A thoroughknowledge of the community is required to be able to understand the group, as well asunderstand the individual’s place in the whole. This knowledge allows a group to build asocially imagined concept of communal belief. It creates a method for demarcating who is and isnot an insider, and allows the group to come to terms with their shared ‘canonical’ text(s).
17More
The Dynamics of Fandom: Exploring Fan Communities in Online Spaces | Myc Wiatrowski - A... - 3 views
-
-
- ...11 more annotations...
-
Often fans are recognized within the American cultural zeitgeist in just this way: fanatical, out of control, frantic and frenzied. In point of fact, fangroups are frequently ‘Othered’ by the dominant culture at large as being significantly differentfrom the mainstream norm.
-
we can say that fans are a group that consumes a text (or texts) enmasse , that in turn uses that consumption as a basis for creating something new that is tailored totheir specific concerns. In short, a fandom can be defined by its consumption of a text and itssubsequent cultural productions of and about that text.
-
we must turn our attention to the productions of the insider community. That is to say we must recognize that the urtext , if it can be so described, does notmeet the needs of the group, so new material is produced by the community to fill the void.
-
“fans of a popular television series[and/or film] may sample dialogue, summarize episodes, debate subtexts, create original fanfiction, record their own soundtracks, make their own movies – and distribute all of thisworldwide via the internet”
-
In creating new artifacts for the group, thus theoretically fillingthe needs of the cyber-fandom as a whole, the group is further able to fashion both an ideologicaland consumable concept of Browncoat-ness and further contribute to the re-visioning and re-drawing of their community.
-
At a very base level these available narrative strains that existwithin the community function as a group rhetoric that ultimately reflects the fictional“Browncoats” of the program’s universe.
-
Each party in a struggle over hegemonic power exercises their leverage from time to time, creating an almost ever present struggle in fancommunities between themselves and the producers of their canon.
-
Fans attack and criticize media producers whom they feel threaten their meta-textual interests, but producers also respond to these challenges, protecting their privilege by defusing and marginalizing fan activism. As fans negotiate positionsof production and consumption, antagonistic corporate discourse toils to managethat discursive power, disciplining productive fandom so it can continue to becultivated as a consumer base.
-
There is a delicate balance between fans and media producers suggested by Johnson. Fansnegotiate their power in virtual spaces, both consuming and producing texts, yet corporate mediaentities struggle to both restrict fan activity, thus allowing them further opportunity to exploitthem capitalistically, while concurrently attempting to cultivate fan production to a degree so asnot to alienate the consumer base all together.
-
Building a complex, onlinecommunity constructed of both a social imaginary and an empirical reality allows the group tonot only form a space wherein they can participate but where they can assert their control over culturally significant texts.
-
n moving to online spaces fandoms remain able to function as traditional communitieswould be expected to. But the mediated interface and its ability to allow communities tocongregate in greater numbers regardless of spatial or temporal limitations, also permits cyber-fandoms to amplify their voice, giving them greater power in space as Foucault would have it.Exercising their power from self-created points in a virtual space allow the community greater Wiatrowski control over both the texts upon which they’ve created a group and over their imagined sense of the community. In the end, the move to online spaces allows the group to exist both as it oncehad and in ways that are new and more powerful than they had perhaps previously imagined.
How Amazon Prime Became More Successful than Anyone Imagined | TIME.com - 0 views
11More
The One-Sided Problem of Oversexualization in Video Games - 0 views
-
-
These are the “ideal forms” of each of these characters. Yet only one of them is ever viewed sexually to outsiders, the women.
-
Both are genetic mutants, by any stretch of the imagination, but one is sexual, and the other isn’t.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
I was playing through Playstation All-Stars last week and found that in the entire roster, there were two women. Fat Princess and Nariko, both from rather obscure games. The rest? All men. Even the cartoony ones. All 16 others. You’ll find a similar ratio in Super Smash Bros, another collection of video games’ most famous icons.
-
The sexiness of the existing women in video games is not the problem. It’s really a subjective argument about why guys lust after Lara Croft, yet girls don’t have eyes for Nathan Drake.
2More
Rembrandt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
2More
The Radio as New Technology: Blessing or Curse? A 1929 Debate » - 0 views
-
Accommodated as we are to mass media, we must work to imagine the impact of commercial radio broadcasting in its early years. From the late 1800s, new electronic devices had been expanding the realm of shared human experience — people conversed on telephones, sent news through telegrams, played records on phonographs, and enjoyed films in local theaters. But until the radio, nothing offered such widely shared simultaneous mass experience. By turning on your radio set, you could listen to a jazz band, baseball game, religious service, even a president’s speech, live, along with millions of fellow listeners.
2More
Facing hereditary breast cancer and its agonising choices - 24/06/2014 - 0 views
9More
More NSA revelations: backdoors, snooping tools and worldwide reactions - 0 views
-
“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systemic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analysing it without prior judicial approval,” he wrote
-
A Presidential Task Force set up by Barack Obama to examine the NSA issue has issued its first report and has concluded that: “Excessive surveillance and unjustified secrecy can threaten civil liberties, public trust, and the core processes of democratic self-government.”
-
Many people in the security industry remain unconvinced by RSA's denials.
- ...1 more annotation...
-
Some members of the group wanted him to step down following his part
5More
Does the Internet Make You Dumber? - WSJ - 2 views
-
Ms. Greenfield concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can improve the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of simultaneous signals, like air traffic control. But that has been accompanied by "new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes," including "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination." We're becoming, in a word, shallower.
-
A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers, says Nicholas Carr.
-
A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers, says Nicholas Carr.
-
I need to know if you find anyone else besides Nicolas Carr who is saying this!! : /
17More
Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With 'Curation' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Not just on Pinterest, but also in the form of dopamine-boosting street-fashion blogs and cryptically named Tumblr blogs devoted to the wordless and explanation-free juxtaposition of, say, cupcakes and teapots and shoes with shots of starched shirts and J.F.K.
- ...14 more annotations...
-
Not because I don’t like magazines. In many ways, I like them better. But they’re too grounded in space and time, too organized and linear, too collaborative and professional to deliver the synaptic frisson available from the stream-of-consciousness image blog.
-
A friend of a friend calls his addiction to sites like these “avenues for procrastination,” but I think there’s something else involved. Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape, the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from monotony, frustration and boredom
-
So maybe we are like the rats, and what we’re seeking while idly yet compulsively cruising Pinterest is really just the reliably unpredictable jumble of emotions that their wistful, quirky juxtapositions evoke. Maybe that is our rectangularity.
-
This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing.
-
In other words, your average Pinterest board or inspiration Tumblr basically functions as a longing machine.
-
They target aspects of our lives that “are incomplete or imperfect”; involve “overly positive, idealized, utopian imaginations of these missing aspects”; focus on “incompleteness on the one hand and fantasies about ideal, alternative realities on the other hand”
-
People don’t post stuff because they wish they owned it, but because they think they are it, and they long to be understood, which is different.
-
In fact, the company discourages people from posting images they have created themselves, preferring that they venture out into the wilds of the Internet looking for beautiful things to bring back to the cave.
-
“Curation” does imply something far more deliberate than these inspiration blogs, whose very point is to put the viewer into an aesthetic reverie unencumbered by thought or analysis. These sites are not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so.
-
But products are no longer the point. The feeling is the point. And now we can create that feeling for ourselves, then pass it around like a photo album of the life we think we were meant to have but don’t, the people we think we should be but aren’t.