IJoC 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. For direct access to the articles, click  the respective article title below.

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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