Satellites of Influence: Television, Streaming, and the New Soft Power - Couverture rigide

Navidi, Soraya

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 9377941415 ISBN 13 : 9789377941413

Editeur : Vij Books, 2026

Synopsis

For much of the twentieth century, geopolitics on screen meant grainy propaganda reels and rival international broadcasters battling for ears behind the Iron Curtain. Today, influence travels through glossy dramas, bingeable series and endlessly scrolling catalogues. Satellites still circle the earth, but the real satellites of influence are the television networks and global streaming platforms that quietly decide what appears, in what order, and for whom. This book argues that to understand power now, we must treat media systems as core political infrastructure.

Satellites of Influence follows the routes by which programmes and narratives cross borders: from state-backed news channels to K-drama export strategies, from regional telenovela networks to platform algorithms that tailor thumbnails for different publics. It shows how states, corporations and creative communities compete and collaborate to shape what counts as normal, modern or plausible on screen. Along the way, it explains how media soft power actually works in practice, why some nations become everyday fixtures in foreign living rooms while others remain marginal, and how censorship and regulation subtly rewrite what can be said or shown.

Written for students, journalists, policy analysts and curious viewers, the book offers more than a tour of notable channels and shows. It provides a framework for reading television schedules, app interfaces and licensing deals as elements of influence infrastructure. Readers come away able to trace how narrative distribution interacts with trade rules, ownership patterns, technological systems and audience habits. By the end, turning on a television or opening a streaming app will look different: less like a private leisure choice, and more like stepping into a contested field where images, identities and transnational audiences are quietly organised.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Soraya Navidi approaches questions of media and international politics as problems of structure as much as of storytelling. Her work in this book is marked by close attention to the mundane infrastructures that carry images and narratives across borders: satellites, cables, catalogues, contracts and interfaces. Rather than treating entertainment and news as separate worlds, she reads them together as overlapping systems that train viewers in how to see others and themselves.Navidi writes with a comparative, historically attuned perspective, drawing lines between Cold War broadcasting, satellite television booms and today's streaming platforms without collapsing their differences. She is particularly interested in how people living between languages and places encounter competing versions of the world on their screens, and how those encounters shape everyday political sense-making. A recurring touchstone in her thinking is the long-running global debate over communication imbalances, from post-war decolonisation to contemporary disputes about digital sovereignty. Throughout this book, she combines empirical curiosity with conceptual clarity, inviting readers to look past individual programmes and controversies to the underlying architectures of power that make some images ubiquitous and others almost impossible to find.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Vij Books
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 9377941415
• ISBN 13: 9789377941413
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 402
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible