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In Videoblogging Before YouTube, Trine Bjørkmann Berry offers a cultural history of online video, focusing on the critical moment when the internet moved from being a mostly textual medium to a truly multimedia one. Through a close analysis of the early videoblogging community and their creative practices, she argues that early in the new millennium a new cultural-technical media hybrid emerged. This coalesced around the short-form digital film whose aesthetic, technical form and content is a predecessor to, and anticipator of our current media ecology.
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In 2017, BBC released a video revealing that Jodie Whittaker would be the actor to play the thirteenth Doctor in the 2018 season of Doctor Who (1963–), the popular BBC television series. The “reveal” that a woman had been cast in the role of the Doctor prompted an overwhelming backlash and fierce online discussion. The same period saw a number of popular films and series cast women as leads. The intense discussion that the reveal generated indicates that televisual representations of gender continue to matter greatly to viewers. The question is how? Fan comments posted below the reveal video on YouTube suggest that viewing publics are less engaged in a controversy over feminism than bewildered by gender categories becoming unstable. Notably, once the series aired, discussion about the Doctor’s gender died down. Seeing the Doctor addressed as “Ma’am,” it turned out, was not what upset viewers.
How do global audiences use streaming platforms like YouTube, Netflix and iPlayer? How does the experience of digital video change according to location? What strategies do people use to access out-of-region content? What are the commercial and governmental motivations behind geoblocking?Geoblocking and Global Video Culture explores the cultural implications of access control and circumvention in an age of VPNs. Featuring seventeen chapters from diverse critical positions and locations – including China, Iran, Malaysia, Turkey, Cuba, Brazil, USA, Sweden and Australia.
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