CarrieLynn D. Reinhard

In the theory class of the first semester of my first year as a graduate student, I was in a group with two other MA hopefuls, and we wrote a paper on how we would study the topic of how the media influences adolescents’ and young adults’ sexual behaviors. Always the clever one, I termed…

Audience/Reception Studies, Industry Analysis Studies

April 1, 2012

Virtual Living Room: CBS and NBC Experiment with Interactive Television

In a previous post, I began a discussion on how American producers — professionals, semi-professionals and amateurs — are experimenting with using Internet-based distribution to promote and produce interactive television. In that post, I highlighted the case study of the live telecast for the SyFy series Ghost Hunters. In this post, I continue this discussion by…

Audience/Reception Studies, Research Method(ology)s

March 30, 2012

Minutia reception analysis

Methods for understanding the moment-by-moment reception of interactive media Oftentimes in media studies that focus on understanding media reception by the audience or the user, there is a focus on reception writ large and post-hoc. That is, there is a tendency to consider the reactions to a media product by the audience/user after the engagement…

Audience/Reception Studies, Digital Games

March 18, 2012

Playing Digital Games as Scaffolding

[This is a research proposal from 2005 on how a child’s cognitive developmental level could interact with digital games’ formal features. The entire proposal, with references, can be found here.] Introduction The history of the mass media has born witness to a chief concern: how will interacting with this or that medium and/or its content…

Critical/Cultural Studies

March 9, 2012

Raging Bull: Sounds of Obsession

The academic society calls cinema a visual art because it captures moving some slice of reality and from it creates a piece of art through manipulations of time and space. Rarely is cinema referred to as an auditory art because the main focus in experiencing a movie is commonly in watching how the film represents…

Audience/Reception Studies, Research Method(ology)s

March 8, 2012

So, Why Did the Media Fail You?

[This post comes from a 2005 research proposal studying how the media was perceived as hindering people. The entire proposal, with full citations and references, can be found here.] Broadcasting or traditional media have been studied by the uses and gratifications perspective (UGP) to uncover the reasons people use traditional media (television, radio, newspapers, even film),…

Audience/Reception Studies

March 6, 2012

Ugetsu, Intertextuality, and the Western Spectator

I want to start off by taking what may be a radical position on how I am conceptualizing film or really any media text. I’m going to take the position of stripping these texts of their accoutrements, designer labels like “entertainment” versus “new” or “high culture” versus “low culture,” and instead I am going to…

Fandom, Industry Analysis Studies, Superheroes

March 2, 2012

Buffy and Public Discourse on Women’s Health

After Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended it’s television run, Joss Whedon inked a deal with Dark Horse Comics to continue the storyline in comic form. What started with “Season 8” in 2007 has since become “Season 9”. The current season finds Buffy in a world without magic, balancing living as a young, working gal in San Francisco…

Audience/Reception Studies, Digital Games, Research Method(ology)s

January 10, 2012

Women and Video Game Addiction: Experimenting with research narratives

This is an experimental research paper relaying women’s stories, gathered with Sense-Making Methodology interviews, of times they felt they were addicted to video games. My analysis, and thus the framing for this paper’s “narrative”, focuses on the dynamics of power in and around the women’s lives during this period of addiction. This representation of the…

Audience/Reception Studies, Fandom, Industry Analysis Studies

January 9, 2012

Virtual Ghost Hunting: Ghost Hunters and Content Interactivity

With Internet-based television on the rise, we are seeing various producers experimenting with at least three types of interactivity. The most common is access interactivity, which provides control to the television viewer over what to watch, when and where. Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and Facebook are examples of channels experimenting with this access interactivity. Another type…

Author: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard