Browsing by Subject "Convergence Culture"

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    Comic Fans and Convergence Culture: Community of Readers in The Master of Kung Fu
    (Harlot of the Arts, 2009) Beard, David; Vo Thi-Beard, Kate
    As a member of several fan cultures, I have an interest in the processes that fan audiences use to construct and reconstruct the texts they consume. Additionally, I think of the way (written, oral, and musical) texts construct the individuals who constitute their audiences. Examining Master of Kung Fu provided the perfect combination of these two interests. —David My fascination with representations of Asians in the media began with The Destroyer book series that I read as a teen. While the character Remo at first resisted his fate, he quickly embraced his identity as the next Master of Sinanju. As a Vietnamese American growing up in a small Midwestern town, I have slowly come to my identity as an Asian American. I owe a lot of that to my current life as a Ph.D. student. My research has centered around cultural identity and representations in comics, children's literature, and Asian American magazines. These have fueled my desire to learn more about my own identity. —Kate
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    Feminized Convergence: Bravo TV and Interactivity for Women
    (2015-07) Arcy, Jacquelyn
    This dissertation analyzes the convergence of television and digital technologies in the context of media that is designed for and marketed specifically to women. Taking the female-targeted Bravo TV network and its interactive platforms as a case study, I show how Bravo organizes its participatory, new media initiates around its brand of stylized, melodramatic docu-soap series. My dissertation argues that Bravo draws women into interactivity through the gendered conventions of mass women’s culture, setting a template for addressing women as digital media users through the socially-constructed skills of femininity. I refer to the gendered strategies, practices, and content used to integrate women into convergence culture as “feminized convergence.” My analysis of feminized convergence suggests a reversion to traditional approaches for attracting female audiences popularized in the twentieth century formats like the soap opera and melodramatic woman’s film. Despite the hope that media convergence will “democratize the media,” feminized convergence reveals a turning back to the stereotypical conventions of mass women’s culture and the intensification of gender stereotypes in the digital realm.