Bücher der Reihe Communication Perspectives in Popular Culture

Popular culture helps construct, define, and impact our everyday realities and must be taken seriously because popular culture is, simply, popular. Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture brings together communication experts with diverse backgrounds, from interpersonal communication, business and organizational communication, mass communication, media studies, narrative, rhetoric, gender studies, autoethnography, popular culture studies, and journalism. The contributors tackle such topics as music, broadcast and Netflix television shows, movies, the Internet, video games, and more, as they connect popular culture to personal concerns as well as larger political and societal issues. The variety of approaches in these chapters are simultaneously situated in the present while building a foundation for the future, as contributors explore new and emerging ways to approach popular culture. From case studies to emerging theories, the contributors examine how popular culture, media, and communication influence our everyday lives.

This book explores contemporary media's reliance on nostalgia in video games, movies, streaming sites, and even social media in their attempt to attract audiences of all generations. The book is interdisciplinary in approach and looks at the implications of this mediated past-focus on our cultural identities and our perception of memory itself.

This book explores the communication issues and power dynamics in fandoms and fan communities to understand the problems fans experience when they interact with one another. It uses fractured fandoms as the case study to consider how these problems relate to all areas of people's lives.

This book offers insight into the many identity work processes in play in the construction of yoga categories, inviting readers to consider pop culture yoga, a distinct way of understanding this complex phenomenon.

This edited collection focuses on varying communication perspectives in the Fifty Shades of Grey series including rhetoric, consent, romance, news coverage, and sexual education.

The contributors of this collection explore various aspects and questions surrounding craft beer culture from perspectives of business, gender, community-building, branding, and culture.

This book analyzes representations of otherness in a variety of romantic Anglophone texts from the 1950s to the 2010s using an array of approaches. Together, contributors suggest a trajectory of increasing openness to diversity, but also the many ways in which popular fiction continues to fall short, perpetuating old tropes and stereotypes.

Communicating with Memes: Consequences in Post-truth Civilization investigates the consequences of memetic communication, including online harassment, the election of Donald Trump, and the resurgence of once-eradicated diseases. The author examines the causes of these consequences, and what action-if any-should be taken in response.

Drawing upon the works of Marshal McLuhan, Joseph Campbell, Thomas S. Frentz, and Janice Hocker Rushing, this book unpacks U2's long-term success, continued relevance, and popular appeal through the lenses of Agape (spiritual, communal love), Amor (romantic love), and Eros (erotic love).

Being a fan helps people to discover their identities, find friends, develop a sense of belonging, express themselves creatively, and act as powerful creators and participants in a capitalistic system. At times, however, being a fan becomes problematic, especially when clashes with other fans occur both inside and outside of their fandoms and fan communities. As their communication becomes contentious, power imbalances destabilize collectives and fans experience fear, sadness, pain, and harassment. Such problematic situations can become ';fractured fandoms.' Fractured Fandoms: Contentious Communication in Fan Communities observes the problems or fractures that occur within and between fandoms as fans and fan communities experience differences in interpretation, opinion, expectation, and behavior regarding the object at the center of their fandom. The book demonstrates the fractures through an examination of self-interviews, collected news stories, and previous research regarding these problems, ultimately providing an assessment of the causes and effects of such fractures and the larger social and cultural issues they reflect.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the connections between communication, organization, gender, discourses, and ethics in the works of Joss Whedon. It examines how characters go to work in them, how characters fight against them, and how some organizations themselves are characters.

This edited collection explores the malleability and influence of body image, focusing particularly on how media representation and popular culture's focus on the body exacerbates the crucial social influence these representations can have on audiences' perceptions of themselves and others. Contributors investigate the cultural context and lived experiences of individuals' relationships with their bodies, going beyond examination of the thin, ideal body type to explore the emerging representations and portrayals of a diverse set of body types across the media spectrum, paving the way for future research on this topic. Scholars of media studies, popular culture, and health communication will find this book particularly useful.