New Media & Society @fms302newmediasoc - Tumblr Blog

Meme

gotta go way back for when we talked about this but I still like it

- Kyle

Lil B & Audience interaction via social media

In Nancy Baym’s paper, “Fans or friends?: Seeing social media audiences as musicians do,” she examines performers’ changing relationships with their audiences via social media. She found that due to easier access and more frequent communication musicians were often developing more personal relationships with their fans, thus also changing the power dynamic between the two. Plenty of performers were excited and touched to receive e-mails and messages via other forms of communication that validated their music as emotionally powerful, and more than entertainment. Many musicians treated their fans as equals, and ultimately fairly often friends (even though, as Baym points out, “friend” is of course specifically defined). Using Baym’s paper as a frame for the general experience of a musician’s relationships to their fans in the new climate of social media, I did extensive research on the fascinatingly bizarre social media presence of rapper, Lil B The Based God. While Baym interviewed these musicians, and I have not done so with B, much of this information was publicly available. Key differences seem to arise between the two experiences because Lil B’s nearly only interaction with fans is through social media. Unlike the performers that Baym interviewed that were prominent before the internet, as well as ones more versed in it, Lil B’s prominence arose through the internet. Lil B live performances are not particularly common, nor has he ever gone on tour. Despite this, he has over 700,000 followers on Twitter. It seems that his audience is more interested in interacting with him just for the sake of the interaction, or interacting with him as a character, than they are talking to him about his music. B is known for tweeting rather eccentric and absurd things:

It’s clear many of his fans enjoy such behavioral antics more than they do his creative output. In fact, because of his insane quantity over quality approach, (one of his many mixtapes, of which he has at least 20 and are uncountable due to their frequent rarity, contains over 600 tracks), as well as his abnormal hip hop style, has garnered him plenty of critics.

It’s because of those that love to hate Lil B, the rapper is willing to entertain more or less any sort of positive response. Whether it be the insane number of people he retweets, or posts screenshots of messages from fans on his blog, B seems to love to publicize any good will he receives.

From here, B encourages his fans to send him letters, etc. with the incentive he’ll post it on his blog:

Out of this discourse, a bizarre subculture of “praising the Based God,” seems to emerge. This also partially due to what Lil B refers to as his, “based” lifestyle, which essentially refers to positivity extreme optimism.

It has evolved into a specific culture of “based” language and bizarre memes. In most cases, B does not reply. It has become more of a case where B’s audience is more interested in a retweet or blog post. This is the primary interaction that Lil B’s audience has with Lil B. What becomes more apparent than B’s music, is the culture that surrounds it. His fans seem far more involved with memes and imagery. For example, similar to the discrepancy of fans versus friends featured in Baym’s article, one of the many memes is B’s reference to his fans as friends. His personal Facebook, as well as fan page are treated the same by B and fans alike.

An excellent example of how pervasive and common the language and behavior have become are the reviews of Lil B’s book on Good Reads:

Although it’s clear that Lil B engages with his fans on social media, it’s far more unprecedented than Baym’s interviewees. As B’s internet presence is more or less his only presence, his fans seem to endlessly communicate him. What’s particularly interesting though, is how these fans are more preoccupied with the subculture surrounding Lil B than his creative output.

Facebook, SNS Sites and Social Capital

Within this course we have examined how society uses social media and how their usage effects both their online and offline "social capital". While social capital has different meanings throughout different platforms, in this case it refers to what we gain through our online activity or inactivity. Examples range from the individual to the community. For instance, an undergrad student may have gained social capital in the form job references or leads while belonging to a educational Facebook group pertaining to their major. A community can also gain social capital through maintaining communication of a specific philanthropic activity occurring in the town at the time, thus generating greatest interest in said community from its individuals.

As the studies of the article “The benefits of Facebook ‘friends’: Exploring the relationship between college students’ use of online social networks and social capital" provided for us have found, Facebook is an effective way for individuals to maintain and generate online relationships within their offline communities, thus maintaining and generating social capital. While this may seem obvious for us now as the study was conducted around 2007, it's my understanding that these results still hold true today. Students and individuals certainly still use Facebook (and now many other SNS sites) to effectively generate and keep tabs on loose relationships like classmates (bridging social capital), interact with circles of friends (bonding social capital), and overall to maintain these relationships over time.

