers aged 15 years. The organizations OfCom, Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Portman Group should implement more effective policies to reduce adolescent exposure to on-screen drinking. The drinks industry should consider demanding the withdrawal of their brands from the show. Short Summary: Alcohol content, including branding, is highly prevalent in the MTV reality TV show 'Geordie Shore' Series 11. Current alcohol regulation is failing to protect young viewers from exposure to such content

The Reality and Hyperreality of Human Rights: Public Consciousness and the Mass Media

Scholarship on international human rights generally adopts two approaches. The normative approach focuses on treaties or other authoritative sources. The institutional approach emphasises governments, organisations or other actors charged with the norms' implementation. Much writing inevitably involves both approaches. Any critical stance is then often limited either to examining obstacles within the norms or their interpretation, or to pointing out the shortcomings of actors responsible for implementation. The authors of human rights scholarship are often activists, lawyers, diplomats or judges, and may include scholars with professional affinities to those circles. They largely confine their critical scope to those normative or institutional levels. Some theoretical writings go further, proposing broader frameworks, such as liberal, legal-realist, post-Marxist, post-colonial, feminist, communitarian or deconstructionist. Those analyses too, however, frequently focus either on prevailing norms (individually or as a system) or on the performance of the relevant actors. In this chapter, I shall examine a third layer of activity, the mass media. I shall treat the media as being on a par with, or more powerful than, the dominant systems of norms, insofar as the media determine the situations with which those norms are associated in the public mind; and as being at least on a par with organisations and governments, insofar as the media determine which situations are most visibly and urgently acted upon. The neglect of this decisive strand underscores the ongoing formalism of legal practice: norms and institutions receive the most attention, since they assume the official status proper to the promulgation, interpretation and implementation of rights. In most scholarship on international law and human rights, the role of the media, lacking any such formalised status, is cited, if at all, only tangentiallyMost human rights scholarship remains highly formalist, with a focus on norms and institutions. However, at least as powerful as, if not more powerful than, those norms and institutions, are the mass media. Consonant with David Kennedy’s concern that rights discourse can privilege some interests at the expense of others, the media must be seen as the force that overwhelmingly decides which norms and abuses count, and which are neglected. Public consciousness of human rights emerges not out of political reality, but out of a media-generated ‘hyper-reality’, impermeable to some of the world’s most heinous abuses. The media remain immune from the values of even-handedness that are conceptually presupposed by human rights law. In principle, human rights shun any zero-sum game, whereby the rights of one person or group may be traded off against those of another. The media not only plays that game, but must play it, as a matter of sheer time and resources. A ‘Hollywoodisation’ of rights still further contributes to forging a hyper-reality that remains at odds with the realities of global human rights

Beyond performativity, how and why American courts should not have used Efficient market hypothesis

This article provides a critical perspective on the performativity of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. It showed that this hypothesis is a fiction that created a hyper-reality rather than performed financial markets. Its use by practitioners, particularly courts and judges in the United States, has created a dialogue of deaf and has generated a gap between the observation of real financial markets and the reality practitioners and academics observe from this fiction. This gap has created and fuelled several misunderstandings discussed in this article

Reputation in organizational settings: a research agenda

Within organization theory, reputation is something we have come to associate with embeddedness research. This short paper seeks to develop a research agenda for new reputational research that draws inspiration from, but also seeks to move beyond, the embeddedness thematic

Is straight the new queer? David Beckham and the dialectics of celebrity

In his book, Understanding Celebrity (2004), Turner provides a comprehensive overview of the vast literature which has developed on issues of celebrity and fame, painting a broad picture of concerns divided between the significance of the apparent explosion in celebrity 'culture' and the focus on celebrities themselves. Within the literature on the social significance of celebrity culture, we can discern two key themes. First, celebrity culture is a manifestation of globalised commodity consumerism in advanced capitalism and second, its social function as a system of meanings and values which is supplanting traditional resources for self and social identities in late modern culture, including structures such as class, gender/sexuality, ethnicity and nationality. Whilst the authors mentioned above both draw on and contribute to these arguments, their focus remains broad, citing Beckham as a key manifestation of the complex interdependence between globalised sports and media industries, and transformations in gender and consumption. For example, although Cashmore's book is solidly researched on the impact of media finance on football and has a sound argument on the significance of consumerism, he is prone to generalisations about the transformations in masculinity and celebrity culture which he suggests are central to understanding Beckham's significance

Liberate your avatar; the revolution will be social networked

This paper brings together the practice-based creative research of artists Charlotte Gould and Paul Sermon, culminating in a collaborative interactive installation that investigates new forms of social and political narrative in multi-user virtual environments. The authors' artistic projects deal with the ironies and stereotypes that are found within Second Life in particular. Paul Sermon’s current creative practice looks specifically at the concepts of presence and performance within Second Life and 'first life', and attempts to bridge these two spaces through mixed reality techniques and interfaces. Charlotte Gould’s Ludic Second Life Narrative radically questions the way that users embody themselves in on-line virtual environments and identifies a counter-aesthetic that challenges the conventions of digital realism and consumerism. These research activities and outcomes come together within a collaborative site-specific public installation entitled Urban Intersections for ISEA09, focusing on contested virtual spaces that mirror the social and political history of Belfast. The authors' current collaborative practice critically investigates social, cultural and creative interactions in Second Life. Through these practice-based experiments the authors' argue that an enhanced social and cultural discourse within multi-user virtual environments will inevitably lead to growth, cohesion and public empowerment, and like all social networking platforms, contribute to greater social and political change in first life

David Beckham as a historical moment in the representation of masculinity

There can be no doubt that David Beckham is a public figure of intense media interest in contemporary Britain. This paper is the first stage in a project which aims to explore the circuit of representation and reception of Beckham in current culture. I use a grounded theory approach to generate and categorise the ways in which representations are constructed. The empirical focus is on the discourses around Beckham which are apparent in magazines from May to October 2002. This six month period covers some extremely significant events in his private and professional lives; from his injury just before the World Cup; his recovery and subsequent captaincy of England during the tournament; his on-going fashion and celebrity career with consecutive cover spreads for major magazines, to the arrival of Romeo - his second child. As such, this time-span provided ample and diverse examples of how he is represented in this particular form of lifestyle media. The conceptual categories generated through the grounded theory approach are analysed using ideas drawn from queer theory. My aim is to explore whether queer ideas of discursive resistance, disruption, or destabilisation, are useful explanatory frameworks when discussing the modes of representation which are deployed to construct David Beckham as a working class heterosexual subject. I suggest that queer theory does allow an appreciation of new elements being coded into working-class masculinity. However, current changes in the representation of masculinity may be more usefully understood as expansions of the 'sign' of masculinity operating as a commodity form