1,930,494 research outputs found
Communicating the City Between Centre and Margins
No full textThis chapter reviews the situation of the conceptual and methodological approaches to the relationship between media and the city, stressing limitations chiefly related to single-focusedness vis-a-vis the complexity of the urban settings in a hypermediatised society
Towards a New Complexity: reasons for Media and the City
No full textThe introduction outlines limitations of disjointed approaches to the media/city nexus and the reasons for integrated views
Fortezze, frontiere e rovine: lo spazio della scuola nel cinema e nella televisione
No full textBy analyzing over 100 movies and tv shows, the paper explores how postwar audiovisual culture has represented the spaces of the school. The analysis returns a taxonomy with four main models: the frontier (the school as a place to be redeemed from chaos), the fortress (the school as a solid and impregnable repository of meaning) and the ruins (the school as an irredimable space), and the space of liberation (The school as a space to be destructured by goodwilled teachers and students)
Rural spaces, urban textures: Media, leisure, and identity in a Southern China industrial village
No full textThe processes of industrialization opened by Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978 has rendered urban space in some areas of China increasingly fluid and subject to fast and profound transformations. In this chapter we intend to focalize on the transformations undergone by a small village in southern China, a part of the Dongguan municipality known as Danning, and reflect on their implications for workers’ individual and collective identity. Specifically, we are here interested in transformations that are related to leisure-related practices of the space users (whose importance has been studied e.g. by Rojek, 1985, 1989), which we studied by means of ethnography and in-depth interviews.
Due to its proximity to an increasing number of important manufacturing complexes, Danning has seen since the 1980s a massive influx of migrant workforce from the inner provinces. The space of the village has been changing ever since to accommodate for the housing, feeding and leisure needs of these new area users. If the former two have settled into more or less established patterns, the latter, being related to sociotechnical processes located outside the village/firm/worker relationship, has been continuously driving spatial changes into the village space. In other words, if housing settled into the offering of either cheap apartments or dormitory space, and the feeding into opening (equally cheap) provincial restaurants or booths, media-related needs have required a continuously changing space, in terms of materiality, practices and representations.
Consumption, entertainment, and leisure for migrant workers have become big business, which in turn transforms the appearance of these areas. Especially after the acceleration and intensification of market-oriented reforms in the early 1990s, shopping malls, supermarkets, game zones, cinemas, Internet cafés, and other consumer facilities have increased substantially in newly industrialized spaces. Literature has already stressed the role of a specific representation of “city life as media-intensive” as an important pull factor for rural laborers from agricultural villages towards newly industrialized spaces (Law and Peng, 2008). Moreover, we found a growing symbolic and economic investment into non-work time by workers, as a time to search for their own interest and enjoy leisure and entertainment – more and more by consuming global products through media commodities.
The village space must accommodate these forces within its spatial morphology. In the chapter, we identify three phases in the sociospatial pattern producing “entertainment and communication space” in the village. The first (1990s – 2000) was dominated by village-centred entertainment, in which leisure spaces were shared and collective (TV-viewing in stores, bookstores, public dancing etc.). The second phase goes from the 2000s to 2008 and sees the rising of mobile phones, which allowed the workers individualized consumption and leisure spaces – thus weakening the role of leisure in reinforcing collective identities. Here the village becomes a content provider for mobile terminals in absence of internet access for migrants, by opening dedicated shops selling pirated music, video and books for mobile terminals. Here the purchase of content remains a shared activity, while consumption is individual. The third phase (from 2009 to the present days) sees the space of the village lose its centrality for leisure needs, as widespread cheap 3G connections allow fully individualized (if hyper-connected) leisure and consumption spaces.
In conclusion we discuss how this trajectory appears to weaken fragment the potential of leisure spaces and times for the elaboration of workers’ collective identities, with potential negative consequences for their bargaining power and therefore, ultimately, for their living and working conditions
Media and The Social Production of Urban Space: Towards an Integrated Approach to the Controversial Nature of Urban Space.
No full textThe paper puts forward an approach to the study of the role of the convergent media system in the social production of urban space. By focusing on controversies around the definition of “urban space”, processes of strategic use of media become more visible. Therefore a case of urban conflict was selected; specifically, the paper examines the 2007 incident known as “the Milan Chinese riots” which saw migrants clash with the police as ultimately motivated by a conflict around definition of “space”. Through ethnography, interviews and content analysis, the paper reconstructs the practices and representations enacted by all involved social actors in the effort of producing competing representations of the self and of urban space
Free and open-source software in China:towards a Sinicisation of FOSS local spaces
No full textChinese Free and Open-Source Software has become a structural component of the Chinese Internet in recent years. Despite FOSS’s cultural importance as a value-laden IT practice, the topic has received little attention from the social sciences. This article contributes to filling this gap by using as a lens a local association of FOSS enthusiasts located in one major Chinese city, c. 10 years after the 1st observation (Tarantino 2011), focussing on FOSS practitioners’ imaginaries and
motivations
Raccordare mondi possibili: Transmedialità, videogioco e problemi di canone
No full textThe paper further expands the canon analysis paradigm developed in Tarantino and Tosoni 2010, dealing with transmedia storytelling universes centered upon videoludic texts. The tripartite analysis we proposed in 2010 is applied and augmented with an in-depth analysis of critical cases which push our categories to the limit (the Pokèmon, Resident Evil, Zelda, Mario and Mass Effect universes). The proceedings show that our categories of static, partial and dynamic canon, and our centre-periphery spatialization principle, appear to work also on these cases
Di fronte al declino: autorappresentazioni degli insegnantidi Milano e Trento
No full textThis chapter explores motivations and career patterns of a sample of elementary, middle and high school teachers in Milan and Trento. It finds a recurring and widely shared "decline" narration as the foremost interpretative frame of contemporary Italian school. However, Trento teachers appear to exempt themselves and their context from the general narration
Tarantino the Cartoonist
No full textIn cinema it is not uncommon to see the interrelation of animation and live action but, despite this, the ascription of characteristics of one medium onto the other has been largely one-dimensional: live action upon animation. The films of Quentin Tarantino, however, illustrate an attribution of a cartoon-like aesthetic in live-action sequences, which the author subsequently terms `cartoonism'. `Cartoonism' and its development have been highlighted in Tarantino's work, showing his continual desire to realize this aesthetic in his own work whilst, ironically, only fully achieving this aesthetic in another's film. The conclusions are illuminating with respect to Tarantino's filmic politics and provide a potential mode of inquiry within film theory
CONTEMPORANEA & ELETTRONICA - Matteo Segafreddo, Giorgio Binda
No full textCD audio, con musica contemporanea di Matteo Segafreddo ed elettronica di Giorgio Binda
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