Virtual World Television as Interactive Television Published

The work that Pooky Amsterdam and I have done on virtual world television has come to a close with the publication of the project’s second journal article in the latest issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. The article is titled “A Community of Televised Avatars: Interactivities in virtual world television promoting and acknowledging […]

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 […]

The Pop Culture Lens Podcast Goes Live!

Christopher Olson (of the blog Seems Obvious to Me) and I present a new podcast, The Pop Culture Lens, where we discuss the media of the past through the lens of today to understand how relevant it is to our modern lives. You can follow the podcast on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, or get the […]

Avatars, Audiences and Interactive Television

This presentation was given at the 100th National Communication Association Conference in Chicago on November 21, 2014. This presentation reflects the work I have done with Pooky Amsterdam to understand the nature and potential of virtual world television as reported in the Journal of Virtual World Research. This presentation was awarded one of the Top […]

Steve Benford and Inhabited TV: The beginnings of VWTV Part 2

Pooky Amsterdam’s interview with a VWTV pioneer concludes with this second part. And it raises the question: how likely is the virtual and the real to converge to produce television? How likely are regular television consumers going to be persuaded to become television producers? Steve Benford and Inhabited TV: The beginnings of VWTV Part 2.

Steve Benford and Inhabited TV: The beginnings of VWTV

Pooky Amsterdam reports on a conversation she had with someone who might just be one of the pioneers of virtual world television. Steve Benford was part of a research project in the United Kingdom who worked on merging virtual reality, virtual worlds, and television at the turn of the century. Their work on “inhabited TV” […]

VWTV Beyond Second Life: InfinityXShark and Star Trek

Although the focus of our virtual world television project is on the social world Second Life, that doesn’t mean it is the only virtual world being used by regular people to create interesting television. As the first of a two-parter, I discuss the work of InfinityXShark and his production of a Star Trek series using the Star Trek […]

Beyer Sellers: Dealing with Second Life

There is a two-for-one today over at Virtual World Television, as we focus today on Beyer Sellers and the VWTV program Metanomics. Learn more about the struggles of producing in Second Life from Beyer Sellers: Dealing with Second Life.

Cultivation theory, media socialization and adolescents’ identity formation

(Originally a class paper written in 2003, with the full paper, including references, found here. Related thinking on this topic can be found here.) When a farmer plants a field of corn, he must provide several environmental conditions to ensure it grows. There must be ample sunlight, water, and fertilizer. The temperature should neither be […]

Virtual World Television: Case studies in the emergence of user-generated participatory television

This post comes from our presentation at Web Science 2012 this past June in Evanston, Il. We are in the process of preparing this study’s results for further conferences as well as a monograph. Introduction Along with producer Pooky Amsterdam of PookyMedia (whom I met producing earlier research [7]), we have begun a study to analyze […]