Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-88). / The music industry, along with the world of media as a whole, is in a state of transition. What is being sold is not so clear anymore, nor is it obvious what parts of the traditional business will survive. Audiences play a crucial role in these shifts; they've become empowered and increased their participation within media industries. Working towards the premise that audiences can add value to media businesses beyond the act of consumption, this thesis argues that for media industries to benefit from their contributions it is first necessary to locate these audiences as active participants and producers of value. This thesis studies the dynamics of participatory audiences through the case of Brazil's Tecnobrega scene (literally 'cheesy techno'), expanding on a 10-day ethnographic field trip to the capital of Tecnobrega, Belem. This music industry has circumvented mainstream conventions by forgoing copyright and collaborating with 'pirates'. Tecnobrega's audiences not only assist in the circulation of content, but through their socializing and fan production, they create and trade symbolic capital that directly affects the popularity, and consequently the perception of value, of various parts of the industry. The competencies acquired through these types of participation have the potential to overflow into other domains; they can help shift the conceptualization of the public sphere and can, likewise, become paths for the exploration of cultural citizenship and agency within globalization processes. / by Ana Elena Domb Krauskopf. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-107). / This thesis explores the intersection of the television image with the presentation of self-identity. I examine two TV series in the spy genre -- Alias (2001 - 2006) and The Prisoner (1967 - 1968) -- discussing how each employs strategies of visual representation to present its protagonist as decentered or unfixed; in so doing, these programs complicate and problematize within their narratives the terms by which "subject" and "agency" have been traditionally understood and represented to popular TV audiences. This problematizing in turn opens up possibilities for detecting new modes of subject formation. This paper argues that television, communication tool and historical and cultural artifact, must be regarded equally as a visual medium. In fact, the TV image brings the enacted identity theorized by Judith Butler into direct contact with Henri Bergson's formulations of memory and image, creating characters and spaces within TV stories that vividly illustrate the limitations to and potentials for creativity within the domains of action and identity. In addition to Butler and Bergson, this paper turns additionally to Gilles Deleuze for an understanding of cinematic image and time, and to the concept of masquerade developed within feminist theory. In The Prisoner, a modern hero must make sense of a landscape of discontinuities and repetitions that challenge his ability to act, react, move, and escape. In Alias, a postmodern heroine must master the art of changing selves in order to move across spaces that, like her own identity, are conditional and are never what they initially appear. / (cont.) In both series, the television image, freed from an obligation to represent only one thing while ruling out others and made multiple by the TV episode format, assumes a resonance over its duration that creates the conditions for the depiction of fluid and changeable spaces and characters. In both cases, the TV image repeated enables a paradigm shift where the depiction of a decentered protagonist, once exceptional, now becomes a normative subject on television. KEYWORDS: Alias -- Bergson -- Butler -- decentered subject -- Deleuze -- feminism identity -- image -- Jennifer Garner -- Patrick McGoohan -- The Prisoner -- spy shows -- television -- visual theory / by Lisa Marie Bidlingmeyer. / S.M.

