[Commlist] The Velvet Light Trap #93 CFP: "Reconsidering Mass Media"

VLT #93: Reconsidering Mass Media


Summer 2022 saw Top Gun: Maverickgross $1 billion globally in its first 
month of release; in Fall 2021, Squid Game became Netflix’s most popular 
series, with 1.65 billion hours streamed in its first four weeks of 
release; on May 6, 2022, Bad Bunny became the Spotify artist with the 
most one-day streams globally, with 183 million streams; and TikTok has 
received over 3.5 billion downloads since 2018. Additionally, streaming 
platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime have massive reach over 
international audiences, despite their varied location-specific 
libraries. In terms of reaching a large audience or consumer base, these 
instances fit historical definitions of mass media. However, studying 
these phenomena require conjunctural and complex analyses of mass media 
that highlight both historical continuities and contemporary 
transformations of the concept through industrial, textual, and audience 
lenses.


Scholars, commentators, journalists, and audiences have used the concept 
of mass media to refer to media industries and companies with vast 
reach, popular genre formulas, and widely-consumed media artifacts 
ranging from consumer electronics to programming and content. More 
recently, assumptions of the homogeneity and uniformity of “the mass” 
have been challenged by industrial trends toward audience fragmentation 
and content diversification. Trends beginning with the widespread 
introduction of cable television in the United States in the 1970s 
through the present ever-expanding online media landscape—including 
app-based, algorithm-driven personalization of content—have resulted in 
the segmentation of audiences, media industries, and content across 
gendered, racial, ethnic, sexual, generational, and cultural lines. 
However, within segmented audiences, networks of users, and local 
spaces, there are instances of broadly disseminated and collectively 
shared mediated experiences. For example, we have seen mass media 
phenomena occur within specific digital publics, social cohorts, other 
groups, and spaces such as Black Twitter and Gay Twitter, BookTok, or 
local news telecasts. Beyond the recognition of internal heterogeneity 
of the mass and the fragmentation of audiences, global media production, 
distribution, and consumption challenge and reimagine the national 
boundaries as a privileged site of distinction. Even as current 
scholarly and industrial discourses challenge the assumed homogeneity 
and unity of mass media, many of these logics and tactics continue to 
shape the media landscape.


The Velvet Light Trap #93 seeks a variety of topics and approaches to 
reconsider mass media in both contemporary and historical contexts. We 
welcome submissions that work to revisit, redefine, renegotiate, 
complicate, or challenge previously-held notions of mass media through a 
multitude of approaches, including (but not limited to) audience 
studies, cultural geography, discourse analysis, distribution studies, 
global media studies, localism, media industries studies, sports media 
studies, taste cultures, and textual analysis. We welcome contemporary 
and historical explorations of any of the following themes:

  *

    Defining and understanding mass media and the notion of “the mass”

  *

    Examining under- or unstated assumptions of gender, race, sexuality,
    and/or representation within mass media, both in terms of texts and
    audiences

  *

    Mass media and geo-cultural markets, distribution, and/or consumption

  *

    Distinctions or intersections between mass media and popular media

  *

    Reconsidering notions of “mass” in a global, multi-pronged media
    landscape

  *

    Mass media as a framework to describe texts that are made for mass
    consumption

  *

    Considering how methods of remediation, reevaluation, or
    revisitation may construct mass media

  *

    Mass media and audience maximization

  *

    Locating and negotiating mass media within niches (and vice versa)

  *

    Reconsidering taste cultures as they have been assigned to mass media

  *

    Complicating notions of nationality within mass media

  *

    Highlighting instances of “unintended” mass media (e.g. sleeper
    successes)

  *

    Interrogating ideas of “going viral” and “viral media”

  *

    Imaginations and constructions of the audiences privileged as “mass”

  *

    Mass mediation as it pertains to data mining, surveillance
    capitalism, and machine learning


Open Call

The Velvet Light Trapis pleased to announce that, in addition to 
accepting submissions that relate to the above theme, we will accept 
general submissions broadly related to the journal’s focus on critical, 
theoretical, and historical approaches to film and media studies. We aim 
to create a new space for scholarship that enhances the journal’s 
overall mission and work that continues the research conversations to 
which our themed issues have contributed. We hope that scholars inspired 
by the work published in our themed issues, past and present, will 
especially consider submitting their work. Even as our themes will 
continue to change each issue, we want to sustain ongoing investment in 
and investigation of the questions each issue of The Velvet Light Trapposes.


Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be between 6,000 and 7,500 words, formatted in 
Chicago Style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with 
a separate one-page abstract, both saved as Microsoft Word files. Remove 
any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for 
anonymous review. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by 
translations. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to 
(vltcfp /at/ gmail.com) by January 31, 2023.


/The Velvet Light Trap /does not charge Article Processing Charges; it 
does not ask for any payments from the authors.


About the Journal

The Velvet Light Trap is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, 
television, and new media. The journal draws on a variety of theoretical 
and historiographical approaches from the humanities and social sciences 
and welcomes any effort that will help foster the ongoing processes of 
evaluation and negotiation in media history and criticism. While TVLT 
maintains its traditional commitment to the study of American film, it 
also expands its scope to television and other media, to adjacent 
institutions, and to other nations' media. The journal encourages both 
approaches and objects of study that have been neglected or excluded in 
past scholarship.


Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the 
University of Texas at Austin coordinate issues in alternation, and each 
issue is devoted to a particular theme. The Velvet Light Trap’s 
Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Manuel 
Avilés-Santiago, Lauren S. Berliner, Andre Brock, Dolores Inés Casillas, 
Aymar Jean Christian, Norma Coates, Brian Fauteux, Allyson Nadia Field, 
Racquel Gates, Aniko Imre, Deborah Jaramillo, Derek Kompare, Lori 
Morimoto, Ruben Ramírez-Sànchez, Debra Ramsey, Bob Rehak, Samantha 
Noelle Sheppard, and Alyx Vesey. TVLT's graduate student editors are 
assisted by their local faculty advisors: Mary Beltrán, Ben Brewster, 
Jonathan Gray, Michele Hilmes (emeritus), Lea Jacobs, Derek Johnson, 
Shanti Kumar, Charles Ramírez Berg, Thomas Schatz (emeritus), and Janet 
Staiger (emeritus).


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