With NBC's Community and ABC's Cougar Town on hiatus, their respective showrunners' Twitter accounts become key outlets for implicitly or explicitly encouraging fan involvement and/or activism.
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Internet
Promoting an Uncertain Future: Showrunners (on Hiatus) on Twitter IV
Fantasy Football: Fandom Fail
Fantasy football engenders a complex experience of fandom.
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Throat Buckles and Nerd Glasses: Performance of White Hipster Celebrity Drag
Mediated drag images are often foregrounded, particularly as contemporary scholarship posits how reality television and music video challenge disseminated images of drag through parody and confrontational disregard for societal convention. Until recently, such representations were limited to television, film, and music video. But several drag artists have developed huge followings based on their online...
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The Materiality of Media
As culture becomes increasingly digitized, arguments for the “dematerialization” of media are becoming commonplace. However, media have always been, and remain, embedded in and structured by material objects, networks, and practices that delimit their uses and meanings.
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Spaces of Speculation: How We Learned Osama Bin Laden Was Dead
As one of the first events of this magnitude that has taken place squarely within the Twitter era, Osama Bin Laden's death reveals the challenge facing traditional media outlets when Twitter runs rampant with speculation (and real reporting).
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Analog Video and Derisive Laughter
What's so funny about old videotape?
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Replying with the Enemy: Showrunners on Twitter II
For showrunners, the risks and rewards of replying to Twitter users are magnified: replying could create a sense of a personal relationship with their followers, but getting into long conversations with fans (especially antagonistic fans) could spark controversy.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Net Neutrality
Despite its reputation as a wonky and bewildering issue, net neutrality actually boils down to a pretty simple principle of openness and nondiscrimination. It’s important to point out, then, that a lot of those who are talking about “net neutrality” these days aren’t actually talking about this.
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Ambient Nationality
For all the interest in using foreign media to immerse oneself in a "foreign" nationality, perhaps what a lot of us want/need is simply a background, faint, weak, unobtrusive ambience.
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Report From Internet Research 11
IR 11 is wildly interdisciplinary, tied together largely by research topic, leading to a number of fascinating connections, disjunctures, and challenges.
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The ACTA Retreat: Their Ignorance, And Ours
The ACTA retreat is indicative of a larger crisis in how media policy works today. Specifically: we have no idea how media policy works today.
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Bike Box
Over the summer, we launched a location-aware iPhone app we called Bike Box. The goal in developing this project was to use smartphone technology to enhance rather than replace a user’s experience of physical space.
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What Do You Think? The Chilean Mine Rescue
The rescue of a group of Chilean miners this week has become a media phenomenon. We want your opinion on it all.
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Anti-Social? The Classic Aesthetic of The Social Network
The biggest fiction in the popular press about the film dubbed "the Facebook movie" is that it is, in fact, about Facebook.
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