Technology, Convergence, and Power

Current Trends in Text-Based Approaches to Media Studies

Sharon R. Mazzarella

[M]edia texts present a distinctive discursive moment between encoding and decoding that justifies special scholarly engagement. The narrative character of media content, its potential as a site of ideological negotiation and its impact as mediated “reality” necessitates interpretation in its own right.

(Elfriede Fürsich (2009, p. 238))

Studies of media content have been a staple of media studies since the field's beginnings. While many people erroneously use the phrase “content analysis” to refer to any and all studies of media content, there are actually a variety of ways to study such content, only one of which is correctly labeled “content analysis.” The chapters in this volume come from a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches and highlight the richness of media content and representation studies. Moreover, they exemplify how such studies have evolved as media content itself has evolved. In this introduction, I provide a historical, methodological, and epistemological context for the chapters contained in this volume. I begin with a discussion of the specific methodology of content analysis not to give it primacy, but rather for the sake of chronology. I then discuss more qualitative approaches to the study of media content and representation before justifying why text-only studies of media are relevant. Finally, I explain the organizational structure of the volume and introduce the individual chapters before offering concluding thoughts and future directions for media content studies.

Quantitative Analysis of Media Content

According to the author of one of the leading content analysis textbooks, Klaus Krippendorff, “Content analysis is a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use” (2004, p. 18). While Kimberly Neuendorf, author of the highly influential The Content Analysis Guidebook, offers a more extensive definition later in her book, she begins with the following brief definition: content analysis is “the systematic, objective, quantitative analysis of message characteristics” (2002, p. 1). Similarly, in yet another key content analysis methodology textbook, Daniel Riffe, Stephen Lacey, and Frederick Fico define the approach as “the systematic assignment of communication content to categories according to rules, and the analysis of relationships involving those categories using statistical methods” (2005, p. 3). Words like “systematic,” “objective,” “rules,” “categories,” “quantitative,” “replicable,” “valid,” and “statistical method” evidence the connection between content analysis and the scientific method employed in the subset of media studies that grew out of the social and behavioral sciences.

While Krippendorff traces the concept of content analysis back even as far as seventeenth-century Europe, the precursor of modern content analysis is generally considered to be the “quantitative newspaper analysis” (Krippendorff, 2004, p. 5) of the early twentieth century. At that time, US journalism schools were established paralleling a public and scholarly concern about the content of newspapers. Early studies such as Mathews's 1910 piece documenting the large amount of space allotted to what he termed “demoralizing,” “trivial,” and “unwholesome” content in US newspapers arrived at their conclusions by measuring column inches devoted to particular topics (as cited in Krippendorff, 2004, p. 5). As other forms of mass media emerged in the early and mid-twentieth century, the quantitative techniques of early newspaper analysis were translated to study the content of other media. Neuendorf (2002), for example, identifies Edgar Dale's 1935 content analysis of the written descriptions of some 1,500 movies released in 1920, 1925, and 1930 as such an example. Published as part of the classic Payne Fund Studies, Dale documented Hollywood's reliance on love and crime stories. Krippendorff identifies the 1930s and 1940s as “the second phase in the intellectual growth of content analysis” (2004, p. 6). Paralleling the rise of the development of the social sciences, public opinion research, and theoretically grounded social research, scholars of media content expanded the range of questions asked about the content, incorporated theory and operational definitions to guide their research, and utilized new statistical tools. In addition, content analysis was used as part of larger research projects incorporating other methods such as survey research (Krippendorff, 2004). Certainly, the Payne Fund Studies mentioned earlier would be an example of this, as that body of work included experimental, survey, interview, and autobiographical case studies along with content analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of the relationship between audiences and films at the time. According to Krippendorff, the first “concise presentation of these conceptual and methodological developments under the new umbrella term content analysis” appeared in a 1948 report by pioneering communication scholars Bereleson and Lazarsfeld titled The Analysis of Communication Content. Krippendorff argues that “this first systematic presentation codified the field for years to come” (2004, p. 8). Content analysis was successfully used to study propaganda and wartime messages before and during World War II (seen notably in the work of pioneering communication scholar Harold Lasswell), and by the end of the war, its benefits became obvious to scholars in other disciplines including psychology, anthropology, and history among others. Content analysis still remains a staple in media studies. In fact, in her 2002 textbook, Neuendorf described content analysis as “the fastest-growing technique over the past 20 years or so” (p. 1).

