Audiences across platforms consume and create meanings about media in transgressive ways
Feminism can reflect the cultural moment, especially as media appropriate and use feminist messaging and agenda to various ends. Yet media can also push boundaries, exposing audiences to ideas they may not be familiar with and advancing public acceptance of concepts once considered taboo. Moreover, audiences are far from passive recipients, especially in the digital age. In Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi focus on how audiences across platforms not only consume but also create meanings—sometimes quite transgressive meanings—in engaging with media content. If television shows such as Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore and dating apps such as Tinder are sites of persistent everyday sexism, then so, too, are they sites of what Press and Tripodi call "media-ready feminism." In developing a sociologically based conception of reception that encompasses media's progressive potential, as well as the processes of domestication through which audiences and users revert to more limited cultural schemas, Press and Tripodi make a vital contribution to gender and media studies, and help to illuminate the complexity of our current moment.
For those attempting research within Asian American communities and/or a organizations hoping to leverage digital technologies for political mobilization - this research is for you
This survey assesses the landscape of Asian American and Pacific Islander politics in relation to contemporary social movements and digital technologies. We asked respondents how they use technology as a place for political community and organizing and explored the role of technologies in shaping racial politics. The aim of this survey has been to identify new ways for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to organize online. We are committed to developing racial and class consciousness amongst Asian Americans and also leveraging the technological tools necessary to do this work. We hope this research and data will be useful to academics seeking to do community research within Asian American communities as well as for grassroots and nonprofit organizations seeking to leverage digital technologies in political mobilization.
To understand racism in our digital society, follow the money.
The study of race and racism in the digital society must produce theoretically distinct and robust formulations of Internet technologies as key characteristics of the political economy. The author puts forth racial capitalism as a coherent framework for this research agenda. The argument for racial capitalism draws on two examples of its engagement with two characteristics of the digital society: obfuscation as privatization and exclusion by inclusion. Internet technologies are now a totalizing sociopolitical regime and should be central to the study of race and racism.