Media Studies

This study contributes to understanding the transformation of journalistic practices in the digital age by delving into the growing trend of online promotion and networking, in the Chinese context. Against the backdrop of the commodification of all online practices and connections, sometimes considered as a savior for news industries to counter economic challenges, this investigation seeks to uncover how young Chinese journalists experience and perceive their practices in promoting news content and networking with news sources via social media. We find that reporters experience online promotion and networking ambivalently. Specifically, our study participants enjoy the recognition gained from promoting news but question whether this should be compulsory. Regarding networking, participants care about building connections, yet feel exhausted by the pressure to constantly network and bewildered about monetizing such actions. Using relational labor as a framework for analysis, we show that journalists' practices of promoting news and networking require a substantial personal and professional investment. While the relational labor of journalists at times brings positive feelings and economic benefits to journalists, it also engenders negative emotions, confusion, and moral dilemmas, compromising journalists' well-being and mental health.

In an interview on his film Dogville (Denmark, 2003) Lars von Trier said that the absence of setting forces the spectators to invent the town for themselves. As a result, the 'cinematic' emerges from a kind of 'in-between' space. In this essay, I shall argue that Kurt Lewin's notion of 'hodological' space is particularly appropriate in understanding this kind of in-between or 'contact' space. Hodological space relates to the human experience as a complex social energy field, and, applied to cinema, it can show that the cinematic experience is much more immediate, much more dependent on the existence of others, and much more socially conditioned than assumed in theories that heavily epitomize the concept of look only. Generally speaking, one could claim that cinema is the art of social space, bringing before the spectators the intersubjective 'life-spaces' of the characters in the film. Cinema is not some kind of objectified external universe cut off from the spectator by an impassable barrier that separates the corporeal from the intellectual or the private self from the public space. Rather, cinema is a matter of senses that emerges from a place between the inside of the self and the outside of the world. This essay shows how the luminousness of design in Dogville lends itself to Lewin's psychological view of space. By removing the setting in Dogville, von Trier leaves the ordinary Euclidean space behind and creates a hodological field of force instead. In doing so, von Trier places the focus on the intersubjective relations instead of on the fixed set of coordinates independent of subjects.

The concept of skin touches upon the growing interest in the senses among cultural theorists, an interest that is driven by a reaction against what is felt to be an unjustified privileging of some senses. It is customarily said that whereas sight and hearing are public senses, more assimilated to reason, smell, taste and touch are more related to subjective and personal perception, because of their proximity to the body. In the contemporary attention for the senses in cultural theory, the emphasis lies not in the separation, but in the meaningful relation between sense-making and our sensate bodies. In cinema studies, too, there seems to be a tendency to re-think spectatorship in terms of the sensual and the mimetic. This paper seeks to find the essence of affective engagement in the cinematic experience by introducing the notion of skin as a medium of intersubjective connection, a perceptual surface that travels through the senses, and between the self and the world. I shall show how skin structures our perception, and that cinema is able to touch us by means of emotion because the affect is situated in the skin, with examples from films such as Ringu, Halloween and The Silence of the Lambs.

to the screen, starring Christian Bale as the 27-year-old yuppie/serial killer Patrick Bateman. Like the novel, the film American Psycho can be seen as an ultimate portrayal of the 1980s New York yuppie lifestyle, depicting a world dominated by hedonism, greed, and egocentrism. The novel's long enumerations of brand name consumer goods, denoting the fashion-dictated materialism that constitutes yuppie life, have been translated cinematically into a sterile space of (now extremely dated) 1980s designer goods. The film version anatomizes the construction of Bateman's double identity that in the novel is created through the use of an unreliable narrator, the appropriation of pop cultural products (particularly brand names, pop songs, and the images of horror and porn movies), and the use of "cinematic" techniques of narration. In this article, we will treat the fictional character Patrick Bateman as a double construction of narration and identity by examining the ways in which Bateman is constructed as both a yuppie and a serial killer. By focusing on his being an unreliable narrator in the novel and a reliable narrator in the film, we will show how readers/spectators make sense of Bateman's constructed identity through their role as Bateman's "witness" within his own fictional and cinematic world.

T he Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon, 2007), the acclaimed film by Julian Schnabel, is a biopic based on the memoir by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric), who suffered a massive stroke in 1995 that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome. In this condition, a patient is fully conscious, but unable to move or communicate because of a complete paralysis of the body, with the exception of movement of the eyes. Despite his locked-in syndrome, Bauby wrote his memoir by blinking his left eyelid to point out letters to an interlocutor, a painstakingly lengthy process that is captured in Schnabel's film. This essay analyzes the way in which the aesthetic system of The Diving Bell directly engages us emotionally, in a process where not only the film is present for us, but where we, too, are present for the film in both our objectivity and our subjectivity.Through my analysis-which is inspired by several theoretical approaches, such as continental and analytical philosophy, cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and even quantum mechanics-I hope to be able to communicate to the reader my own views on cinematic emotions and its methodological consequences, which I address in the last part of this essay.

This paper investigates the affective dynamism of the cinematic experience in terms of the so-called intuition of the heart. Inspired by the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, it shows how the affective circulation between the film and the spectator can be a matter of sharing rather than a consequence of character identification or the satisfaction of narrative desire. The (in)operative similarity in the heart of Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) stands central in the discussion. But the concept of heart touches not merely on our affective intelligence, but also on matters of coexistence, vulnerability, and the securing of personal boundaries; in other words, the crisis of affect. This paper argues that these films teach us broken mode of being as a precondition for 'filmic ethics' to emerge.

In July 2006, Finland's Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen appeared for the first time in public with his new girlfriend Susan Kuronen, a self-employed single mother, at a summer festival in Central Finland. 1 Shortly after, Kuronen became the best-known girlfriend in Finland as ...

It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.