Visual Narrative and Temporal Relevance: Segueing Instant Replay into Live Broadcast TV

Professional production of live TV combines real‐time and recorded video into a single broadcast stream. In “live” TV, non‐live “instant replay” footage can help viewers to make sense of what has just happened. This article shows how multi‐person TV production teams assemble timely and relevant instant replays that can be seamlessly combined with real‐time footage during live broadcasts. Detailed interaction analysis demonstrates how this work is dependent on coordinated practices, and how team members achieve this by orienting to narrative concerns across multiple temporalities to produce topically useful instant replays, displaying clip relevance, and help segueing transitions between the ongoing action and replay. We conclude by examining the interrelationships between the sequential flow of visual content, the role of talk in mediating time‐shifted visual alignments, and how members make their work visible and accountable to one another and to their intended audience.     

Police Accounts of Body-Worn Camera Footage In News Media

People offer accounts in response to actions that are subjected to valuative inquiry. Recordings of police actions captured on body-worn camera (BWC) video can become subject to valuative inquiry when footage is publicly released. This footage may possibly undermine police legitimacy. Managing legitimacy is a basic rationale for why police provide accounts in response to their conduct. Proponents of BWCs assert that the devices enhance legitimacy and, while police have long used accounts to justify their conduct, less is known about how body cameras affect police accountability in practice. Drawing from Scott and Lyman's accounts theory framework, this qualitative, exploratory study examines official police accounts as both outcomes of police accountability in practice and as provided in the context of news media coverage of publicly released body-worn camera footage. This allows us to ask the following questions: What types of accounts have police officials provided in news media reports in the context of publicly released BWC footage? And, more generally, what insight might an analysis of police accounts provide about accountability in relation to the implementation of BWCs? A key finding reveals that the timing of police accounts varied quite considerably, and that accounts were usually not static. The findings provide some general insight into what kinds of actions captured on body camera recordings constitute acceptable use of force by officers, even in situations when police actions resulted in death. This study also provides a small empirical window into when and how police officials provide accounts in response to publicly released body camera footage.     

YOUTUBE,TWITTER AND THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

Videos stored on YouTube served as a valuable set of communicative resources for publics interested in the Occupy movement. This article explores this loosely bound media ecology, focusing on how and what types of video content are shared and circulated across both YouTube and Twitter. Developing a novel data-collection methodology, a population of videos posted to YouTube with Occupy-related metadata or circulated on Twitter alongside Occupy-related keywords during the month of November 2011 was assembled. In addition to harvesting metadata related to view count and video ratings on YouTube and the number of times a video was tweeted, a probability sample of 1100 videos was hand coded, with an emphasis on classifying video genre and type, borrowed sources of content, and production quality. The novelty of the data set and the techniques adapted for analysing it allow one to take an important step beyond cataloging Occupy-related videos to examine whether and how videos are circulated on Twitter. A variety of practices were uncovered that link YouTube and Twitter together, including sharing cell phone footage as eyewitness accounts of protest (and police) activity, digging up news footage or movie clips posted months and sometimes years before the movement began; and the sharing of music videos and other entertainment content in the interest of promoting solidarity or sociability among publics created through shared hashtags. This study demonstrates both the need for, and challenge of, conducting social media research that accommodates data from multiple platforms.     

Professional Perception and Expert Action: Scaffolding Embodied Practices in Professional Education

From vocational education to neurosurgery residencies, apprenticeship training is characteristic of how people are acculturated to a profession. One of the primary goals of professional education is to develop skillful performance. Expert skill includes an integrated set of perceptual and motor abilities. During practical teaching, instructors deploy a set of discursive practices that nurture skilled performance in trainees. These practices scaffold particular patterns of movement, patterns that students can assimilate and subsequently use to guide or govern tool-based actions. We conducted in-depth ethnographic research in a dental hygiene program to gain a deeper understanding of the hands-on training environment: the activities in which participants engage, the circumstances they typically encounter, and the tools and technologies they rely upon in accomplishing their work. The primary data are video recordings of naturally occurring instructional interactions, chosen to be representative of broad classes of interactions observed. This article documents three practices used to entrain students with professional perception and scaffold expert action: guidance, demonstration and modeling, and embodied conceptual metaphor.     

Accounting for surveillance

This contribution discusses the ways people hold themselves and others accountable for everyday practices of surveillance. It analyses three examples: (1) the “breeching experiments” of the video artist “Surveillance Camera Man,” (2) a “stop and frisk” incident involving a 17‐year‐old boy in Harlem, and (3) the pop‐up windows on websites that ask for users’ consent to use “cookies.” Understanding the relationship between language and securitization, it is argued, requires that we pay attention to the interactional basis of surveillance and the ways rights and responsibilities are negotiated, ratified, challenged, or ignored in the moment‐by‐moment unfolding of communication.     