Filmography: leaves 85-86. / Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-95). / Film dances, or filmed dance sequences accompanying film songs, are an important part of popular Indian cinema. Over the years, Hindi film dance has evolved from a cinematically simplistic, filmed documentation of performance traditions, to a recognized and increasingly respected dance category emulated in staged performances in India and abroad. Despite their significance, dances in Indian popular films have not been systematically analyzed, and their movement, history, cultural influence and migration remain largely unexplored. The ubiquitous presence and under-theorization of film dances raises many questions about why these dances emerged as key ingredients of film, how their production, dance and cinematic content has evolved over time and, finally, how these dances are received and reinterpreted by audiences outside India. The objective of my investigation here is to set the foundation for an analytical framework for understanding dances in popular Hindi films. Using the relationship between dance sequences in films and their re-staging as Bollywood dances at South Asian cultural shows as a point of departure, I explore the analytical challenges of exploring dances in Hindi films as a first step towards a larger study of the cyclical migration of these dances to be conducted at a later date. My rather formalist approach to Hindi film dances provides a foundation for investigating these dances in way that will allow me to expand on this research in the future. Most importantly, however, I believe my approach to Hindi film dances enables me to explore "Bollywood dance" as a site of reception of Hindi film dances as they move from films to stage. / by Sangita Shresthova. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / "June 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-125). / In an age of globalization, texts increasingly migrate not only out of their native medium, but their native countries as well. Within the East Asian region, a booming television program trade circulates television texts, both as programs and as formats for re-making within the native culture industry. In this paper, I examine the program Hana Yori Dango, a Japanese manga turned television program that has been produced in Taiwan, Japan, and recently Korea. In particular, the Korean adaptation called Boys over Flowers, which simultaneous caters to a national and export market, exists in cultural and historical tension with the originating authority of the Japanese version. Texts then, in this process of industrial adaptation and cultural indigenization, may be understood as contact zones where asymmetries of historical power battle. Examining the mismatch of Korean form and Japanese narrative in this television melodrama, the narrative traversal of modern spaces, and the reparative capacity of nostalgia in fiction, I expose a contested process of adaptation that defies the easy descriptor of "hybridity." Reading the text historically and comparatively, I locate not only the cultural specificities and anxieties that mark this program as Korean, but also the phantom of a common, regional imaginary of the Asian modern. / by Lan Xuan Le. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-159). / (cont.) This thesis examines the evidence of community among listeners to three radio programs, who gather online to discuss radio programming in blogs, message boards and discussion forums provided by those programs. The three programs of focus are Air America Radio's The Majority Report, ABC Radio Networks' Sean Hannity Show, and National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation. The shows are analyzed in terms of how they perform by a new standard of interactive radio, whose benchmark has been established by The Majority Report. First identified in this thesis, the concept of high-interactivity radio brings together both vertical (between audience and broadcaster) and horizontal (intra-audience) interactivities. The relative success of high-interactivity radio is judged by a comparative analysis of the evidence of community in radio-online discussion areas, and the use of these online spaces by show producers as a vehicle for listener feedback, interaction, and content generation. The observations made in these three radio-online discussion areas can be practically applied to the work of broadcasters. Toward this end, the thesis closes with a brief ethnographic description of Open Source, a new public radio program currently attempting to develop its own version of high-interactivity radio. / by Joellen Easton. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 368-401). / Gay Bombay is an online-offline community (comprising a website, a newsgroup and physical events in Bombay city), that was formed as a result of the intersection of certain historical conjectures with the disjunctures caused via the flows of the radically shifting ethnoscape, financescape, politiscape, mediascape, technoscape and ideoscape of urban India in the 1990. Within this thesis, using a combination of multi-sited ethnography, textual analysis, historical documentation analysis and memoir writing, I attempt to provide various macro and micro perspectives on what it means to be a gay man located in Gay Bombay at a particular point of time. Specifically, I explore what being gay means to the members of Gay Bombay and how they negotiate locality and globalization, their sense of identity as well as a feeling of community within its online/offline world. On a broader level, I critically examine the formulation and reconfiguration of contemporary Indian gayness in the light of its emergent cultural, media and political alliances. I realize that Gay Bombay is a community that is imagined and fluid; identity here is both fixed and negotiated, and to be gay in Gay Bombay signifies being 'glocal' - it is not just gayness but Indianized gayness. I further realize that within the various struggles in and around Gay Bombay, what is being negotiated is the very stability of the idea of Indianness. I conclude with a modus vivendi - my draft manifesto for the larger queer movement that I believe Gay Bombay is an integral part of, and a sincere hope that as the struggle for queer rights enters its exciting new phase, groups like Gay Bombay might be able to cooperate with other queer groups in the country, and march on the path to progress, together. / by Parmesh Shahani. