Category: Audience/Reception Studies
-
The Pop Cultures Lens on Sherlock
In the thirty-first episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome friend of the podcast, and Sherlockian, Malynnda Johnson to discuss the indelible nature of famous British detective, Sherlock Holmes. In this episode, Malynnda shares her extensive fan-based knowledge of the classic private investigator as the conversation considers the influence Sir…
-
Identification with Favorite Media Personae
I presented this study at my first International Communication Association conference in May 2005. It was the first major study I did by myself in graduate school. I remember making these slides to show on a projector — there was no PowerPoint! I should probably revisit it. Identification with Favorite Media Personae: A phenomenologically-informed conceptualization of…
-
Thoughts on Sex in FanFic
Written in October of 2005… I started researching fan fiction, the creation of stories centered on characters or storylines of preexisting media texts, after I came upon a website for such creators and consumers. Recently one particular phenomenon has attracted my attention: heterosexual relationships wherein a character, depicted in her “home-text” as a strong, independent,…
-
Convergent Wrestling: Call for Chapters
Official Call for Chapter Proposals Title: Colliding Inside the Squared Circle: The Convergent Nature of Professional Wrestling Editors: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard (Dominican University) & Christopher J. Olson (Dominican University) Purpose: The concept of convergence represents one of the most pervasive buzzwords in media studies, but with good reason. In essence, convergence concerns how the boundaries…
-
On the Issues of Disagreement Becoming Censorship
The conversation I had one night and into the next morning with the GamerGate supporter (i.e. a ProGGer) was long. It started off with my comments on Twitter about the need to not censor texts and instead use them to create dialogue. But the problem is that people too often don’t want to talk about…
-
Experiencing the Co-Construction of Kayfabe: AAW Take No Prisoners
This blog post expands on the ideas of the co-construction of kayfabe, an idea I presented at the Popular Culture Association 2016 conference in Seattle. For this post, I reflect on a live wrestling event I attended in an attempt to define what my partner, Christopher Olson, and I mean by “convergent wrestling.” The entire presentation…
-
This Jedi’s Reaction to The Force Awakens: An Autoethnography in Fractured Fandom
I didn’t go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens when it was released in theaters. I couldn’t bring myself to. And this is coming from someone who saw — willingly and enthusiastically — each of the prequels in midnight openings. I saw Phantom Menace numerous times in the theater — even while doing an internship…
-
The Dark Side of Fandom
Last fall the call went out from the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (aka C2E2) for proposed panels for the 2016 convention. I had just been part of a very successful discussion at an academic conference that considered the problems, tensions, fractures that fans have been facing, online and offline, for years. But that was…
-
Reviewing the Virtual Worlds Entertainment Study
These thoughts were produced at the end of my time on this project, in May of 2012, for the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University. These thoughts involve my reflection on the project that I completed as part of the research group, and do not reflect the thoughts of anyone else involved with the…
-
Virtual World Television and Interactive Television
This is the end result of the work I have been doing with Pooky Amsterdam. This paper is the write-up of the presentation Avatars, Audiences and Interactive Television. I do not think there is enough in this paper to make pursuing publication worthwhile, but I do hope to use the categorizations of the three types…
It's Playing, Just With Research 