What I am interested in is not just the percentages of what type of social capital are maintained most through Facebook and the demographics and characteristics of these individuals (as the study above aimed to find), but I want to get into the specifics of social capital and maintenance and such. For my project, I will be aiming to update and expand on the study above. I want to further find out specific examples of popular social capital for the individual and community, how social capital generated and maintained within online communities translates into offline communities, and the different SNS platforms which generate social capital. An example I plan to explore in my project would be to examine how a musician uses social media to generate their social capital offline. When the musician turns to social media to generate social capital, what are they looking for (fans to buy tickets to a concert, individuals to help out with their philanthropic cause, relationships on personal levels)? How effectively do their social media efforts translate to their offline community? What platforms are they using to generate social capital and which seem to be the most effective?

Overall, I want to discover more behind the meaning of social capital and how we as individuals use our online relationships to translate the social capital generated through our social media activity to benefit our offline activities and communities.

Cameron Volker

3 more days until winter break hibernation commences!

Cameron Volker

Extra Credit Meme

Shane Terry Williams

Extra Credit Meme

(I absolutely hate this question! haha)

Affordances of Tumblr as a Roleplaying Platform

Character blogs were apparently a one way PR thing of the past. T.V. show pages on network websites would run 'character blogs' which were supposed to be run by the character represented on the blog. In this way, the audience would see inside the mind of the character by what was written or shared on the blog. This allowed for a non-air time form of gap filling for someone who wasn't the character and in relation to the audiences of the television show. You could say that this was a form of roleplaying.

Before Tumblr. ever existed there were forum websites in which people could post text as an 'in-character' interaction - that is, written in the voice or manner of the character they wished to portray, and one which they chose for themselves - with various affordances such as sidebars, usernames pertinent to their character, and maybe even signature graphics which would go at the end of a post to signify that the character wrote the post. Now that Tumblr. does exist, there are a multitude of ways in which the portrayal of a character for the purpose of roleplaying has been expanded. For example, the multiple multi-media capabilities in music, photos, videos, graphics, and with the allowance of html and css in blog aesthetics, have allowed for a more enriched representation of a character for the purpose of roleplaying.

I wanted to examine the affordances of Tumblr. as a social media and microblogging platform in pursuit of the portrayal of a character for roleplaying, and how this allows for a more enriched experience in gaming because of these affordances.

-Jeremie Hong

#fms302 #practicum project

Extra Credit Meme

-Cameron Brown

The Next water Cooler

Twitter is one of the fastest growing and most widely used social networks in the world. Twitter is at a turning point, with recently going public Twitter started to change some strategies to generate revenue. One of these many strategies was to incorporate Twitter with more television avenues. Television and Twitter are becoming more and more intertwined to the benefit of networks, twitter, and hopefully viewers. Television is using Twitter as it has in the past with any new media, it is using it to promote, get the opinions of its viewers, and most of all increase interaction. For this practicum project I researched different types of strategies that television networks and shows for twitter. I will discuss how specific television programs use Twitter strategically, the goals of television shows using twitter, how well they reach those goals, and the effect that Twitter has back on the television show.

There is a new formula that has recently started to develop in this connection between Twitter and television, “Through the two distinct phenomena of discovery and engagement, Twitter and TV drive each other in a complimentary cycle. For example, a hashtag on air can boost engagement by organizing viewers to tweet and interact. In the other direction, a TV-related Trend, or Tweet in a user’s timeline, can drive discovery.” Twitter was not created to be used as a “second screen” but both Twitter and television executives are starting to realize that that is one function it has begun to serve. People tweet while they watch TV it’s as simple as that, whether it is about the show they just watched, are watching or are excited to watch next. Twitter going public gave them an opportunity to start looking for ways in which they could generate more revenue so they began to sponsor networks and shows. They would walk into TV executives offices and promote an idea, “The big pitch: Twitter Amplify, which allows networks to post short, sponsored video replays on Twitter. The ad revenue is split between Twitter and the network and everyone is happy. Throughout this practicum I will argue that Twitter is changing the framework for some television shows and networks for the better, they are changing the way television media is being interacted with by the viewers and how it is beneficial to the networks, Twitter, and viewers at home.

