This study examines how the secluded Clifftop Village rapidly transitioned from a pre-digital society into a mediatized world via short-video platforms. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, we find that mediatization in this media-deprived rural community was triggered by an incidental news report and unfolded along leapfrogging trajectories driven by the marginalized group’s short-video practices. This process stemmed from complex negotiations between structural forces—China’s centralized governance, expanding digital infrastructure, and platform capital—and the agency of marginalized subjects. It systematically reconfigured villagers’ spatio-temporal order, social relationships, cultural beliefs, and lifestyles, ultimately precipitating the complete relocation of the entire community. Following the dissolution of the physical community, mediatization extended into the affective realm, as villagers began to rely on short-video platforms to anchor their sense of place and collective identity. Ultimately, the case of Clifftop Village demonstrates that rural mediatization cannot be reduced to either technological empowerment or the reproduction of digital inequality, offering a localized lens on the existential condition of marginalized groups under radical modernization.
With the growth of digital streaming platforms, the Indian media economy is witnessing widespread changes that challenge the business models of traditional media sectors. The article attempts to trace the overall movement of investment capital between the television sector and other sectors of the economy as a consequence of the digital transition. The study uses a combination of network analysis and qualitative analysis to detail a tectonic shift in the frequency and directionality of capital movement across two concomitant periods of remediation: digitalisation and platformisation. In the first period, television was the centre of capital inflow from other sectors, whereas in the subsequent period there was a repositioning of television as it became a centre of capital resources shifting to other sectors. This article argues that the logic driving these repositioning of capital derives from the perceived limits to growth in established business models and the redirection of advertising spend, a dilemma which arises from the underlying dynamics of revenue streams, competition for resources and a diversified national market.
This essay examines how the principle of open justice is reconfigured under conditions of platform-mediated visibility. While openness has long been understood as a democratic safeguard, socio-legal and media scholarship shows that visibility is never neutral but staged, mediated, and institutionally structured. Positioned as a conceptual intervention into debates about media, visibility, and public authority, the essay argues that contemporary open justice operates within a political economy of visibility, in which judicial legitimacy is increasingly shaped by the infrastructures that organise how courtroom images circulate, attract attention, and generate value. Rather than focussing on courtroom access and transparency, the essay examines the conditions under which judicial visibility is produced, circulated, and monetised. Drawing on the 2022 Depp–Heard defamation trial in Fairfax County, Virginia, as an analytically revealing US case, it shows how such trials unfold within platform environments structured by algorithmic ranking, metricisation, and monetisation, where visibility functions as a regulated resource rather than a simple guarantee of transparency. The essay develops a conceptual lens for understanding how judicial authority is co-produced by courts, media institutions, platforms, and networked publics. It concludes that justice today is increasingly governed through the organised conditions of its appearance.
In this article, we discuss the contemporary shifting landscape in global audiovisual governance from two main perspectives. The first begins with the new agenda of the Trump’s administration on global trade in audiovisual goods and services, noting how it signals a shift towards neo-mercantilist unilateralism, which involves a dual push for US economic nationalism and trade liberalisation abroad. The second puts this recent development in the historical context of long-lasting debates over trade liberalisation and culture. Here we trace back to the early days of trade agreements within the World Trade Organisation and their later clashes with principles of cultural exception that paved the wave for international counter agreements, notably the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the diversity of cultural expressions. We then moved forward to the rise of streaming platforms and the revision of the European Audiovisual Media Services Directive as well as other emerging platform regulatory frameworks across nations. In this context, we highlight how the shift associated with Trump’s “America First” agenda is historically grounded in the United States’ long-standing dominance in framing culture through the lens of trade, while at the same time representing a radical intensification of commercialism in audiovisual exchanges.
To mark the publication of the second edition of Race, Culture and Media , the author, Anamik Saha, is interviewed by Herman Gray, one of the leading figures in race and media scholarship. In this wide-ranging conversation, the two draw out key themes from the book, including the value of an interdisciplinary approach that brings together cultural studies, political economy, postcolonial studies and media studies, and the importance of historical analysis for tracing both transformations and continuities in the ways media make race. Saha and Gray also reflect on what a focus on race-making might reveal about the current conjuncture, particularly the rise of populist right-wing nationalism, and whether such an approach might help illuminate paths beyond the present crisis.