Qualitative Analysis of Media Content

According to Neuendorf (2002), “with regard to content analysis, there seems to be a widespread but wrongheaded assumption that ‘anyone can do it’ with no training, and there also seems to be another common misperception that any examination of messages may be termed a content analysis” (p. xv). Furthermore, many approach content analysis as an easy project only to discover that it is unexpectedly difficult with issues such as operationalization, inter-coder reliability, and statistically significant measures being some of the few elements of a well-carried-out research project. In addition to content analysis, media studies scholars use a variety of more qualitative techniques whose roots are found not in the social and behavioral sciences, but rather in the humanities – literary theory, film/cinema studies, and critical/cultural studies. While content analysis is one specific methodology, there is a range of qualitative approaches used by media studies scholars. I stop short of calling them “qualitative content analysis” because that implies that (quantitative) content analysis is the original and more valued, while qualitative content analysis is an afterthought. It is comparable to the trend of universities calling their men's teams the Tigers, for example, and their women's teams the “Lady Tigers,” implying that the men's teams are the original, and the women's teams are second fiddle. (Which, in terms of funding and media exposure, they often are, but that's another story.)

In 1996, Ellen Hijmans offered her typology of qualitative approaches to the study of media content. The first is rhetorical analysis or rhetorical criticism, which has its origins in Greek philosophy, notably the work of Aristotle. It focuses less on what communication messages say, and more on how the message says it – on the rhetorical strategies employed. While used in media studies, rhetorical analysis is employed more often in communication studies to analyze non-mediated messages. Narrative analysis, derived from literary theory focuses on the “formal narrative structure” (Neuendorf, 2002, p. 5) of stories, for example Propp's canonical analysis of characters in Russian fairy tales (1968) which established now-classic character archetypes such as hero, villain, helper, and so on. Discourse analysis focuses on the use of words and manifest language. It is used often in analyses of public communication, typically to study phenomena such as speech, conversations, and the like. Structuralist/semiotic analysis, for example, the influential work of Roland Barthes, is related to linguistics and focuses on latent meanings, signs, sign systems, and symbols. Interpretive analysis emphasizes forming theory from the observation and coding of messages.

In addition to the above as documented by Hijmans, Neuendorf (2002) identifies other qualitative approaches including conversation analysis, which is the analysis of “naturally occurring” conversations – interviews, for example. She also identifies what she calls critical analysis, which has its roots in cultural studies and film studies, and which can be seen in many of the chapters in this volume. Such studies incorporate a range of critical/cultural theories such as feminist theories, critical race theory, political economy, and so on. In fact, they may also incorporate one or more of the approaches already identified by Hijmans. Fürsich (2009) and others use the term “textual analysis” to broadly refer to such studies (while that phrase is often erroneously used as a synonym for “content analysis”).

Such “qualitative reading strategies” (Fürsich, 2009, p. 240) assume the subjectivity of the researcher (in comparison to the emphasis on objectivity employed in content analysis). Moreover, textual analysis goes “beyond the manifest content of media, [and instead] focuses on the underlying ideological and cultural assumptions of the text” (Fürsich, 2009, p. 240). According to Kellner (2010), “Each critical method focuses on certain features of a text from a specific perspective.” For example, Marxist scholars focus on representation of class, while feminist scholars focus on gender portrayals. Critical race scholars examine representations of race and ethnicity while those grounded in queer theory address ideologies of sexuality.

Interestingly, some within the fields of media and cultural studies have criticized text-only-based approaches as providing an incomplete picture of the mediated landscape. For example, in 2007 Greg Philo of the Glasgow University Media Group argued that such approaches are deficient in that they fail to include analysis of production and audience, what du Gay and his colleagues have called the “circuit of culture” (1997). While acknowledging the advantages of such holistic approaches, Fürsich argues that “only independent textual analysis can elucidate the narrative structure, symbolic arrangements and ideological potential of media content” (2009, p. 239). Text-only media studies do not assume the roles of the producers or the audience are unimportant, but rather acknowledge that texts are a dynamic and rich source of ideological messages that warrant deconstruction. As Fürsich reminds us, “The question (guiding textual analysis) is not how accurately does the text reflect reality but what version of reality is normalized and as a consequence, how emancipatory or hegemonic is the text” (2009, p. 249). In fact within media studies, “reflection” is not a useful term as it implies a direct correspondence between reality and media, something that mediation challenges intrinsically.

