http://flowtv.org A journal of television and new media Sat, 19 May 2012 19:16:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Danny Dyer's Deadliest Man In recent years British TV has seen a growth in shows that have displayed a particular type of masculinity. Shows such as ‘Deadliest Men’, ‘Toughest Pubs in Britain’ and aspects of ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ have displayed hyper-masculinity and have strong links to class and ... http://flowtv.org/2012/05/fighting-beers-and-the-queere/ Film and Digital A few days ago, I was watching Kathryn Bigelow’s excellent film The Hurt Locker (2008) – on DVD of course – and I was suddenly struck by the fact that it may be one of the last movies to be actually shot on film; in the case of ... http://flowtv.org/2012/05/film-nostalgia-digital-divide/ Image 1: Bedwin Hacker Uses Cyber-slang to Reject a Monolithic French Identity Within digitized and networked forms of contemporary globalization, technologies regulate immigration and information according to regimes of virtual labor recruitment, examined in “Race and Labor, Unplugged: Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer,” and virtual border control, examined in “Biometrics and Machinima, ... http://flowtv.org/2012/05/surveillance-disinformation-bedwin-hacker/ The Logie Award Let me give some background to this first. The Australian equivalent to the American Emmys is called the Logies –after the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird, one of the major contributors to the invention of television. The Logies are screened annually and they used to be one of ... http://flowtv.org/2012/04/how-to-become-a-tv-star/ Wanda Sykes Since the late 1990s, lesbian celebrities have garnered an astounding amount of power, respect, and loyalty from fans, cultural critics, and the popular press. National civil rights organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) feature lesbian celebrities during fundraisers and ... http://flowtv.org/2012/04/laughing-out-loud/ 1978 had less in common with ’68 than ’28 and ’38: the old motto 'give the people what they want'…Ten years ago filmmakers were making films about things that they ought to – [things] they thought ought to be explored, with thoughts that they wanted to explore, and lessons ... http://flowtv.org/2012/04/adorno-vs-siskel-and-ebert/ Inland Empire, David Lynch In The Straight Story, a secret passage opens in the mouth. Alvin and his older brother Lyle no longer speak to each other after having fought ten years earlier when they “said some things [they] shouldn’t have” to each other. Each of them has spoken ... http://flowtv.org/2012/04/david-lynchs-secret-passages-ii/ Mission statement from a sacred security firm's website I am writing these days about something I call sacred security, which is the business of selling video surveillance and other security measures to religious institutions. But it’s not just any old business. Sacred security is the work of a few dozen religiously-identified ... http://flowtv.org/2012/04/god-is-watching/ What if Interactivity is the New Passivity? (( I am certain I heard this phrase from someone else, but a Google search didn’t reveal my source. For now, its provenance remains a mystery. Also, my copious thanks to William Moner and the Flow crew for their help getting ... http://flowtv.org/2012/04/the-new-passivity/ John Baldessari, An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer . . . In an age when “all media are mixed media,” the modernist emphasis on media specificity seems antique. (( W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5. )) Yet ... http://flowtv.org/2012/04/on-the-surface/