[ecrea] IJoC Publishes Special Section on Online Entertainment

The International Journal of Communication Publishes Special Section on
Online Entertainment

Media globalization has been one of the most enduring topics in public
debate about the impact of media on society. Debate has been traditionally
centered on questions of U.S. “cultural imperialism” through widespread
dissemination and popularity of its film and television output.  But a
reassessment of this debate is imperative in the light of the current
explosion of the virtually frictionless global reach of YouTube and major
social media platforms such as Facebook, SnapChat, Twitch and Instagram, and
the innovative content they have spawned.
“Social media entertainment” is the term we use for the phenomenon of
rapidly professionalizing amateur content creators engaging in
entrepreneurial forms of creator labor to create innovate content and
aggregate global fan communities in an effort to incubate and monetize their
own media brands.
While the relatively frictionless global reach of such phenomena demands
attention, we stress the differences between such platforms and the system
of national broadcasting, film, and DVD release and licensing by windowing
and territory. The latter, established forms of media globalization enter
territories with IP-controlled content, whereas platforms such as YouTube
exhibit facilitation rather than content control and much greater content,
creator, service firm and language and cultural diversity than traditional
global media hegemons. The fundamental takeaway is that we are witnessing
the rise of a nascent media industry that represents non-traditional media
ownership, disruptive platforms, and unique content innovation that
challenges our prior conceptions of media globalization, including
nationalized regulatory regimes.  Guest edited by Stuart Cunningham and 
David Craig, this Special Section on
"Online Entertainment: A New Wave of Media Globalization?" pays particular
attention to China, which represents a singular and central exception to
notions of a new U.S. imperium, and India, which together with China
constitutes one of the two largest emerging non-Western online spaces in the
world and whose online cultural sphere is one of intense localization.
This collection of papers also advocates for updating cross-cultural
analysis in the light of social media, whether comparative reception studies
of sociability or new methodological approaches for conducting social media
content analysis.  We invite you to read this new Special Section that 
just published November
1, 2016 at http://ijoc.org. 
___________________________________________________

Online Entertainment:  A New Wave of Media Globalization? — Introduction
Stuart Cunningham, David Craig

Disconnecting, Connecting, and Reconnecting:  How Chinese Television Found
its Way out of the Box
Michael Keane

Professionalization of Amateur Production in Online Screen Entertainment in
China: Hopes, Frustrations, and Uncertainties
Elaine Jing Zhao

Mapping and Managing Chinese Social Media Entertainment: A Conversation with
Heng Cai, Chinese Media Entrepreneur
David Craig, Heng Cai, Junyi Lv

YouTube Nation: Precarity and Agency in India’s Online Video Scene
Sangeet Kumar

The Globalization of On-Screen Sociability:  Social Media and Tethered
Togetherness
Ralph Schroeder

Cross-Cultural Comparisons of User-Generated Content: An Analytical
Framework
Limor Shifman

_________________________________________________

Larry Gross
Editor
Arlene Luck
Managing Editor
___________________________________________________
International Journal of Communication (IJoC)
USC Annenberg Press
University of Southern California
http://ijoc.org/

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