Interestingly, while this volume is specifically on media content and representation, and while other volumes in this larger project focus on production and audience, some of the chapters in this volume do address the role of producers and audience in addition to content. Clearly, there is room for a range of approaches to the study of media content, and many scholars choose to carry out a combination of approaches throughout their career or within one particular research project.

Content and Representation

This volume is purposely titled “Content and Representation.” While it includes overviews of scholarship out of the social/behavioral science tradition of (quantitative) content analysis, it also includes numerous chapters coming from a more critical/cultural tradition, the latter of which has been extensively (although not exclusively) concerned with issues of representation; what Stuart Hall defines as “the production of meaning through language” (1997, p. 16). (Language, of course, is broadly defined to include the language of mediated artifacts.) Hall writes extensively about the constructivist or constructionist approach in which “it is not the material world which conveys meaning: it is the language system, or whatever system we are using to represent our concepts” (1997, p. 25). Such an approach can be seen, for example, in the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault and media studies scholars employing a Foucauldian approach, as do some of the authors in this volume.

At the heart of many studies of representation, including those from a Foucauldian perspective, is the issue of power. Who has the power to represent themselves and others? How is power represented in mediated texts? How do representations laterally reproduce or challenge power? A grounding in the “politics of representation” often guides media studies scholarship examining how particular groups – women, transgendered people, teenagers, Latino/as, and so on – are represented. The questions asked are not so much whether such portrayals are positive or negative, realistic or unrealistic, biased or unbiased, but rather how such portrayals are constructed ideologically. In fact, as Angharad N. Valdivia points out, media studies has moved beyond such “binary approaches” (2010, p. 74). The chapters in this volume, whether employing a content or textual analysis approach, evidence this turn to more complex analyses of representation and power.

Volume Structure

Organization

While this volume could have been organized in any number of ways – theoretical, methodological, epistemological, conceptual – I chose to organize it by focusing on the function of the content studied: (1) Persuasion and Information, (2) Entertainment, and (3) Interaction and Performance. In this age of convergence and boundary blurring (advergames, anyone?), it may seem archaic to use such an organizational structure, but I chose to organize the volume this way for a variety of reasons. First, it links to the history of how studies of media content evolved. Recall that early content analysis, for example, focused specifically on journalism (informational media) and then matured through studies of propaganda (persuasive media). This was followed by its use in studies of entertainment media – radio, film, and television. Finally, the evolution of media technology itself has been toward the creation of more interactive forms of media including the Internet and videogames, to which media studies scholars have now turned their attention.

While intention often guides content creation such that historically content intended to persuade had been quite different from content intended to entertain, today, as McAllister and Smith remind us in Chapter 1, one of the biggest trends in media content is the blurring of persuasive, informational, and entertainment messages as seen in the phenomenon of hypercommercialization. This is why this chapter opens the book – because it addresses this big-picture trend. I also chose to close the book with the section on interaction and performance because it too speaks to one of the most important recent trends in media content – the role of the “audience” in producing and/or interacting directly with media content.

Scope

In addition to including both qualitative and quantitative approaches to media content studies, this volume offers a range of additional distinguishing features beginning with its international scope. Authors in this volume are based in 10 different countries – Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition, the scholarship presented addresses media content found in an array of geographic areas ranging from Europe to Latin America, from the Middle East to the Caribbean, and from Asia to North America. Topics covered are also diverse, ranging from advertising and journalism to popular television and film; from music to videogames; and from blogs to place-based media.

This volume approaches content studies broadly. Not only does it include chapters from both the textual analysis and content analysis traditions, but the format of the chapters also varies. Some chapters are reviews of the literature while others are case studies. Essays also evidence the broad array of theories and intellectual concepts that ground content and representation studies – cultivation, feminist, hegemonic masculinity, political economy, poststructuralism, othering, Orientalism, hegemony, and so on.

