VLT #93: Reconsidering Mass Media
Summer 2022 saw Top Gun: Maverickgross $1 billion globally in its first
month of release; in Fall 2021, Squid Game became Netflix’s most popular
series, with 1.65 billion hours streamed in its first four weeks of
release; on May 6, 2022, Bad Bunny became the Spotify artist with the
most one-day streams globally, with 183 million streams; and TikTok has
received over 3.5 billion downloads since 2018. Additionally, streaming
platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime have massive reach over
international audiences, despite their varied location-specific
libraries. In terms of reaching a large audience or consumer base, these
instances fit historical definitions of mass media. However, studying
these phenomena require conjunctural and complex analyses of mass media
that highlight both historical continuities and contemporary
transformations of the concept through industrial, textual, and audience
lenses.
Scholars, commentators, journalists, and audiences have used the concept
of mass media to refer to media industries and companies with vast
reach, popular genre formulas, and widely-consumed media artifacts
ranging from consumer electronics to programming and content. More
recently, assumptions of the homogeneity and uniformity of “the mass”
have been challenged by industrial trends toward audience fragmentation
and content diversification. Trends beginning with the widespread
introduction of cable television in the United States in the 1970s
through the present ever-expanding online media landscape—including
app-based, algorithm-driven personalization of content—have resulted in
the segmentation of audiences, media industries, and content across
gendered, racial, ethnic, sexual, generational, and cultural lines.
However, within segmented audiences, networks of users, and local
spaces, there are instances of broadly disseminated and collectively
shared mediated experiences. For example, we have seen mass media
phenomena occur within specific digital publics, social cohorts, other
groups, and spaces such as Black Twitter and Gay Twitter, BookTok, or
local news telecasts. Beyond the recognition of internal heterogeneity
of the mass and the fragmentation of audiences, global media production,
distribution, and consumption challenge and reimagine the national
boundaries as a privileged site of distinction. Even as current
scholarly and industrial discourses challenge the assumed homogeneity
and unity of mass media, many of these logics and tactics continue to
shape the media landscape.
The Velvet Light Trap #93 seeks a variety of topics and approaches to
reconsider mass media in both contemporary and historical contexts. We
welcome submissions that work to revisit, redefine, renegotiate,
complicate, or challenge previously-held notions of mass media through a
multitude of approaches, including (but not limited to) audience
studies, cultural geography, discourse analysis, distribution studies,
global media studies, localism, media industries studies, sports media
studies, taste cultures, and textual analysis. We welcome contemporary
and historical explorations of any of the following themes:
*
Defining and understanding mass media and the notion of “the mass”
*
Examining under- or unstated assumptions of gender, race, sexuality,
and/or representation within mass media, both in terms of texts and
audiences
*
Mass media and geo-cultural markets, distribution, and/or consumption
*
Distinctions or intersections between mass media and popular media
*
Reconsidering notions of “mass” in a global, multi-pronged media
landscape
*
Mass media as a framework to describe texts that are made for mass
consumption
*
Considering how methods of remediation, reevaluation, or
revisitation may construct mass media
*
Mass media and audience maximization
*
Locating and negotiating mass media within niches (and vice versa)
*
Reconsidering taste cultures as they have been assigned to mass media
*
Complicating notions of nationality within mass media
*
Highlighting instances of “unintended” mass media (e.g. sleeper
successes)
*
Interrogating ideas of “going viral” and “viral media”
*
Imaginations and constructions of the audiences privileged as “mass”
*
Mass mediation as it pertains to data mining, surveillance
capitalism, and machine learning
Open Call
The Velvet Light Trapis pleased to announce that, in addition to
accepting submissions that relate to the above theme, we will accept
general submissions broadly related to the journal’s focus on critical,
theoretical, and historical approaches to film and media studies. We aim
to create a new space for scholarship that enhances the journal’s
overall mission and work that continues the research conversations to
which our themed issues have contributed. We hope that scholars inspired
by the work published in our themed issues, past and present, will
especially consider submitting their work. Even as our themes will
continue to change each issue, we want to sustain ongoing investment in
and investigation of the questions each issue of The Velvet Light Trapposes.
Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be between 6,000 and 7,500 words, formatted in
Chicago Style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with
a separate one-page abstract, both saved as Microsoft Word files. Remove
any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for
anonymous review. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by
translations. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by January 31, 2023.
/The Velvet Light Trap /does not charge Article Processing Charges; it
does not ask for any payments from the authors.
About the Journal
The Velvet Light Trap is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film,
television, and new media. The journal draws on a variety of theoretical
and historiographical approaches from the humanities and social sciences
and welcomes any effort that will help foster the ongoing processes of
evaluation and negotiation in media history and criticism. While TVLT
maintains its traditional commitment to the study of American film, it
also expands its scope to television and other media, to adjacent
institutions, and to other nations' media. The journal encourages both
approaches and objects of study that have been neglected or excluded in
past scholarship.
Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the
University of Texas at Austin coordinate issues in alternation, and each
issue is devoted to a particular theme. The Velvet Light Trap’s
Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Manuel
Avilés-Santiago, Lauren S. Berliner, Andre Brock, Dolores Inés Casillas,
Aymar Jean Christian, Norma Coates, Brian Fauteux, Allyson Nadia Field,
Racquel Gates, Aniko Imre, Deborah Jaramillo, Derek Kompare, Lori
Morimoto, Ruben Ramírez-Sànchez, Debra Ramsey, Bob Rehak, Samantha
Noelle Sheppard, and Alyx Vesey. TVLT's graduate student editors are
assisted by their local faculty advisors: Mary Beltrán, Ben Brewster,
Jonathan Gray, Michele Hilmes (emeritus), Lea Jacobs, Derek Johnson,
Shanti Kumar, Charles Ramírez Berg, Thomas Schatz (emeritus), and Janet
Staiger (emeritus).