The intensifying global tariff tensions are reshaping the operations of cross-border e-commerce platforms. This study examines Shein, a Chinese-origin e-commerce platform with global reach, to explore nationhood and transnational operations amid emerging tensions through a communication lens. Conducting Shein as a case study, this paper draws on the nation’s two bodies to conceptualize the third body as a distinct form of nationhood in the platform age. Findings reveal that Shein enacted a deterritorialized yet embedded nationhood, performing through logistical sovereignty, digital infrastructure, and transnational governance. These dimensions indicate that the third body provides insight into how state power can remain invisible yet operate through platforms. This paper concludes with implications for future research on the infrastructural turn of platforms in today’s global ambivalent moment.
In Western regions, tensions surrounding mediated nation-building progressively converge with growing commercialization of cultural institutions. The Story of Flanders (2023), a docudrama that narrates the genesis of Belgium’s northernmost region, proves exemplary of how reimaging national identity through public service media heightens fears for instrumentalization. This study investigates how heritage practitioners “make do” with the series and broader restrictions defined by austerity and political fragmentation. Despite ample research on historical television, identity and production, works commonly engage with historians as key expert contributors. Yet, important alternative roles have been neglected as central to the construction of televisual history. Results show austerity-drive imperatives guide practitioners to leverage discreet tactics to navigate this sensitive climate. Three areas of tension manifest, as the burden of history is weighted down by an added ideological layer: anticipating political fragmentation and fostering trust, negotiating authority and authorship, and facilitating dialogue and navigating austerity.
This study investigates how mobile-first journalism is reconfiguring participatory news production and gatekeeping in informal economies, with a focus on urban South Africa. Addressing the problem of whose voices gain visibility and legitimacy in the digital age, the research integrates digital ethnography and semi-structured interviews with journalists, citizen reporters, and platform users in Johannesburg and Durban. In this study, voice refers to who can speak, contribute, and be recognised as a legitimate news participant, while visibility refers to whose contributions become searchable, shareable, and publicly legible within mobile-first news flows. The study is grounded in a theoretical framework combining digital public sphere theory, networked gatekeeping, and participatory culture, and introduces the concept of “mobile-mediated gatekeeping” to capture novel forms of editorial power and community agency. Results show that mobile-first platforms foster inclusive practices and amplify vernacular knowledge but also produce new exclusions through algorithmic bias and shifting infrastructural constraints. The findings contribute original theoretical insights by advancing “mobile-mediated gatekeeping” as a distinct analytic tool, showing how practice-based innovation within informal economies challenges conventional models of media power. Implications include recommendations for platform design, media policy, and scholarly approaches to digital voice and participation in the global South.
This article examines how media discourse constructs epistemic legitimacy and marginality in relation to Z & aacute;rubek, stigmatised neighbourhood in Ostrava, Czech Republic. Drawing on a comparative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 14 regional and national media texts (2008-2025) alongside narrative interviews with long-term residents, the study interrogates how credibility, belonging, and voice are unevenly distributed through place-based representations. The analysis identifies five recurring strategies in media coverage: pejorative naming, metaphorical spatialisation, visual erasure, technocratic abstraction, and temporal shifts from degradation to regeneration. Each of these discursive practices enacts what I term spatialised epistemic injustice: the systematic devaluation of knowledge through the symbolic disqualification of place. Narrative counter-discourses reveal forms of irony, kinship naming, and care that I conceptualise as epistemic place-attachment: practices of belonging that sustain dignity and credibility under conditions of symbolic violence. By integrating feminist epistemology with place-attachment theory, the article develops a new framework for analysing how media logics reproduce urban marginality and how residents reassert epistemic dignity through everyday practices.
This article examines Voice of Palong (VoP), a participatory audio-visual media initiative co-produced by Rohingya refugees and the Bangladeshi host community in Cox’s Bazar camps. Based on focus groups and field observations from 2023 to 2025, the study analyzes how VoP operates not simply as a communication project but as a relational media infrastructure through which counterpublic formations are assembled under conditions of displacement, surveillance, and legal precarity. Participation is calibrated and situational, shaped by mobility restrictions, gendered risk, limited access to technological resources, and asymmetries between host and refugee participants. VoP functioned as a situated counterpublic in which members calibrate storytelling, visibility, and circulation in relation to infrastructural and regulatory constraints. Findings also show that relational processes of co-production and circulation enabled incremental social repair across refugee-host divides. By situating participatory refugee media within border and media infrastructures, this article argues that counterpublic formation in protracted displacement is materially contingent, emerging through sustained negotiation with uneven conditions of access and control.