At first glance, the reader might notice that the volume is heavy with studies of cultural representations of females. Indeed, seven chapters deal with some aspect of this topic, while only one deals with masculinity. Yet this is representative of the field, as studies of media portrayals of women and girls have been very prolific, and media studies scholars have only recently begun to seriously study mediated portrayals of masculinity(ies) (Mazzarella, 2008). While these seven chapters focus on females, they also address other issues including blogging, representation of nations, branding, and science.

As is representative of the field, most of the chapters are analyses of media/cultural content produced for mass audiences, yet some focus on content produced by individuals (e.g., bloggers, videogame players, musicians). In fact, it is the chapters focusing on these topics that force us to rethink the way we define media content, in particular with videogames where the “audience” (aka “player”) plays a role in creating the content.

In the course of editing this volume, it quickly became clear that other artificial distinctions such as those related to production or audiences or effects or content are also problematic. Several of the essays in this volume do go beyond the text-only approach and take into account one or more of these other factors. Through her archival research, Miranda Brady, for example, provides extensive background on the decision-making processes behind the introduction of place-based media in museums and how such decisions affect Indigenous representations. Katalin Lustyik and Ruth Zanker include a great deal of information on the structure of the children's networks they study. In addition, they have conducted extensive interviews with network officials to more fully understand children's television content. Similarly, other authors make reference to the potential effects of the content studied (Steinke, Signorielli, and Robinson et al., for example), while other authors such as Kenneth Lachlan and Mia Consalvo challenge us to think differently about how we study videogame content – specifically, the fact that the “audience” (i.e., the player) influences content.

Many of the chapters in this volume evidence the way media studies content and representation scholarship intersects with other fields, including Latino/a studies, game studies, women's studies, cinema/film studies, queer studies, sport studies, masculinity studies, and so on. This interdisciplinarity brings a richness and depth to media studies content and representation scholarship that adds to its relevance in a multicultural, global, and technology-driven world. Taken as a whole, then, the chapters in this volume evidence the multiplicity of ways in which media studies scholars approach the study of media content and representation.

Introduction to the Chapters

Part 1: Persuasion and Information

The first section of the book, “Persuasion and Information,” returns us to two of the earliest concerns about media content – advertising and news. The section begins with three chapters on advertising. While the first one provides more of an overview of current trends related to hypercommercialization, the other two chapters focus on two of the most frequently researched subtopics related to advertising content – portrayals of women and advertising to children.

In Chapter 1, “Understanding Hypercommercialized Media Texts,” Matthew P. McAllister and Alexandra Nutter Smith take a big-picture look at one of the most important media trends in recent years – the global phenomenon of hypercommercialization. Beginning as early as the 1980s, hypercommercialization is best described as commercial messages and imperatives invading other forms of culture, resulting in such hybrid cultural artifacts as advertorials, advergames, infomercials, branded school books, and so on. McAllister and Smith argue that such artifacts are “messy,” thereby blurring the distinction between advertising and other forms (e.g., news, entertainment, education). They conclude with a discussion of what they see as the future trends in hypercommercialization, mostly related to the Internet.

Focusing specifically on the US context, Nancy A. Jennings examines the research on children's advertising in Chapter 2, “And Now a Click from Our Sponsors: Changes in Children's Advertising in the United States.” Jennings puts US children's advertising into a broader context by discussing the legal regulations, the historical evolution, and the future directions of both content and scholarship. Focusing extensively on the current children's media environment in which marketers are moving more and more to the web to reach child consumers (for example, the kind of advergaming that McAllister and Smith include in their description of hypercommercialization), Jennings reminds us that “convergence” seems to be the watchword best describing children's advertising today. She concludes with a call for research on the branded environment in which children grow up.

Continuing with a focus on persuasive messages, Paloma Diaz Soloaga and Carlos Muniz examine “Women's Portraits Present in Print Fashion Advertisements: A Content Analysis of Spanish Fashion Magazines from 2002 to 2009” in Chapter 3. Based on their analysis of hundreds of luxury brand advertisements in high-end Spanish fashion magazines, the authors document the persistent stereotype of presenting women as objects of pleasure – valuable only for their physical appearance.

The next four chapters in Part 1 focus on informative media content – news and sports. While the topics of each of these chapters differ, so too do their approaches as they incorporate a range of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological groundings – political economy, feminism, power, poststructuralism, content analysis, and discourse analysis.