Different networks and shows want to accomplish different things by using Twitter. The example I use the most throughout my research and paper is ESPN. ESPN started not wanting to use Twitter, they thought it would take away from their website hits and thought if reporters were giving out all their information on Twitter no one would watch their television shows. Now ESPN has become heavily reliant on Twitter and has evolved into a network who embraces everything Twitter has to offer. They are being sponsored by Twitter, so they establish a hashtag in hopes to increase circulation, promotion, and viewer’s opinions. They use hashtags as a tool to vote and poll, then twitter takes all these and through the sponsor can then add footage and clips so the followers can see what to vote on or add their opinion too. There are countless examples this is just one episode of Sports Center, like voting for their top plays with #SCtop10 or where viewers can ask expert sports analysts any sports related question they want with #AskInsider. I will also use the Emmy’s as examples, along with shows like the X-Factor and Pretty Little Liars. All of these programs use Twitter in different ways with different goals in mind.

It is tough to dive into different strategies that different shows try to implement in this short presentation. Each show has a different strategy that they implement when working with Twitter and they are used in hopes to generate interaction amongst their viewers and their media. Throughout the practicum I will present multiple findings through research that will discuss the goals of these Twitter strategies, how the shows are engaging with their audience more than ever (some to the point where some shows have even changed the narrative because of the Twittershpere) and then analyze why different shows use these different techniques and how effective they are for the goals they are trying to accomplish.

- Kyle

Evolution of storytelling in gaming

For my practicum project I am going to focus on the evolution and varying levels of complexity of storytelling in video games; from how stories in video games went from simple stories about saving a princess (like in super mario bros.) to stories like the Mass Effect series: played out in three different games, with supplemental story elements present as well (cell phone games, comics, playing online, etc...). I chose this topic because I have played a fair amount of video games, some very simple, others more complex, and am interested in ways that game developers come up with the stories for their products. I’m narrowing my research to three game series, each representing a different type of evolution in story complexity. The game series I am focusing on are Super Mario brothers, the Call of Duty series, and the Mass Effect series. The Mario Brothers series is very simple, very objective based, and the stories in the games have very gradually gotten more complex. The Call of Duty series started off as a pretty basic first person shooter, and has focused more on story in some of their games, while focusing more heavily on gameplay aspects in others. The Mass Effect series is a role-playing game series that’s story is a larger than life space epic that spends much more time moving the plot along than other games usually do.

For my research I’m looking into the history of these game series; articles I can find about why audiences want more complex stories in their games; I’ll interview a couple of self-proclaimed “gamers” about as to what gets them sold on a game’s story; see what the companies that release the games have to say about their games’ stories; as well as look at reviews of the games. In terms of relating it back to what we’ve studied in class, I’ll primarily be using the articles concerning digital storytelling, gaming, and perhaps the transmedia articles as well.

-Kevin Tomkins

What causes emotional instability in video games?

For my practicum project I am researching the psychological effect of video games on people’s emotions. As someone who lives in a gaming household, I hear screams at all hours of the day and night due to gaming rage. I chose this topic because I am interested in knowing what causes the most frustration – cheating, harassment, inability to achieve what the player wants? Connecting to this, I want to study how the genre of the game effects emotion: do people get most upset in first-person scenarios or third person, fighting games versus shooting, MMO versus strategy, etc.

I will interview different types of gamers, ranging from those on the professional circuit down to the casual gamer, with skills in different fields. Another interesting aspect I want to dive into is the single player versus multiplayer aspect of gaming; do people retain the same amount of frustration by themselves as the do with a group of people? I will gather my research from the people I interview as well as the random gamers I will play with in online games.

The primary genre’s I will be studying are MMO games, League of Legends (PC), fighting games, Street Fighter (360) and Injustice (360), sports games, FIFA ’14 (360), FPS games, Halo (360) and Team Fortress (PC), and mobile games, Candy Crush.