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-154). / Hip-hop is a competitive form of popular culture characterized by an on-going process of aesthetic renewal and reproduction that is expressed through carefully selected media and communications technologies. Hip-hop is also a segment of the pop music industry that manufactures a wide range of commercial products featuring stereotypical images of young black people. These stereotypes disproportionately mark young black men and rarely reflect the technical sophistication and cultural literacy mobilized in hip-hop expression. This thesis begins with a reading of hip-hop culture through its use of media technologies, moves on to a historical examination of the hip-hop mixtape economy, and concludes with an analysis of the "Crank Dat" online dance craze. Foregrounding expressive deployment of media and communications technologies in hip-hop challenges damaging stereotypes with compelling narratives of young black men driven by a spirit of competition, creativity, and technical innovation. / by Kevin Edward Driscoll. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-146). / This thesis is an attempt to bring fresh insights to current understandings of cinematic space and the relationship between film, architecture, and the city. That attempt is situated in relation to recent work by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Saskia Sassen, and others on the importance of the city in the current global framework, along with the growing body of literature on film, architecture, and urban space. Michel De Certeau's threefold critique of the city, set forth in The practices of Everyday Life, structures a comparative analysis of six primary films, aired as follows, with one air for each of three chapters-Jacques Tati's lay Time and Edward Yang's Yi Yi, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Wang Xiaoshuai's Beijing Bicycle, and Franqois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay!. Along with De Certeau's notions of satial ractice, walking rhetorics, and the pedestrian speech act, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze-including work from the Cinema texts and A Thousand plateaus-is developed in relation to existent film theory on movement, time, and space. / (cont.) The analysis operates as a kind of mediation between an active set of spatial theories-a mediation which uses traditional techniques of film analysis and critical theory to instigate a negotiation around the topic of (cinematic) space. That negotiation implies a common ground on which the film texts and theories are read against and in addition to one another, allowing each to contribute in its own right to the setting u of a series of terms-what I refer to as a "spatial grammar"-proper to both film and theory. The spatial grammar thus comprises a more abstract theoretical lane-a palimpsest on which resides a classic body of work on cinematic space (including Andre Bazin, Stephen Heath, and Kristin Thomson), and on which I layer the work of De Certeau, Deleuze, Fredric Jameson, and others. / by Brian R. Jacobson. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Through an archaeology of text-generating mechanisms, the present work excavates the deep history of reading and writing as material, combinatory practices. On the one hand, by positing the physical manipulation of language as a form of reading and writing, this archaeology answers Roger Chartier's call for book historians to "take on the task of retracing forgotten gestures and habits" that do not fit "the genealogy of our own contemporary manner of reading," a call echoed in much recent work on the "use" of early modem books. It thus challenges our assumptions about how readers and writers of the past made meaning from printed texts and, more broadly, the expressive potentials of the printed book itself. Yet this archaeology of ars combinatoria, the art of combination, also presents a imaginative challenge to historians of the book. For if we accept physically cutting paper or spinning a volvelle as a readerly and writerly act, then we must also erase the boundaries we have drawn between "the book" as a material form and "the digital" as an epistemology, reconsidering the various literacies each facilitates or forecloses. In keeping with the spirit of media archaeology, which seeks to defamiliarize the past, the present work on text-generating mechanisms exists as a web-based text-generating mechanism. On the one hand, this medium allows me to present a comparative history without compromising specificity or reducing the complexity of one moment to a mere reflection of another; yet it still strives for thematic cohesion by using our digital present quite literally as a map for exploring programmatic epistemologies in our past. It lives on the web at: http://www.whitneyannetrettien.com/thesis/ Since MIT Libraries requires a paper copy of a thesis, all HTML pages and code used to produce this thesis are copied in the space below. / by Whitney Anne Trettien. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-64). / This study explores questions of media change, negotiation of literary value and postcolonial hybridity through a study of The Wondering Minstrels, a largely South-Asian community on the Web dedicated to the celebration of English poetry. I aim to demonstrate how an online community like Minstrels can unsettle hierarchies such as those between writer and reader, high art and fandom, and between metropole and margin, even as it often seems rooted in this logic. While print-culture and literary values are often conflated, this new kind of platform celebrates poetry using the interactive and participatory possibilities of the Web. It garbles protocols of literary appreciation by discussing canonical poetry in an idiosyncratic, personal manner. As a group dominated by South-Asian techno-managerial workers, this is also an account of ways in which globalization and postcoloniality intersect and the new networked society complicates the center-periphery model of cultural traffic. In choosing to informally engage with English poetry as bookmarks for their own lives and remaking the rules of engagement, the Wondering Minstrels is an act of cultural translation, another way of telling the literary legacy of colonialism. In addition to analyzing the conversation on the website, I draw on selected theoretical work relating to new media, middlebrow culture, reception theory, postcolonial studies and globalization. / by Amulya Gopalakrishnan. / S.M.