This paper critically reviews participatory communication in the communication for social change (CFSC) tradition in the Global South, following its development from radical origins—grounded in Freirean pedagogy and grassroots action—to its co-optation within neoliberal development frameworks. Through a comparative analysis of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the paper questions the enduring gap between rhetoric and practice while observing how participatory action is usually caught between donor agendas, state regulation, and structural social hierarchies. Conceptually, the paper thematizes tensions around power, voice, and epistemic justice, contending that real participation necessitates more than technical participation; it needs the redistribution of communicative agency and a critical attention to the politics of voice, listening, and representation. In conclusion, the article urges a rethinking of participatory communication as a locally specific, contested practice grounded in local epistemologies and collective struggle that can promote social transformation in the face of persistent structural inequalities. The paper also contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink communication theory from Global South perspectives within contemporary media and communication scholarship.
This paper examines the fashion media discourse on the rise of the “Ozempic Era” in the American editions of Vogue and Elle magazines published in print and online since the announcement by the FDA clearing a GLP-1 agonist to be prescribed as a weight loss aid. Using critical discourse analysis, I explore the coverage of Ozempic and other brand name drugs in the fashion press. I situate the discourse on GLP-1’s ability to reshape the body to fit a long-held esthetic ideal at the intersection of lifestyle/fashion and health/wellness journalism and the intertextual context inherent to each. The voices and perspectives of fat women on this medical development and its relevance to both the fashion industry and their own lived experience are prioritized in the analysis.
Although Malay Muslim women’s increasing role in the peace process in Thailand’s southern border provinces has become a subject of scholarly interest, their use of social media in activism remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper examines how Malay Muslim women activists employ social media to strengthen their human rights advocacy, based on in-depth interviews with 10 women activists. The findings reveal that, given the highly securitized environment and the shortcomings of Thai mainstream media, social media provides an alternative civic space where Muslim women activists form a political subject, namely “pious online rights claimants.” This paper argues that this emerging social media practice contributes to the enactment of “postcolonial digital citizenship” which allows these women to contest the constructed category of Malay Muslims and Muslim women. Such intersectional contestations not only legitimize their political participation in the peace process, but also strategically manage the multifaceted boundaries of belonging as Malay Muslim women in the male-dominant sphere of the peace process and the enduring colonial notion of “Thainess.”
Internet-connected smart speakers have expanded the reach of radio by enabling easy access to broadcasts and podcasts from around the world. However, access to radio on smart speakers depends on the policies of voice assistant platforms including Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri; these platforms ultimately determine which audio services are available to users and which are excluded. Our paper presents findings from an empirical study of smart speakers in Australia. Using a device testing method, we compared the availability and discoverability of 373 radio stations across the major smart speaker brands. Overall, we find that a third of Australian radio stations are not available on smart speakers, with particularly poor availability on Apple devices. We argue that this reflects a larger problem for radio stations, which risk becoming disintermediated from the streaming media ecosystem in favour of on-demand services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. Our analysis also considers the role of radio aggregators (including TuneIn, RadioApp, and iHeart) in this opaque market.
Amid the crisis of masculinity generated by a structural marriage squeeze, this study explores how rural men in China negotiate social dignity and gender identity through mediated performance on Douyin. Drawing on digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis, 122 short videos and 585 high-engagement comments related to rural marriage were iteratively coded to examine how mediated performance, affective labour, and audience co-creation shape emerging forms of digital masculinity. The study introduces two interrelated analytical concepts: virtual migration , which captures men’s symbolic mobility through platformised self-representation, and consumption of masculinity , which reveals the affective and symbolic exchanges between male creators and their audiences. Findings show that Douyin provides both opportunities and constraints for rural men to reclaim visibility and value in a changing social hierarchy. Digital media thus reconfigure the affective politics of masculinity, oscillating between empowerment and re-patriarchalisation. The paper extends gender performativity theory within digital contexts and offers a new lens to understand how emotional economies and mediated visibility reproduce social inequality in contemporary China.
