It's Playing, Just With Research
Dr. Carrie's Research Outreach
My project all started with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. In 2010 a new animated series was released based on the old toy line (I had these toys as a kid). What amazed everyone is that a toy line and series meant for girls started to develop a following of adult men, who took […]
Read More The Fractured Fandom BookOkay, first, let’s talk about echo chambers. You may have heard this term, especially since the 2016 presidential election. In media studies, an echo chamber is a community, usually one that is online, where the members of that community all have the same interests, values, and beliefs. This group of like-minded individuals talk with one […]
Read More Echo Chambers and FandomFractured Fandom in Online Spaces: Problematic Communication in Communication-Inscribed Places This blog post represents a presentation I gave at the 2017 Central States Communication Association Conference, and is based on research I am doing on my Fractured Fandom project. This project is an online self-interview study conducted in 2015. The larger project is being written […]
Read More Fractured Fandom in Online SpacesIn the thirty-third episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I welcome friend of the podcast Norma Jones to discuss the venerable pop culture brand that is Hello Kitty. In this episode, Norma and I position Hello Kitty not only as a pop icon but as a heroic […]
Read More Pop Culture Lens on Hello KittyThe 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 […]
Read More On the Issues of Disagreement Becoming CensorshipLast 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 […]
Read More The Dark Side of FandomOnline Learning Communities with a Dominican Flair: Arguing for applying the Dominican ethos to online higher education CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Claire Noonan (Dominican University) Introduction It seems that everywhere one looks in the world of contemporary higher education, someone is making an argument for the elimination of faculty in favor of technology as the […]
Read More Online Learning Communities with a Dominican FlairI have been talking about this idea of fractured fandom on this blog for awhile now, because I have been concerned with the problems and tensions fans are facing in contemporary fan communities and fandoms. Across the Internet and around the world, it seems that hardly a day goes by without another story, another anecdote, […]
Read More The Pop Culture Lens: Fan HarassmentOne of the things I have been doing this year (i.e. 2015) is trying to better understand what I mean when I say “fractured fandom” and how it manifests in the world. I’ve been writing about it for a couple years now, I have done an online interview study to gather people’s stories, I have […]
Read More Conversations of GamerGate and Fractured FandomIn the eighth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I celebrate the Easter Sunday holiday by discussing the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Not being religious scholars, we focus our discuss on the usefulness and even necessity for artists and audiences to engage in artistic and critical […]
Read More Pop Culture Lens Episode 8: The Last Temptation of Christ