In Chapter 4, “Marketing Militarism to Moms: News and Branding after September 11th,” Mary Douglas Vavrus provides the bridge between the persuasion and information subsections of Part 1. Informed by feminist theory, political economy, and branding research, Vavrus unpacks how the news media constitute and politicize identity brands such as that of the “security mom” – women/moms who are concerned with national security and who were projected to be a swing voting bloc in recent US elections. Vavrus shows how the security mom identity, which emerged during the 2004 US presidential election, took on the status of a brand that was then used to reproduce the patriarchal values and pro-war agenda of the US power elite at the time.

While Vavrus calls on Michel Foucault's concepts of “biopower” and “governmentality” in her analysis of security moms, Marie Hardin and Erin Whiteside also invoke Foucault in their chapter “From Second-Wave to Poststructuralist Feminism: Evolving Frameworks for Viewing Representations of Women's Sports” (Chapter 5). Hardin and Whiteside trace the evolution of scholarship on women's sports, and demonstrate the potential of a poststructuralist/third-wave feminist approach to studying the topic in contrast to the more traditional, second-wave approach that had dominated the literature. Comparing the two approaches as being grounded in the way each conceptualizes power – either the Gramscian (second-wave) or Foucauldian (third-wave) approaches – and being careful not to devalue earlier scholarship on women and sports, the authors encourage future scholars to consider the potential of a poststructuralist approach.

While the Latin American cultural phenomenon of telenovelas has generated a significant amount of scholarship, Guillermo Avila-Saavedra examines not the content of the ubiquitous programs themselves, but rather US news coverage of English-language adaptations of four telenovelas for US audiences. In Chapter 6, “‘Honey-Drenched, Rags to Riches, Good versus Evil Stories’: The Telenovela as a Cultural Referent in the US Press,” he employs discourse analysis of mainstream US press coverage of these programs to document the coverage's devaluing of the telenovela genre and its use of the genre as a cultural proxy for Latinos. As a result, Avila-Saavedra argues that the coverage created an “identity crisis” for the programs, contributing in part to their low ratings and quick cancellation.

Continuing the focus on news coverage of minorities, Eli Avraham addresses “Changes in the News Representation of Minorities Over the Course of 40 Years of Research” in Chapter 7. Focusing on a range of contexts – Israeli, European, and US – Avraham seeks to address how minority groups have been covered in the press; why the coverage has tended to be stereotypical; and the role of activists in influencing the coverage of their own group. He offers a model outlining the dynamic factors that affect the journalistic image of minorities: (1) the characteristics of the group (e.g., population size, geographic location, socioeconomic indicators); (2) editorial policy and “social-ideological distance” between journalists and the members of the group in question; (3) the social-political environment; and (4) the public relations strategies employed by the group activists.

The last chapter in Part 1 provides a bridge between the first and second sections in that it focuses on media content that is at once designed to inform (i.e., educate) and entertain – children's television. In conducting case studies of three locally launched children's television channels – TVNZ6 in New Zealand, Minimax in Eastern Europe, and Al Jazeera Children's Channel in the Middle East – Katalin Lustyik and Ruth Zanker seek to answer the question: “Is There Local Content on Television for Children Today?” Through their case studies, the authors document the different ways each of these three channels has responded to media globalization. While the stations may still include “good” imported programming from abroad, they also provide locally produced programming that highlights local culture and traditions.

Part 2: Entertainment

The chapters in Part 2 highlight the intersections between media studies and other fields as mentioned earlier. They evidence the interdisciplinary nature of media studies, and the way in which media studies has crafted rich, nuanced approaches to the study of entertainment media content and representation.

The first chapter in Part 2 is Mary C. Beltrán's, “The Evolution of Hollywood Latinidad: Latina/o Representation and Stardom in US Entertainment Media” (Chapter 9). Focusing primarily on Hollywood films and US television programming, and informed by the broader literature in Latino/a studies as well as her own extensive body of scholarship, Beltrán's analysis raises issues of Latino/a visibility, racialization, authenticity, Latinidad, hybridity, transnationalism, and self-representation. By focusing on the evolution of Latino/a stars decades ago ranging from Delores Del Rio and Carmen Miranda to more recently popular celebrities including Salma Hayek and Jennifer Lopez, Beltrán teases out the nuances and complexities of the representational politics guiding such images. She concludes with a discussion of the current marketability of Latinidad and the implications of such hypervisibility.