-Cameron Brown

Transmedia and Participatory Culture

In the months leading up to the opening of the The Dark Knight, Warner Brothers created a “viral” marketing campaign which is somewhat documented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpuC7HhCPWA (no, I didn’t wear makeup). Participants would work together online and in the real world to solve puzzles and go on scavenger hunts which would unlock advanced screenings of trailers and images before they were made fully public. The production of The Dark Knight films were known for being shrouded in secrecy, with fans of the films jumping on any morsel of information they could get. Any bit of information collected would generate massive amounts of speculation on internet forums, some fans going so far as writing their own scripts for the films around the plot details they had been given.

While my paper isn’t about Batman, the character represents a shining example of how transmedia storytelling should work. He has transcended his comic origins and become ubiquitous across radio, TV, films, video games, fan fiction, etc. Fans can immerse than themselves in any one of these mediums without feeling like their missing out on the whole story. All of these stories exist in a meta-narrative, rather than being parts of a whole. To me this is how transmedia should work.

I put this in contrast with something like The Matrix, which told a single story across multiple platforms. As we can see in Henry Jenkin’s “Searching for an Origami Unicorn,” telling a transmedia story in this format caters only to hardcore fans and can alienate the casual audience. This is why The Dark Knight’s was a successful campaign and The Matrix’s wasn’t. For my practicum paper I will be looking at transmedia and participatory culture, and how it works and when it doesn’t. What is the solid base for any effective transmedia narrative? How can a story be expanded upon, enriching the world for some without estranging others? These questions and more will be investigated throughout.

-Bryson Schwarz

the Online Car Culture Community

In my paper i am going to be talking about the Car Culture Community (CCC) that exists online all over the world. To most people, cars are no more than an expensive appliance that gets you from A to B, but to some they are much more than that. To a car enthusiast they are an extension of our personalities. Something about that connection between man and machine excites millions of people across the globe. All of those people make up the CCC because of their love of cars. Seeing the beauty in the lines of the bodywork, feeling the power of the motor under your feet, having that control of it and being able to go anywhere, there is no other feeling in the world like it.

There are thousands of groups in the CCC that help diversitize not by race or color of the person but by the cars or club you belong to. For example: i drive a 1987 Toyota Supra which is the third generation of the Supra in Toyotas line up, so it's also referred to as a Mark III (MK3). I'm in a group on Facebook that is called the 'Toyota Supra (MK3) Appreciation Club (MK3AC)' which is made up of 3,055 members who all own a 1986-92' MK3 who are all over the globe and are apart of the group because they love their Supras, want to talk to other people who love their Supra, and if they have an issue with their car, who better to ask for help that 3,000 people who have the same car?

This is just that specific car, There is a group for just about every car, every car manufacturer, every cars home country (i.e. US cars, Japanese cars, German cars, etc), even cars that use the same engine even though they are from different counrties (the Dodge Stealth "American" and the Mitsubishi 3000GT "Japanese, different countries of origin, but same motor; so there is a group page for them).

Though car enthusiasts argue a LOT over stupid things like which car is better, which motor is better, etc, at the end of the day we all still love cars and love being apart of this community, we are like a gigantic family. A good example of this would be the death of 'The Fast and the Furious' star Paul Walker's death, how all car enthusiasts from all over the world came together (online at least) to honor his death. I'll go over this in more detail in my paper but this is had a monumental affect on the CCC. To help put this in perspective: this is like if Daniel Radcliffe had died in the middle of making the last Harry Potter movie. How heartbreaking it would've been to all the Harry Potter fans in the world. How would they play the rest of the series out?

-Andrew Meier

The Modern Pirate

[Zak Stremel]

For my practicum project I wanted to deal with the topic of online piracy and copyright infringement. Online piracy in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is defined as, “the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright.” However, because this topic can become quite broad I wanted to focus my efforts on certain aspects of online piracy. More specifically I wanted to answer these two questions:

1) What steps are copyright holders taking to deal with piracy?

2) What steps are pirates taking to deal with the increasing difficulty to maintain their entirely open community?

Due to the fact that pirates usually wish to remain anonymous, researching this topic can be complicated. So the bulk of my research consisted of scholarly articles, books, and pop press to see what actions the copyright holders are taking to deal with online piracy. To gain information about what steps the piracy community is taking to deal with these crackdowns I went to torrent news sites like TorrentFreak and online forums like Reddit, whose fan base tend to skew towards piracy, to discuss the topic with other pirates. A segment of this information also comes from my personal experience while fully immersing myself in the culture of the modern pirate.

