Pornography, Ideology, and the Internet

Pornography, Ideology, and the Internet PDF Author: Zhang Mei
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149856089X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This book starts from the discussion of a pornography, but does not end with pornography. Rather, it suggests that a pornographic star can be treated as a cultural product which obtains rich cultural meanings. It contributes to the debate between the global homogenization paradigm and the creolization paradigm which predominates in multiple disciplines, through a thorough examination of the entire process of the cross-cultural migration of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video (AV) actress who has achieved amazing popularity in mainland China since 2010. Through fifteen-month participant observation inside the two Chinese agencies of Sola, this study reveals that the transformative intermediaries play a significant role in the transformation of the cultural product in the Chinese context, even though their operations are usually invisible to outsiders. The findings challenge the conventional scholarly assumption that foreign products produced by global producers are consumed “directly” by local consumers or that the significance of these intermediaries can be ignored. This study further extends the participant observation inside the realistic field to the virtual space of media in different countries, which can be called the second field. It demonstrates that multiple local groups, including intermediaries, Chinese commercial news portals, Party media, and Chinese Internet users, respond to the dominant ideologies in Chinese society by reinterpreting Sola in different, even contradictory, ways. Thus, this research refutes the presumption that a local society is a coherent monolith in the acceptance of foreign cultural products. The book also deepens the reader’s understanding of Chinese Internet usage.

Ideologies of the Internet

Ideologies of the Internet PDF Author: Katharine Sarikakis
Publisher: Hampton Press (NJ)
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This volume gathers together some of the most significant debates surrounding the development, use and potential of the Internet. Twenty scholars from four continents address some of the more pertinent questions surrounding the presence and future of the Internet. These are organized into questions regarding the role of the Internet as a mediator of communicative space and process; an object of current and future policy; and a tool for development. The debates are proceeded by a discussion on the contextual positioning of the medium in terms of arts, the market, gender, and education.

Pornography, Ideology, and the Internet

Pornography, Ideology, and the Internet PDF Author: Zhang Mei
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149856089X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book starts from the discussion of a pornography, but does not end with pornography. Rather, it suggests that a pornographic star can be treated as a cultural product which obtains rich cultural meanings. It contributes to the debate between the global homogenization paradigm and the creolization paradigm which predominates in multiple disciplines, through a thorough examination of the entire process of the cross-cultural migration of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video (AV) actress who has achieved amazing popularity in mainland China since 2010. Through fifteen-month participant observation inside the two Chinese agencies of Sola, this study reveals that the transformative intermediaries play a significant role in the transformation of the cultural product in the Chinese context, even though their operations are usually invisible to outsiders. The findings challenge the conventional scholarly assumption that foreign products produced by global producers are consumed “directly” by local consumers or that the significance of these intermediaries can be ignored. This study further extends the participant observation inside the realistic field to the virtual space of media in different countries, which can be called the second field. It demonstrates that multiple local groups, including intermediaries, Chinese commercial news portals, Party media, and Chinese Internet users, respond to the dominant ideologies in Chinese society by reinterpreting Sola in different, even contradictory, ways. Thus, this research refutes the presumption that a local society is a coherent monolith in the acceptance of foreign cultural products. The book also deepens the reader’s understanding of Chinese Internet usage.

Free Speech Law and the Pornography Debate

Free Speech Law and the Pornography Debate PDF Author: Lynn Mills Eckert
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498572618
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
By examining the highly contested legal debate about the regulation of pornography through an epistemic lens, this book analyzes competing claims about the proper role of speech in our society, pornography’s harm, the relationship between speech and equality, and whether law should regulate and, if so, upon what grounds. In maintaining that inegalitarian pornography generates discursive effects, the book contends that law cannot simply adopt a libertarian approach to free speech. While inegalitarian pornography may not be determinative of gender inequality, it does contribute, reinforce, reflect and help maintain such unfairness. As a result, we can place reasonable gender-based regulations on inegalitarian pornography while upholding our most treasured commitments to dissident speech just as other liberal democracies with strong free speech traditions have done.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains PDF Author: Nicholas Carr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079368
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

Netporn

Netporn PDF Author: Katrien Jacobs
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461639522
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Netporn delves into the aesthetics and politics of sexuality in the era of do-it-yourself (DIY) Internet pornography. Katrien Jacobs, drawing on digital media theory and interviews with Web porn producers and consumers, offers an unprecedented critical analysis of Web culture as digital artistry and of the corresponding heightened government surveillance and censorship of the Internet. Netporn features Web users who question the goals of global commercial porn industries-whether they are engaged in Usenet fringes, video blogging, peer-to-peer distribution, porn art collectives, or decadent amateurism. Emphasizing gender and cultural differences, Jacobs shows how the creative uses of netporn images and services are important ways of exploring or redefining the 'network body' and indispensable ingredients of a maturing network society.

