This chapter, Everything Christianity/the Bible Represents is being Attacked on the Internet!”: The Internet and Technologies of Religious Engagement, studies public contestation of power with powerful pastors through a crucial aspect of asserting power: money. This chapter illustrates a revolt against pastors through the critical examination of the aftermath of “The Great Tithe Debate” between online air presenter Ifedayo Olarinde (known as Daddy Freeze), and most of the famous Pentecostal pastors. If the identity of Pentecostals is power, then the rise of modern technology has provided the means for ordinary people on social media to duel with religious authority. Pentecostal pastors’ influence has been frequently studied in Pentecostalism, and one of the focal points of analysis is their ability to build immense financial power through skillful solicitation. With the ubiquity of technology, contenders are rising and threatening pastors’ authority to build financial capital. These contenders stage their own shows demonstrating how they have equally been empowered to tap into the same symbolic instruments that generate power for their leaders. This development troubles not just the Pentecostal pastorate but their followers as well.

This chapter, Everything Christianity/the Bible Represents is being Attacked on the Internet!”: The Internet and Technologies of Religious Engagement, studies public contestation of power with powerful pastors through a crucial aspect of asserting power: money. This chapter illustrates a revolt against pastors through the critical examination of the aftermath of “The Great Tithe Debate” between online air presenter Ifedayo Olarinde (known as Daddy Freeze), and most of the famous Pentecostal pastors. If the identity of Pentecostals is power, then the rise of modern technology has provided the means for ordinary people on social media to duel with religious authority. Pentecostal pastors’ influence has been frequently studied in Pentecostalism, and one of the focal points of analysis is their ability to build immense financial power through skillful solicitation. With the ubiquity of technology, contenders are rising and threatening pastors’ authority to build financial capital. These contenders stage their own shows demonstrating how they have equally been empowered to tap into the same symbolic instruments that generate power for their leaders. This development troubles not just the Pentecostal pastorate but their followers as well.

This chapter will discuss the role of the media in the development of Sheng (showing largely African language syntax with salient English lexis) and Engsh (showing the reverse; i.e. largely the syntax of English and lexis from several African languages) in Kenya. While African urban youth languages may start as anti-languages of the streets, many develop a much wider speech community due to their gradual spread from the street and the informal transport environment into song lyrics and thus the radio, and into comic strips and cartoons and thus the printed press. The use of these two youth language varieties in these media has the additional effect of making them acceptable for a larger part of the society as a style of youth and modernity and rendering this style fit for advertisement and use on television, such as in soap operas. This development is illustrated with Sheng and Engsh examples.

Chapter 7 draws on the work of trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth to argue that Occupy Central can be understood as a form of cultural trauma in Hong Kong. Focusing on independent documentaries about the movement, including Chan Tze Woon’s Yellowing (2016; 亂世備忘); Evan Chan’s Raise the Umbrellas (2016; 撐傘), Nora Lam’s Road Not Taken (2016; 未竟之路), and James Leong’s Umbrella Diaries: The First Umbrellas (2018; 傘上:遍地開花), I examine how different filmmakers try to capture in their work an event with which the city is still, to a great extent, coming to terms. I will also show the continuities between Occupy and the anti-extradition bill protests, and discuss the role of cinema in the more recent episodes of unrest.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, ambrotype photographs profoundly altered American efforts to make apocalyptic violence resound. The wet-plate collodion negative, which comes into circulation as the Civil War begins, fractures the historiographical medium that conforms martial violence to narratives about historical progress. This paper adds to scholarship on 1860s responses to the early circulation of battlefield, hospital, and candid photographs. On the one hand, bodies on the ground and the material conditions of human scale are revealed with exhilarating clarity; on the other hand, the reproducible plates threaten prose conventions for suturing apocalyptic violence to national regeneration. Periodicals from the 1860s and 1870s record this ambivalence; early historians of the war often wrestled with the ambrotype’s claim to immediacy. This chapter asks where the early collodion plate archive fits in a larger history of American media for translating unthinkable violence into revelatory insight, or for severing that link.

Chapter 5 examines the impact of the Internet and social media on how the speech and press rights discussed in Chapter 1 operate in the context of our modern democracy. New technology has had two primary consequences: to democratize public debate by permitting any and all citizens to reach potentially vast audiences, and to disintermediate public debate by reducing the role of the mainstream media and political leadership as gatekeepers of the flow of information and ideas to citizens. In the early Internet era it was hoped that these developments would revitalize democracy. Instead, their actual impact has been to produce cacophony, political polarization, and a collapse of social consensus regarding even basic facts. The balance of the chapter proposes possible solutions to address these pathologies. Importantly, the chapter does not suggest that a return to elite intermediaries such as media entities is plausible. Instead, it explores ways in which the democratizing potential of the Internet can be harnessed to create new institutions that might be broadly trusted, at least as to factual matters, and so might help ease political polarization.