Avatars of Whiteness: Racial Expression in Video Game Characters

Video games are an enormous segment of popular media today, comparable to television and movies. Moreover, video games represent a new form of media distinguished from previous forms due to the interactive element, where game players have the ability to change and influence the game world. This paper contributes to the study of race and popular media by examining how race is presented in role‐playing video games through the feature of avatar creation. Capabilities for avatar creation are analyzed in over sixty massively multiplayer online role‐playing games (MMORPGs) in service as of early 2010 and twenty offline role‐playing games (RPGs) published over the past 10 years. The analysis shows that the vast majority of games, both online and offline, do not allow for the creation of avatars with a non‐white racial appearance. Forcing an Anglo appearance on avatars that purport to represent the player has the potential to reinforce a sense of normative whiteness as well as shape the social composition of online worlds into all‐white virtual spaces, contributing to the creation of a virtual “white habitus.”     

The media and the formation of the public sphere in the new Independent States

This paper analyses the development of the media in the successor states of the USSR from a public sphere perspective. This approach allows the post‐communist media to be placed within the context of the process of democratization that these societies are currently experiencing by postulating that the role of the media in this process should be to provide a symbolic space where the economic and political dimensions of the process of transition offer themselves to the comprehension of citizens, and where those who hold representative opinions on this process are able to express themselves. This article argues that two main obstacles exist to the development of East European media as a public sphere institution. These are the various means of control East European governments employ to check the freedom of the press, and some of the profit‐oriented journalistic practices market‐driven media entrepreneurs are introducing in the East European media field. In its conclusion, this article argues that media policies in the New Independent States should specifically aim at developing the media as a public sphere institution rather than simply an industry.     

Massively Multiplayer Online Video Gaming as Participation in a Discourse

This article has two primary goals: (a) to illustrate how a closer analysis of language can lead to fruitful insights into the activities that it helps constitute, and (b) to demonstrate the complexity of the practices that make up Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOGaming) through just such an analysis. The first goal is in response to the way we sometimes treat language in studies of activity, despite calls for more nuanced analyses (e.g., Wells, 2002), as a mere conduit for information in which its other (social, identity) functions are overlooked. The second goal is in response to the diatribes against video games in the media and their frequent dismissal as barren play. In this article, I use functional linguistics to unpack how a seemingly inconsequential turn of talk within the game Lineage reveals important aspects of the activity in which it is situated as well as the broader "forms of life" enacted in the game through which members display their allegiance and identity.     

Critical perspectives on brand culture in the era of participatory and algorithmic media

Brands have become a ubiquitous feature of life in market‐based consumer societies. While marketers aim to establish brands as efficient devices for guiding purchase decisions, critical scholarship investigates how branding functions as a mode of exercising power by shaping consumers' identities and consumer culture more broadly. Beginning in the 1950s as a predominantly semiotic critique of advertising, critical research into branding has over the decades developed a more complex conceptualisation of brands and their interrelationship with “active” audiences and the cultural environment in which they operate. The first part of this essay summarises this conceptual evolution. It provides the necessary background for interrogating how brands engage with, shape, and capitalise on “algorithmic culture”. Recent dramatic changes in the data‐processing power of the developing algorithmic, platform‐dominated media environment is significantly altering the way brands operate and capitalise on consumer participation and popular culture. The present moment is therefore a crucial one to survey and evaluate emerging critical perspectives on brands and branding. By engaging with the current scholarship on social media, algorithms, and platforms, the second part of this essay outlines a number of novel and distinctive critiques emerging from this literature, which can help inform further research.     

Exhibiting Interaction: Conduct and Collaboration in Museums and Galleries

This article explores how individuals, both alone and together, examine exhibits in museums and galleries. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it focuses on the ways in which visitors encounter and experience exhibits and how their activities are organized, at least in part, with intimate regard to the actions of others in the domain, both companions and “strangers.” This study contributes to the long‐standing concerns of symbolic interactionism with (mutual) attention and involvement, materiality and social relations, and interpersonal communication. The data consist of video recordings of naturally occurring action and interaction in various museums and galleries.     

Cultures of Denial: Avoiding Knowledge of State Violations of Human Rights in Argentina and the United States

Why and how do individuals distance themselves from information about their government's participation in torture and other human rights violations? Such citizen (non)response implicitly legitimates and thus facilitates the continuation of abusive state actions. Drawing on a model of socially organized denial, we explore how sociocultural contexts and practices mediate individuals’ avoidance, justification, normalization, silencing, and outright denial of human rights abuses in two sites: Argentina during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983) and the United States during the “war on terror” post September 11, 2001. The study is based on 40 in‐depth interviews with members of diverse civic, religious, community, and political organizations in both countries (20 in each site). Comparing the political circumstances of a dictatorship and an electoral democracy, the analysis shows the roles of patriotic and national security ideologies and practices of silence and talk as organizers of cultures of denial.     

