I haven't a clue why so little is written about humor. Having a background in sociolinguistics, I have a particular interest in language practices and in how things get said, not just in what gets said. Humor plays such an important role in the community making process, cutting across fan interactions and practices, including romantic and erotic talk.

As I argued in Cyberspaces, humor is bound up with class, gender and by extension race and ethnicity and nationality.

Due South with its American fan base was part of what Chris Barker calls reverse flow. In his 1999 book, Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities, he challenged the notion that the one-way flow of American programming to the rest of the world would lead to the homogenization of culture and the erasure of local and national identities. The more likely outcomes, he argued, were fragmentation and hybridization.

, these young people enact relationships to the subject and process of fanart making, fellow fanartists and the fan community that are not unlike those of the medieval European craftsman to his craft, guild workshop and community. Appreciation of local and global aesthetics is quickened, and a desire to develop a high level of skill is inspired.

personally relevant content

The broader field of social semiotics is the site of intersection between two more currents, not usually called semiotics but in practice implicitly or explicitly drawing on a social semiotic orientation and tool kit. ‘Discourse’ theory/analysis is widely used in many branches of social research. ‘Cultural studies’ is likewise a popular research tradition. Social Semiotics, which has many affinities with both, can act as a grand node, linking each to the other, reframing them within a wide network of related traditions. At the same time it can serve the salutary effect of bringing these vigorous traditions into the field of semiotics, energising semiotics and making its insights more widely available and appreciated.

Cybertext is based on the idea that getting to the message is just as important as the message itself. In order to obtain the message work on the part of the user is required. This may also be referred to as nontrivial work on the part of the user.[2]

The fundamental idea in the development of the theory of cybernetics is the concept of feedback: a portion of information produced by the system that is taken, total or partially, as input.

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in "literature" and reader interaction[1].

the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works.

"literature" has always been a contested category.

To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all.

N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article Electronic Literature: What Is It. She argues in her 2008 text Electronic Literature that, "electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast 'digital born,' and (usually) meant to be read on a computer."[1]

Computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects

But for the academic critic, I think the stakes are higher. One can like or dislike something, but we scholars, particularly of popular media, have a special obligation to explain something new about the works we discuss. There are plenty of fans of The Wire and Mad Men and Halo and World of Warcraft out there. The world doesn't really need any more of them. What it does need is skeptics, and the scholarly role is fundamentally one of skepticism.

While media scholars do not solely write about what we like, the prevalence of books focused on "quality television" shows that appeal to academics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, and now Mad Men—especially when compared to the lack of similar volumes or essays about more lowbrow or mainstream programs—suggests that taste is often more of a motivating factor for our scholarship than we admit. We should own up to our own fannish (or anti-fannish) tendencies regarding our objects of study, not regarding fan practices as something wholly separate from our academic endeavors by acknowledging how taste structures what we choose to write about. I'd push it further: the media scholar ought to resist aca-fandom, even as he or she embraces it. The fact that something feels pleasurable or enjoyable or good (or bad) need not be rejected, of course, but it ought to issue an itch, a discomfort. As media scholars, we ought to have self-doubt about the quality and benefit of the work we study. We ought to perform that hesitance often and in public, in order to weave a more complex web around media—not just to praise or blame particular works.