College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Towards a Theory of Transmedial Immersion(2020) Frew, Kathryn Kaczmarek; Kraus, Kari; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Immersion names a physical, mental, and emotional state in which narrative can take control over a reader. Traditional theories of immersion, rooted in the metaphors of enchantment and transportation, assume that the boundaries of the text constitute the boundaries of the reader’s engagement with the story. In other words, if you close the book, immersion ends. Transmedia narratives, such as the Matrix franchise, challenge these assumptions because the story moves across media boundaries. By putting theories from disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, narratology, and media studies in conversation and testing them against case studies of transmedia narratives, I propose a new theory of transmedial immersion that accommodates all narratives, particularly those crossing media boundaries. Transmedial immersion is the phenomenological experience of a narrative by which the features of the storyworld, characters, and plot become the primary focus of the reader/viewer/player’s consciousness. This immersion bleeds beyond the boundaries of the medium and narrative experience, allowing it to be individual or communal. As I show through a reading of the interaction of print text, augmented reality, and digital narrative in The Ice-Bound Concordance, transmedial immersion relies on distributed, rather than focused, attention, and embraces the materiality and hypermediacy of the reading/viewing/playing experience. Contrary to assumed effortlessness, transmedial immersion requires cognitive effort as readers collate and assemble all the aspects of the narrative. For example, players of the alternate reality games DUST and The Tessera use cognitive blending (as described by Mark Turner) to blur the ontological boundaries of fiction and reality, demonstrated in their use of metalepsis. Finally, transmedial immersion allows the narrative to be simultaneously enjoyed and critiqued, an approach Alexis Lothian calls “critical fandom.” The theory explains how Harry Potter fans reacted to the Fantastic Beasts movies by embracing Newt Scamander as an unlikely hero while raising concerns about cultural appropriation and queer representation. This theory of transmedial immersion not only provides a framework for understanding narrative engagement in the new media landscape, it also prompts literary scholars to reexamine how their assumptions about the process of reading, viewing, and playing texts in a single medium inform their criticism.Item Nuclear reactions: Testing a message-centered extension of enduring predictions about expert and lay person perceptions of and reactions to risk(2011) Evans, Sarah Anne; Turner, Monique M; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this dissertation was to critically examine differences in risk perceptions among experts and lay people. In particular, this project aimed to address inconsistent definitions of "expert" found in the existing literature and to test the predictions of the psychometric paradigm in the context of communication. To examine the effect of message features and expertise on risk perceptions and evaluations of risk characteristics, this dissertation employed a 2 (emotional appeal: fear, anger) x 2 (message topic: nuclear energy, traffic accidents) x 4 (expertise: general risk assessors, traffic safety experts, nuclear energy experts, lay people) between-participants design. The results replicated some findings of the existing research. First, in the main, experts reported lower risk perceptions than lay people. Second, expressed fear led to increased risk perceptions compared to expressed anger. This study also advanced theory regarding risk perception and risk communication in two critical ways. First, differences were found not only between experts and lay people but also among the various expert groups, and, even in the expert groups, these differences were influenced in meaningful ways by the messages viewed. Second, this study demonstrated the potential for messages to affect not only risk perceptions but also the evaluation of risk characteristics, a possibility not previously tested. Specifically, the findings indicated that emotional appeals and message topic can affect evaluations of risk characteristics for risks both related to the message and unrelated to the message. The messages' effects on evaluations of risk characteristics were, in fact, more pronounced than the effects of the messages on general risk perceptions. The results suggest the factors argued to be predictive of risk perception (dread risk and knowledge risk), presented previously as inherent characteristics of risks rather than as targets for influence, can be altered through strategic communication. Both theoretical and applied implications of these results are discussed, and recommendations for future research are provided.