Much scholarship on food blogs has turned attention to new forms of domesticity. This chapter focuses instead on men and masculinities, examining how US bloggers navigate gendered dynamics of power on food blogs, particularly when they approach a highly gendered genre: dude food. After defining and situating this genre within the broader US foodscape, this chapter analyzes the text and visuals on four dude food blogs: the professionally produced Men’s Health food blog, two amateur blogs written by men (Dude Food and Buff Dudes), and one female-authored blog (Domesticate Me!), which includes a “Dude Diet” section. This chapter examines the different ways that these bloggers communicate the culinary characteristics and paradoxical concerns of dude food through a variable set of authorial personae and narrative styles fashioned through prose, recipes, and food photography. Whether produced by men or women, calorie-laden or macronutrient-centric, oriented positively or negatively around fat and muscular male bodies, dude food – and dude food blogs – demonstrate the contradictions of performing masculinity in the twenty-first century, in the blogosphere and beyond.

Drama, film, new media, and television play key roles in the representation of black and Asian British experiences. Linking back to a history of drama, film, and media production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, this chapter considers how leading writers and their productions have taken Britain’s diverse cultures centre stage. The widespread success of works by black and Asian British writers, actors, directors, and producers in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century led some commentators to conclude that the way Britain conceives of itself as a nation has effectively been transformed. Circumstances are, however, more complex and by tracing long-standing barriers around processes of representation this chapter focuses on how these assertions are increasingly challenged. In so doing, it highlights ongoing debates around citizenship and access to representation, and argues that black and Asian British drama, film, new media, and television productions have become central to contemporary debates around Britishness. Ultimately they constitute important cultural markers in the way Britain confronts its colonial heritage and conceives of itself as a nation.

The conclusion comments on the cultural functions that experiences of immediacy possess and outlines the productive contributions that the academic study of literary immediacy can make to literary and cultural studies, especially if it approaches literature from a comparative media perspective. The chapter summarizes that American Literature and Immediacy explores literary narratives of new media encounter, and the stylistic and thematic innovations they inspired, to show that American literary culture absorbs media cultural changes as it participates in the pervasive cultural quest for increased immediacy. The book describes how American writers compared the immediacy effects of photography, film, and television to literature’s representational possibilities to re-envision the imaginative and critical role that literary practice could play in a culture increasingly shaped by mass media. The conclusion also discusses the use of voice recognition software by the novelist Richard Powers and cites his compositional strategy as an example of how contemporary writers continue to successfully appropriate new media technologies in search of immediacy, full expression, and literary innovation.

The introduction argues that American literature participates in American culture’s ongoing quest for immediacy, that the effort to generate ever-new reality effects has sparked the innovation of new literary techniques and forms, and that a common strategy American writers have used since the nineteenth century to create texts of greater immediacy has been to study and rework the reality effects of photography, film, and television. The chapter defines immediacy as a culturally and historically situated effect that indicates how the relation between reality and representation as well as between knowledge and mediation is construed in a given culture. In media history, claims to immediacy play a central role in the competition and alignment between media. The introduction shows that literature participates in this dynamic and promotes an understanding of literature as a medium rather than an art form. The chapter argues that literary studies will produce more complex accounts of literary history if it reconceptualizes the dynamics of literary experimentation and innovation from a comparative media perspective. The introduction also outlines the book’s chapters.

Whilst Saudi government decision-making remains ‘top-down’, the dynamic within this approach has shifted as the top-down system incorporates a consultation process that includes newly established civil society institutions alongside recognition that public opinion cannot always be ignored in the new/social media age. Indeed, of particular significance in Saudi Arabia is growing public awareness, particularly amongst young educated Saudis, of the need for government accountability, transparency and best practices. In addition, there have been indications that the Al Saud leadership – to a degree – recognizes the necessity of being answerable to society on domestic policy-making issues that affect citizens’ lives. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to assess perceptions of new media usage, most specifically social media, as well as the importance of public opinion, government transparency and awareness of political issues, and the impact these have on daily life as linked to politico-economic and socio-cultural change in Saudi Arabia.