Your Brain on Porn

Your Brain on Porn PDF Author: Gary Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780993161605
Category : Internet addiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The internet has made access to sexually explicit content radically more easy than ever before. This book is essential reading for those who are troubled by their own relationship with pornography, and for those who want to understand the world we now live in. Republished with extensive revisions in December 2017.

The Pornography Wars

The Pornography Wars PDF Author: Kelsy Burke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635577373
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
For readers of Peggy Orenstein and Rebecca Traister, an authoritative, big think look at pornography in all its facets - historical, religious, and cultural. In the 1960s, sex researchers Masters and Johnson declared the end of the fake orgasm. Nearly two decades later, in 1982, evangelical activist Tim LaHaye foretold that the entire pornography industry would soon be driven out of business. Neither prediction proved true. Instead, with the rise of the internet, pornography saturates the American conscience more than ever and has reshaped our understanding of sexuality, relationships, media, and even the nature of addiction. Dr. Kelsy Burke has spent the last five years researching and interviewing internet pornography's opponents and its sympathizers. In The Pornography Wars, Burke does a deep dive into the long history of pornography in America and then turns her gaze on our present society to examine the ways this industry touches on the most intimate parts of American lives. She offers a complete understanding of the major players in the debates around porn's place in society: everyone from sex workers, activists, therapists, religious leaders, and consumers. In doing so, she addresses and debunks the myths that surround porn and porn usage while showing how everything from the way we teach children about sex to the legal protections for what can be published is tied up in the deeply complicated battles over pornography. Sweeping, savvy, and deeply researched, The Pornography Wars is a necessary and comprehensive new look at pornography and American life.

From the Golem to Freedom

From the Golem to Freedom PDF Author: Gábor L. Ambrus
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350361291
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
With a particular focus on social media, Gábor L. Ambrus explores how human beings relate to contemporary information technology. Ambrus argues that religious traditions – such as Judaism and Christianity, as well as secular philosophical thought inspired by religion – can be invoked to describe both the freedom and 'unfreedom' of the user of information technology. To illustrate how individuals relate to technology in a restricted and totalitarian online environment, Ambrus adopts the figure and legend of the golem from Jewish mysticism. At the same time, his argument features other religious concepts and themes to describe an alternative to our present predicament of 'unfreedom', while not seeking to portray any 'redemption' outside the technological environment. At the core of his argument, Ambrus presents the experience of nothingness as a source of freedom, opening up the possibility for a free relationship for us all with information technology.

Gender, Race, and Class in Media

Gender, Race, and Class in Media PDF Author: Gail Dines
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761922612
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description
Gender, Race and Class in Media examines the mass media as economic and cultural institutions that shape our social identities. Through analyses of popular mass media entertainment genres, such as talk shows, soap operas, television sitcoms, advertising and pornography, students are invited to engage in critical mass media scholarship. A comprehensive introductory section outlines the book′s integrated approach to media studies, which incorporates three distinct but related areas of investigation: the political economy of production, textual analysis and audience response. The readings include a dozen new original essays, edited for maximum accessibility. The book provides: - A comprehensive, critical introduction to Media Studies - An analysis of race that is integrated into all chapters - Articles on Cultural Studies that are accessible to undergraduates - An extensive bibliography and section on media resources - Expanded coverage of "queer" representations in mass media - A new section on the violence debates - A new section on the Internet Together with new section introductions, these provide a comprehensive critical introduction to mass media studies.

Pornland

Pornland PDF Author: Gail Dines
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807044539
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Professor Gail Dines has written about and researched the porn industry for over two decades. She attends industry conferences, interviews producers and performers, and speaks to hundreds of men and women each year about their experience with porn. Students and educators describe her work as “life changing.” In Pornland—the culmination of her life’s work—Dines takes an unflinching look at porn and its affect on our lives. Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it’s no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. But, as Dines shows, today’s porn is strikingly different from yesterday’s Playboy. As porn culture has become absorbed into pop culture, a new wave of entrepreneurs are creating porn that is even more hard-core, violent, sexist, and racist. To differentiate their products in a glutted market, producers have created profitable niche products—like teen sex, torture porn, and gonzo—in order to entice a generation of desensitized users. Going from the backstreets to Wall Street, Dines traces the extensive money trail behind this multibillion-dollar industry—one that reaps more profits than the film and music industries combined. Like Big Tobacco—with its powerful lobbying groups and sophisticated business practices—porn companies don’t simply sell products. Rather they influence legislators, partner with mainstream media, and develop new technologies like streaming video for cell phones. Proving that this assembly line of content is actually limiting our sexual freedom, Dines argues that porn’s omnipresence has become a public health concern we can no longer ignore.