While the increasing hypervisibility of Latino/as in the media can be attributed, in part, to the growing purchasing power and size of the Latino/a audience, the increased purchasing power of the LGBTQ community (in the United States, anyway) has impacted the increase in queer-focused programs (Streitmatter, 2009). Beginning with a discussion of what they see as the “theoretical richness and relevance” of queer theory, Sofie Van Bauwel, Frederik Dhaenens, and Daniel Biltereyst (Chapter 10; “Queer Gazing and the Popular: A Study on the Representational Strategies of Queer Representations in Popular Television Fiction”) analyze “moments of queer identity” and queer representational strategies in three globally successful television series typically considered as queer and/or including queer characters: Queer as Folk (UK), The L Word (US), and Six Feet Under (US). Deconstructing the texts' signifying practices – specifically narrative and cinematographic elements – the authors document the queer signifiers present in each series. Throughout the essay, the authors argue for the importance of incorporating themes of queer representations in studies of media and popular culture.

Continuing with this section's focus on representation, Heather L. Hundley addresses “Mediated Portrayals of Masculinities” in Chapter 11. The operative word in the title is the plural, “masculinities,” as influential scholarship in the sociology of gender reminds us that there is not one “masculinity” but rather a range of “masculinities” and that scholars “have to examine the relations between them” (Connell, 1995, p. 76). In her chapter, Hundley reviews how studies have examined a variety of masculinities in the media including hegemonic, hypermasculine, and metrosexual. Written in two sections, Hundley's chapter begins by reviewing the literature on the evolution of media studies scholarship on US mediated representations of masculinities including the intersections between that topic and race, class, and sexuality. The second half of the chapter focuses on portrayals in each of a range of US media. Hundley argues that, despite the dramatic increase in studies of mediated masculinities in recent years, there are still notable gaps in the literature, in particular when it comes to the intersections of masculinities and other identities – race, class, sexuality, and so on.

While there are various types of masculinities, there are also various types of femininities. In Chapter 12, Sujata Moorti examines one type – “Shifting Contours of Indian Womanhood in Popular Hindi Cinema.” Through a detailed historical analysis from Indian colonial times (1896–1947) through the present, Moorti shows how, through the figure of “woman” in Indian cinema, larger social, cultural, and political issues have been worked out – for example, India's struggle for self-reliance in the postcolonial era and anxieties about globalization in recent years. Interestingly, while she argues that current-day Bollywood films offer a limited representation of Indian womanhood (restricted primarily to a heteronormative focus on the family), earlier eras, in particular the colonial era, offered more possibilities for female subjectivity.

The discussion of possibilities for female subjectivity is at the heart of Jocelyn Steinke's literature review, “Portrayals of Female Scientists in the Mass Media” (Chapter 13), as she examines the topic in relationship to broader cultural beliefs about the role of women in the workforce, specifically in the sciences. Focusing on the broader literature on the topic, as well as on her own scholarship specifically, Steinke documents the way in which US media (e.g., films, television, Internet) historically have underrepresented and stereotyped female scientists. She links concerns about such portrayals to the broader concerns about the lack of women in science, engineering, technology, and math occupations, including evidence that cultural representations of science may play a role in defining such fields as “masculine.” Steinke concludes that, despite recent improvements in portrayals, there is still a long way to go.

While Moorti focused on cinematic constructions of Indian womanhood in Chapter 12, specifically on how such constructions stood in for broader national/cultural issues, in Chapter 14 (“‘She's the Real Thing’: Filming the Nostalgic Past through Vietnamese Women”) Diem-My T. Bui analyzes representations of Vietnamese womanhood in three US-made films about Vietnam – Heaven and Earth (1993), The Quiet American (2002), and Three Seasons (1999). Bui focuses not only on the portrayals of the film's female characters but also on media coverage of the actresses playing those roles in order to ask questions about “who speaks?” Grounded in the literature on othering and Orientalism, Bui unpacks how the female body in these films is constructed as an aid in returning to an “authentic” Vietnam – a nostalgic and exotic past that existed before the war.

