Volume 36, Issue 4

This article presents an analysis of Turkish film screenings in Belgium as a case study of diasporic media practices in Europe. Turkish blockbusters have only recently become part of the programs of Belgian mainstream film theaters. This study provides insight into both historical and recent dynamics that characterize this new film and audience segment in film exhibition. After analyzing transnational patterns of distribution, selection and promotion (in Belgium and in Europe), we put forward that changing circulation patterns and the associated power relations (co-)define the social and spatial conditions of reception, resulting in the creation of new semi-public diasporic spaces. Thus, the links between the political economy of media and audience research are discussed. The findings of this article are based on archival and press research and a series of semi-structured expert interviews with exhibition and distribution professionals, as well as social workers and representatives from Turkish cultural associations.

The selection of ‘good’ pictures has increasingly become a crucial factor when transmitting news to the recipients. Every day thousands of events are happening and millions of pictures are taken. By choosing photographs for newspapers and magazines, photographic editorial departments want to attract the recipients' attention, evoke emotions and get them to read their stories. But what exactly is a good picture that meets these expectations? Which criteria are decisive for selecting pictures and what effects of this selection can be measured on the recipients' side? This article presents the results of a research project carried out at the University of Erfurt in 2008 and conducted in collaboration with the German weekly magazine stern . It deals with the selection and impact of press photography by introducing the concept ‘photo news factors’. Applying the traditional news value theory to pictures, photo news factors are defined as selection criteria that, on the part of the communicator, decide whether the press photos are worth publishing. Furthermore, they are assumed to exert an influence on the intensity of attention that a picture arouses.

This article examines whether the attention to cultural products on the internet is more democratically structured (in terms of gender and genre distributions) than in traditional print media, and how these types of media attention affect commercial success. For the U.S. fiction book releases in February 2009, I analyze consumer ratings at the web store Amazon.com and the social networking site Goodreads.com. The results show that on the internet far more books receive attention, and that this indeed comes to the advantage of female authors and authors of popular fiction. Moreover, online publicity positively affects commercial success. These outcomes suggest that online attention to cultural products dampens the effects of institutionally embedded evaluations, while word-of-mouth mechanisms are becoming increasingly prominent in terms of how cultural products are discussed.

This article examines interactivity using the concept of dialogic relationships introduced by Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and the concept of transtextuality, proposed by French literary theorist Gérard Genette. These concepts help to reveal two parallel strata of interactivity: the stratum of interactivity between the viewer and the message and the stratum of interactivity that exists inside the message and its surrounding. It concludes that interactivity can be conceived as a relation and that the message is a co-creation. The study contributes to the theory of interactivity, which challenges the existing – and rather limited – advertising theories and offers an alternative Bakhtinian perspective on the phenomenon of interactivity.