To answer the first question I looked at the history of piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing regulation. Government regulations, regulations that are almost entirely backed by major copyright holders, like the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) are well known and have been highly effective in trying to curb online piracy. But more recently Congressional bills like SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), PIPA (Protect IP Act), ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), and CISPA (Cyber Intelligence and Sharing Act) have been making waves in the industry as new measures to try and deal with the increasingly high usage of peer-to-peer file sharing services. Many media companies have also been known to sue online pirates in an attempt to make an example out of them, as well as trying to ‘recoup’ lost profits. The most notable instance of this was the attempts by the music industry to sue the owners of The Pirate Bay for distributing their copyrighted material on the Internet. But these kinds of drastic measures are not just limited to government regulation. ISP’s across the world are attempting to block piracy websites from the Internet all together, which would effectively remove the layman’s ability to pirate at all. It is my firm belief that these kinds of infringements on our freedom of speech cannot be tolerated and it is our duty as citizens to defend our speech.

The second question can become quite a bit more complicated because of the secretive nature of online pirates, but plenty of information can still be gathered. For instance one major step that The Pirate Bay, the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world, has taken to maintain their open community is the creation of the Pirate Party. The Pirate Party is a political party with the express goal of maintaining freedom of speech for everyone, regardless of what they are doing with said speech. Other major actions can be seen in The Pirate Bay’s recent shift from the domain name .sx to .ac after repeated pressure from the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, who controls the Dutch portion of the Sint Maarten (.sx) domain name. However, by far the largest step that has been taken by pirates to maintain their content is the use of Tor. Tor is an encrypted web browser that directs Internet traffic through a volunteer network of thousands of relays to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Tor essentially allows someone to be entirely anonymous on the Internet and makes it virtually impossible for someone to be punished for piracy. Less drastic measures like VPN (Virtual Private Network) are also highly effective at making it impossible for a third party to trace a persons activity on the Internet. This proves that where there is a will there is a way. In other words, no matter what the copyright holders try to do to end piracy, the pirates will always be one step ahead of them.

More information and links can be found on blog at http://therealsnailherder.tumblr.com

The Relationship Between Transmedia Campaigns and Participatory Culture

Joanna Hlavacek

My paper will explore how fans generate content, both in transmedia campaigns and in participatory culture. What is the connection between the two concepts? I'd like to examine how content produced by fans via participatory culture differs from fans' activity in transmedia campaigns. What is the difference between content created from the bottom up (fan fiction, fan-based social media activity, fan art, etc.) and tasks that are "assigned" to fans from the top down by executives (transmedia campaigns for shows and movies)?

Also, who benefits from these relationships between fans and the source of their fandom? Do transmedia campaign exploit fans for their free marketing work, or do these campaigns simply provide an enriched experience for the fans?

Similarly, I'd like to explore how participatory culture effects those who create the movies and TV behind the fandom. For example, when fans speak, do showrunners listen? Does a popular piece of fan fiction influence the showrunners? And, if those in charge of these movies/shows decide to integrate fan-generated storylines into the plot of their program, how will fans react? Who benefits more from this relationship?

A Transmedia Case Study: Pottermore

We all have have been a part of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter somehow. Either we read some or all of the books, watched the movies, played the video games, read the slash fiction, etc. The list goes on and on. However, one of the transmedia elements that is tied to this magical world is often forgotten on peoples lists. That element? Pottermore.

For those of you who don't know what Pottermore is, it is a browser-type game, where you have two options. Either you can play through your own time at Hogwarts, or you can, supposedly enrich your experience of the books and movies by participating in interactive moments. The website was created by J.K. Rowling, and of course a bunch of web designers, some time after the the final book and movie came out. Why did it fail though? Harry Potter fans have been known to take everything to the fullest degree and think of Rowling as somewhat of a God, so shouldn't this website have gotten an insane amount of users? Unfortunately that was not the case.

