A great new blog by Christopher J. Olson on pop culture, It Seems Obvious to Me, has gone live.
And it all begins with a discussion of virtual bands, vocaloids, and what it all means for how we think about ourselves and each other.
Christopher did the Doctor Who presentation with me at MPCA this past October, and recently appeared on the Director’s Club podcast speaking about Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn.
So for my first official post, I thought I would share this short paper that I wrote for a class on New Media and Culture, taught by Dr. Paul Booth at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. The paper looks at how virtual bands and vocaloid performers represent what Zizi Papacharissi refers to as the networked self, primarily because they highlight the fluidity of gender, the performative aspects of identity, and the flexible nature of reality itself, all of which are important factors in the conception of a networked self. I would like to expand the paper, and in the process devote more time to the discussion of Hatsune Miku and other Vocaloid performers. Additionally, I would like to bring in more scholarship on fan studies to back up some of the assumptions made in the paper (particularly the one about fans negotiating and renegotiating their identities through fannish activities). Therefore…
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It's Playing, Just With Research 