While Moorti and Bui focus specifically on how womanhood is constructed to stand in for broader social, cultural, political, and national issues, in her chapter on “Chinese Cinema at the Millennium: Defining ‘China’ and the Politics of Representation” (Chapter 15), Gina Marchetti analyzes dozens of post-millennial Chinese-language films in order to understand how such films represent the Chinese “nation” as well as China's evolving political economy. She argues that “China” is a contested concept in transnational cinema, and that in constructing China, filmmakers continuously return to the same themes – defining the nation, border crossing, the marketplace, political divisions and related controversies, as well as law and history.

The final chapter in Part 2, Nancy Signorielli's “Violent Content on US Television: A Historical Overview of the Research” (Chapter 16), takes us in a slightly different direction than the previous chapters. Grounded in cultivation theory and part of one of the most prolific media studies research projects, Cultural Indicators, Signorielli reviews the literature on the topic from a historical perspective as well as from the perspective of very recent studies including ongoing yearly content analysis of US prime-time programming and the National Television Violence Study of the mid-1990s. Examining both the amount and context of violent portrayals, Signorielli shows that the level of violent television content has not changed greatly in that it remains an “important and significant” element of prime-time and children's television content.

Part 3: Interaction and Performance

Part 3 highlights issues of interaction and performance, primarily but not exclusively as related to new media. In the first of two chapters about blogs (Chapter 17), Zizi Papacharissi and Sharon Meraz look at the big picture in terms of the evolution of blog content. In their chapter “Blogging Culture: Content and Representation in Blogs,” the authors examine blogging as a form of sociocultural expression. Acknowledging the breadth and diversity of the blogosphere, the authors examine the plurality of both blog content and functions, notably as issues of self-representation intersect with race, class, and gender. Informed by the theories of Chantal Mouffe, Papacharissi and Meraz conclude with a discussion of the agonistic nature of blogs – highlighting plurality and conflict – and argue that bloggers are agonists of both the personal and the political.

Papacharissi and Meraz reference the increase in female political bloggers as well as girl bloggers who, they argue, use a personal lens to highlight their political experiences. It is precisely this phenomenon that Jenny Gunnarsson Payne addresses in Chapter 18, “Blogging the Third Wave? Citizens' Media, Intimate Citizenship, and Everyday Life.” Situating her research within the growing body of scholarship on feminist media production, the author analyzes three specific Swedish feminist blog projects on such topics as bare female breasts, eating disorders, and motherhood/breastfeeding to show how they function as a form of feminist micro-narrative, or more specifically what sociologist Kenneth Plummer describes as “intimate citizenship.” The author argues that third-wave feminist bloggers such as those she studied are not so much dis-articulating feminism (in a postfeminist sense) as re-articulating feminism in an ongoing and continuous process.

The next three chapters in Part 3 focus on videogames. While much of the public attention and scholarship on videogames has centered specifically on violent content and/or the effects of such content, the three chapters in this section offer alternate ways of looking at games and gaming. In particular, all three chapters challenge traditional ways of studying game content. In her chapter “Videogame Content: Game, Text, or Something Else?” (Chapter 19), Mia Consalvo raises a range of methodological and theoretical questions related to the study of videogames – what she calls “the particularities of studying games.” Her primary goal is to answer the question of “how do games make meaning?” In so doing, she reviews the limitations of past approaches of studying videogame content and offers two case studies of her own to suggest more effective ways for scholars to study the topic. She concludes with a call for “situated” rather than global approaches to the future studies of videogames so that researchers can take into account the peculiarities of specific games.

Through his analysis of the role of the player in relationship to violent videogame content, Kenneth A. Lachlan in his chapter “Rethinking Violent Videogame Content: Conceptual Advances and Directions for Future Research” (Chapter 20) demonstrates the complexity of games, and argues that the tools, language, and methodologies employed in traditional content analysis research may not reveal the full complexity of game content. He argues that user attributes such as personality, past game play experience, how much the game replicates real-life environments, and a sense of “presence” for the player actually influence the content. Rather than traditional effects research, for example, which would look at how content influences audience, Lachlan argues that research on videogames, including violent videogames, must incorporate the interface between game player and game parameters to understand how the player influences content. In other words, content should be a dependent variable – an outcome – and not a cause.