What I will be looking at in my paper is why exactly Pottermore failed, how that has affected not only the fans of the series, but also what the failure has does to the Harry Potter industry. Even though Pottermore did everything correctly, meaning they opened it up to beta users, had an insane amount of press around the announcement of the site, and even had the creator take the front seat in the project, it is still viewed as the worst venture in this magical paradise. Is it because the game isn’t fun? Is it because the browser game doesn’t live up to the other games that have been released that are attached to Harry Potter? Or is it just as simple as it is not what Potterheads wanted? Well, dear readers, for those answers I guess you will just have to read my paper.

-Kaitlyn Hilgers

Does Reddit fit the definition of an Online Community?

by Jordan Fox

My basic research goal with this project was to find out if Reddit, as a whole, is considered to be an internet community The first step in my research was crafting a precise definition of what an internet community actually is. I really liked the Watson definition of a internet community, but I also added a few things that I found on other sources that I thought would make the Watson definition better. So it's kind of a hybrid. Basically, to prove whether or not Reddit was a community, I asked these questions:

1. Does community participation create individual benefit for individual users?

2. Through the collective participation of users, is able to alter the world outside of their community?

3. Are personal relationships formed? If so, how strong are these relationships? Do users befriend or help other users in the outside world just because they know they're a Redditor?

4. Does the site have a common interest? Reddit is obviously a large site, so could this 'common interest' maybe be substituted for a 'common type of user'? (Explanation: instead of trying to find out if all the user's share one overarching interest, are they similar types of people? For example, are most Redditors students, are they slackers, etc)

5. Is there ritual communication where culture is modified by the community for the groups own purposes?

6. Does the community form any type of new language? Do 'inside jokes' or past posts lead to any new, exclusive verbiage?

7. If Reddit as a whole is not a community, are there small groups of users who post frequently and similarly enough to be considered a community themselves?

8. Finally, do the users participate in the "communion" described by Watson, Rheingold, and MacDonald?

Essentially, I came to this conclusion: Reddit, as a whole, is a community, but the individual subreddits (smaller sections of reddit that focus around a similar interest) have better qualifications of a community, All members of Reddit seem to share a general kinship, with a kind of "us-vs-them" view of non-users, but the site was simply too large and the users were simply too separate to qualify for numbers 3, 4, and 8 in the above definition. The individual subreddits that I studied exhibited nearly all of the above characteristics, making the case for them being an internet community much stronger than Reddit as a whole's. This is mainly due to the smaller size of the subreddits, as member familiarity, a decreased number of posts, and increased interaction between users facilitated the development of these characteristics This was especially true for the personal relationships and communion qualifiers, which were almost non-existent in Reddit as a whole.

Thanks for reviewing this, and let me know what you think!

"The Angel in the House" and the Mommy Blogger: Feminine Narratives in New Media

Corinne Schwarz

I was really struck by the Katie Day Good article I made you all read for my FMS 302 lecture (the historical connections between scrapbooks and Facebook), so I wrote my seminar paper on the historical links between 19th century household manuals and 21st century mommy blogs.

Household manuals were very popular during the Victorian era as a text to promote ideal femininity in the private sphere. Women wrote these texts for other women (usually wives and mothers) to consume. For the female writer during this era, the private sphere of domesticity and maternity was one of the few content areas deemed socially acceptable for women to write about. The female performances illustrated in the household manual aligned with the idea of “the angel in the house,” a self-sacrificial, pious figure whose duty was the physical and moral upkeep of the home.

While the idea of “the angel in the house” is now mostly discussed in the context of Victorian literary studies, I argue that this trope is actually present in the 21st century mommy blog. Certain elements of the angel—her status as a white, middle-class woman performing socially defined “good” motherhood—appear in the digital world, even if we as a society think we’ve moved beyond this limited conception of a feminine, maternal identity.

Using Good’s idea of formal and functional comparisons, I show how household manuals and mommy blogs resemble each other practically and thematically, building to an analysis of “the angel in the house” in 19th and 21st century conceptions. Overall, this paper was really fun to research (I know, right? But grad students LOVE research!) but surprisingly challenging to write—there’s so much information about both artifacts that I ended up finding too much data! While in the grand scheme of paper-writing problems this isn’t an issue, but there were a few different angles I could have illustrated in this paper that I left out for the sake of clarity/cohesion.

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