Analyses of AI power geometries have so far predominantly focused on the perspectives of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech and its “loud futuring” of AI. However, for comprehending Silicon Valley’s imaginaries surrounding AI, an analysis of the “quiet futuring” of AI-related groups and communities in the San Francisco Bay Area is equally essential because they are an integral part of its imaginative landscape of AI. Based on an ethnographic study conducted between December 2024 and February 2026, this article reveals how Silicon Valley’s imaginative landscape of AI is anchored in appropriated places, constructed within specific social figurations, and characterized by distinct discursive thickenings. Although this landscape may at first appear fragmented or even contradictory, taken together, it forms a coherent “quiet futuring” of AI. The associated visions extend beyond the technology itself, focusing instead on the potential futures it presents. Three themes dominate these visions: the possible futures of AGI, the possible futures of job loss, and the possible futures of AI geopolitics. With such an analysis, the article contributes to the discussion in “Media, Culture & Society” about the power geometries of AI by showing how Silicon Valley’s agency also refers to the local anchoring of AI’s imaginative landscape.
Digital platforms are often portrayed as increasingly dependent on automation to optimise user engagement and streamline governance, a logic commonly captured by the notion of the ‘human-in-the-loop’. Emerging evidence from transnational platforms, however, points to a more hybrid operational model in which algorithmic systems are actively steered through context-sensitive human intervention. This article examines Bigo Live, a Chinese-owned livestreaming platform, as it expands into Oceania, specifically Australia, New Zealand (ANZ), and Papua New Guinea. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, including interviews and participant observation conducted in Guangzhou and Sydney, the study demonstrates that Bigo’s internationalisation relies heavily on human-led adaptation to negotiate intercultural sensitivities, localise marketing strategies, and comply with highly varied content regulations. Unexpected developments, such as the platform’s unanticipated popularity in Papua New Guinea, reveal the limitations of automation and the continuing centrality of human labour in recalibrating platform operations. The article introduces the concept of ‘human-directing-the-loop’ to describe a mode of platform governance in which human labour does not simply validate algorithmic outputs, but actively shapes how automation is deployed across culturally, legally, and infrastructurally uneven transnational environments.
Using a critical political economy of media and sport framework, this study explores Liberty Media’s Formula 1 media strategy, specifically 2025’s F1: The Movie, as a case study. To address our research questions—in what ways does F1: The Movie serve as both a cultural text and commercial tool, and what are the broader implications of Formula 1’s media model for sport authenticity and fandom in the digital age—we use textual analysis to examine trade and popular press articles regarding the film, including its commercial success, production elements, and promotion strategies. We find that the film’s narrative sacrifices crucial sporting authenticity by relying on fictionalized rule breaking and impossible scenarios to fulfill the blockbuster mandate of the spectacle to attract audiences to not only the film but also to Formula 1 and to promote Apple platforms, including its streaming service that acquired Formula 1 broadcasting rights in the U.S.
Ni Una Menos is one of the most powerful transnational feminist collectives of Latin America, drawing from legacies of feminist organizing in Argentina as well as the media acumen of its founding members. This digital ethnography leverages the online discourses of Ni Una Menos and interviews with activists to examine the early years of the collective. The study helps to understand how NUM embraced transversal politics to construct its objectives and collective identity through online discourses. The ethnography also provides insights into the relevance of media and mediated activism as structuring forces in social movements, highlighting that no study about political activism is ever complete without considering media power.
The enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law on 30 June 2020 provides a case for examining how state power seeks to reconfigure journalistic norms and media legitimacy. Following the NSL, multiple pro-democracy critical news outlets, including Apple Daily and Stand News , ceased operations or were restructured, and senior staff members were prosecuted under national security-related charges. Soon after, former staff launched new, small-scale news outlets. Drawing on the concepts of legitimacy and delegitimisation, this article examines how legal and discursive power is deployed to redefine the boundary between mainstream and alternative journalism, relegating previously recognised pro-democracy critical journalistic norms to the margins. The analysis demonstrates how news media legitimacy is actively constructed through state intervention, and how “alternative media” emerges as an outcome of delegitimisation rather than oppositional intent. By conceptualising media closure and marginalisation as processes of legitimacy reordering, the article contributes to theoretical debates on alternative media and journalistic norms.