While Lachlan examines how player characteristics shape videogame content, Tanya Krzywinska in Chapter 21 focuses on “Transmedial Aesthetics: Where Form and Content Meet – Film and Videogames.” Specifically, through a case study of Final Fantasy XII as well as references to other games and films, she examines convergences and divergences between film and videogames to show how form can influence content. By focusing on concepts such as the “aesthetics of convergence,” narrative as form and content, as well as affect, movement, and time, the author shows how film and game each borrow from the other, while viewers/players bring their knowledge of one to their experiences with the other. She concludes by reminding us that, while games and films still have formal differences, this is one more example of media convergence.

While the previous chapters have focused on one or another specific medium such as the Internet or videogames, in Chapter 22 James D. Robinson, Teresa L. Thompson, Jeanine Warisse Turner, Robert R. Agne, and Yan Tian undertake a review of the recent literature of how health-related topics have been presented in a variety of media including newer media such as medical tourism websites, Japanese manga, graphic novels, young adult novels, and YouTube videos. By focusing their chapter, “Recent Trends in Research on Health Portrayals in the Media: From TV Newspapers, and Magazines to Websites, YouTube, and Manga,” specifically on content analyses published over the past five years, the authors have documented three trends in health portrayals research: (1) the study of a wider variety of health topics; (2) more diversity in the theoretical grounding of such studies; and (3) a broadening focus of media outlets studied to include more international portrayals and more types of media channels. Certainly, this chapter could easily have fit into either of the two previous sections since it addresses informational/persuasive and entertainment media as well as interactive media, but a major point made by the authors is that audiences are looking more and more toward interactive media such as that provided by the Internet for their health information, and they remind scholars of the importance of studying such portrayals.

Continuing the focus on interactive media, Miranda J. Brady explores place-based media – specifically its use in the Canadian Museum of Civilization's (CMC) First Peoples Hall (FPH). In her chapter “Canadian (Re)Presentation: Media, First Peoples, and Liveness in the Museum” (Chapter 23), Brady interrogates the role of place-based new media in Indigenous identity construction. Brady not only examines the content of place-based media itself but also conducts an in-depth analysis of archival documents related to the construction of the FPH and news coverage of the process. Grounded in her analysis, she reminds us that colonial power can be found in the act of representing Indigenous culture in Eurocentric terms, in particular when the focus is on the museum visitors' experience of “liveness” and interactivity. While new place-based technologies offer opportunities to represent Indigenous people in new ways, Brady argues, they also “mask the contingent nature of representation.”

Concluding the volume is Susan Harewood's essay “Calypso and the Performance of Representational Politics” (Chapter 24), which addresses not how calypso music represents but, rather, how calypso is represented in the literature about it. Her essay is a theoretically grounded examination of the academic discourse – specifically historical accounts – about calypso, and how that discourse is linked to representational politics. Harewood argues that histories play a role in the construction of a “national imaginary,” yet such histories, while working to solidify the significance of calypso, have also functioned to reinscribe a narrow view of citizenship. So while calypso itself plays a role in the representational politics of the Caribbean, the academic discourse about calypso contributes to the ways in which calypso makes meaning. She calls for a rethinking of the colonial narrative of calypso's, origins and evolution.

Conclusion

Taken as a whole, the chapters in this volume evidence the dynamic and vibrant nature of media content and representation studies. Scholarship in this area has evolved to actively address the evolution of media technology, trends in convergence in media content, and changes in the role of the audience in relationship to that technology and content. Media content and representation scholars no longer limit their research questions to binary oppositions of positive/negative or biased/unbiased, but rather have achieved a high level of complexity and nuance in their analysis. Moreover, scholars have reached out to other fields in order to ground studies of content and representation in a range of rich theoretical concepts. These interdisciplinary links add relevance and depth to studies of media content and representation, and have kept the field from becoming stagnant.

For the future, media content and representation scholars need to continue to embrace and respect a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives. We need to remain open to evolving and refining our research questions, and to consider that perhaps we need to ask new questions as the technology and content evolve. While celebrating the unique and important contributions of media studies, we also need to be open to what scholarship in other fields offers us, not because it is better, but because it is complementary. Thus, we need to acknowledge the potential of interdisciplinarity. Overall, it is an exciting moment in the scholarship of media content and representation, and this volume provides a glimpse into the current and future trends of such scholarship.

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