Children's Intent Participation in a Pediatric Community of Practice

This study analyzes informal learning, drawing on video recordings of staff-child interaction in a pediatric unit. It is shown that even very young patients engage in intent community participation, carefully noting fine variations in examination and treatment practices. They orient to everyday routines in successively more complex ways, gradually acquiring novel repertoires of practices; advancing from nonverbal uptake to an active use of medical terminology, and to actively assisting staff members. Ultimately, the children themselves assume almost full responsibility for routine procedures. The unit had adopted partnership-oriented routines, and the doctors and nurses spent much time in securing the children's consent and participation in their own treatment. In contrast to much earlier work in pediatric settings which has shown children to be marginal participants; even the youngest patients were engaged, and they successively acquired a set of novel practices related to treatment procedures. Together with doctors and nurses, the children could be seen to form a community of practice. But community is not something fixed; instead it is seen as an emergent phenomenon, dependent on staff members' and children's mutual alignments and collaborative action. Learning is thus analyzed as a social and relational phenomenon.     

‘Older people’ talking as if they are not older people: Positioning theory as an explanation

This paper addresses the question of how we account for ‘older people’ talking as if they are not older people. Membership of an age category is usually conceptualised as having a pre-discursive reality, as is inherent in the concept of ‘denial of ageing’. This paper theorises membership of an age category as a discursive resource and uses positioning theory to examine what is said. Working within the framework of discursive psychology, it demonstrates both the complexity and the fruitfulness of identifying older-age related positions in talk. Data is presented where speakers position themselves as not-older-people or modify positionings of themselves as older. The data comes from interviews about a topic where age status is often treated as pertinent: sexual activity in later life. The analysis demonstrates that how speakers position themselves in relation to older age depends on, and has important consequences for, the particular local business of the interaction.     

On the relevance and accountability of dialect: Conversation analysis and dialect contact

The present study seeks to illustrate how the theory and method of conversation analysis (CA) can be used to begin to unpack the notion of ‘contact’ in contact linguistics research. After reviewing language and dialect contact as they are traditionally conceptualized, we describe an additional set of questions inspired by CA's fundamental concern with relevance and accountability. It is argued that, by analyzing the structure and design of turn‐by‐turn talk in situations of dialect contact, we are able to investigate how co‐participants themselves go about carving out the boundaries of their respective dialects, how they can link those dialects to social identities, and how those social identities can become ‘procedurally consequential’ for the design of subsequent talk between the interlocutors. It is ultimately hypothesized that relevance and accountability at the micro‐interactional level may provide new insight into the moment‐by‐moment mechanisms that bring about the comparatively more macro‐level outcomes of dialect contact (e.g. leveling, koineization, etc.) that have been previously identified in contact linguistics research.     

User‐generated online queer media and the politics of queer visibility

In this article, we review sociological research on the politics of queer self‐presentation and visibility in user‐generated online media, such as personal homepages, blogs, YouTube vlogs, and queer‐specific social networking sites. Using an intersectional lens to attend to multiple axes of identity, the review offers a deeper understanding of how online queer media impact self‐presentation and visibility, while also privileging certain racial, sexual, and gender identities and practices over others. Online platforms can serve as spaces of resistance wherein queer people not only make themselves visible but also redefine dominant conceptions of identity, as well as the boundaries between public and private life. However, our review also finds that online spaces of queer self‐presentation often become another space for the reinforcement of dominant norms pertaining to various axes of one's identity. Given that the advent of user‐generated media and the Internet has facilitated the mobilization of queer people worldwide, an understanding of queer self‐presentation in online media demonstrates how new iterations of sex, gender, and sexuality are constructed in a technological era by queer‐identified people themselves, and how people can both resist and reify dominant social hierarchies across boundaries of space and time.     

Complicating categories: Personae mediate racialized expectations of non‐native speech

This paper examines how American listeners’ expectations of non‐native English speech from speakers of East Asian descent can be modulated by the persona invoked by a speaker's visual display. While prior work has typically linked expectations of non‐native speaker status with East Asian‐ness broadly construed, this study indicates that US listeners’ expectations can be tied to more particular manifestations of this racialized identity, themselves informed by raciolinguistic ideologies. In a lexical recall task with persona‐based photographic primes, different visual styles embodied by the same Korean individual induced contrasting expectations of “foreign accented” speech, which corresponded to significant differences in how well the speech was remembered. Ultimately, I argue that models of sociolinguistic perception should include cognitive representations of social constructs like personae, not only to better capture the detailed nature of listeners’ sociolinguistic expectations, but also to avoid perpetuating homogenizing treatments of racialized groups’ language practices.     

Pushing boundaries and blurring categories in digital media and religion research

As religious identity and spiritual practices transform and expand in the digital media moment, this article advocates for more critical scholarship on media and religion that examines the complex ways that individuals make meaning in the digital age. First, I present an overview of foundational media and religion theories that analyze the interactions between these ever‐changing fields, such as the culturalist tradition, mediatization theory, and the social shaping of technology approach. Furthermore, this essay highlights insightful research trends that blur distinctions between media spaces and complicate definitions of religion. Finally, a discussion of gaps in the scholarship will justify an argument for more theories centered in international contexts, as well as analysis of the relationships between media technologies, aesthetics, affect, identity and religious expression. These emerging approaches provide more in‐depth discussions of how the fast‐changing and ever‐complex digital culture is deeply connected to the evolving nature of religion and human existence.