American Studies
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Item Emancipatory Hope: Reclaiming Black Social Movement Continuity(2019) Winstead, Kevin C; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the Freedom Songs to the Pullman Porters, African Americans have had to find ways to make collective use of the available means of communication for resistance, survival, and political organizing. The Movement for Black Lives carries on this tradition by using social media platforms, specifically Twitter. Accordingly, I asked: How do Black activists use Twitter to communicate ideas of hope and survival? Applying an adaption of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, I examined Black activists’ constructions and utilization of hope for political action through shared artifacts of engagement across Twitter. By engaging both the interface of Twitter, its uses, and significant cultural practices along with a content analysis of Black activists’ online discussion, I identified the technocultural political framing of the current movement for Black lives. I argued that hope becomes a vehicle by which African Americans pass along strategies and tactics for liberation through technocultural practice. I conceptualized these findings as emancipatory hope, a utopian expectation of the collective capacity for dismantling race, class, and gender dominance. This research has implications for how we understand social movement theorizing by including a technoculture lens to the abeyance formation of social movement continuity theory.Item SPINNING NARRATIVES ACROSS POLITICAL DIVIDES: HARNESSING THE CULTURAL POWER OF A STORY WELL-TOLD(2016) Glacel, Ashley; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how two American storytellers, considered by many in their to be exemplary in their craft, rely on narrative strategies to communicate to their audiences on divisive political topics in a way that both invokes feelings of pleasure and connection and transcends party identification and ideological divides. Anna Quindlen, through her political columns and op-eds, and Aaron Sorkin, through his television show The West Wing, have won over a politically diverse fan base in spite of the fact that their writing espouses liberal political viewpoints. By telling stories that entertain, first and foremost, Quindlen and Sorkin are able to have a material impact on their audiences on both dry and controversial topics, accomplishing that which 19th Century writer and activist Harriet Farley made her practice: writing in such a way to gain the access necessary to “do good by stealth.” This dissertation will argue that it is their skilled use of storytelling elements, which capitalize on the cultural relationship humans have with storytelling, that enables Quindlen and Sorkin to achieve this. The dissertation asks: How do stories shape the beliefs, perspectives, and cognitive functions of humans? How do stories construct culture and interact with cultural values? What is the media’s role in shaping society? What gives stories their power to unite as a medium? What is the significance of the experience of reading or hearing a well-told story, of how it feels? What are the effects of Quindlen’s and Sorkin’s writing on audience members and the political world at large? What is lost when a simplistic narrative structure is followed? Who is left out and what is overlooked? The literature that informs the answers to these questions will cross over and through several academic disciplines: American Studies, British Cultural Studies, Communication, Folklore, Journalism, Literature, Media Studies, Popular Culture, and Social Psychology. The chapters will also explore scholarship on the subjects of narratology and schema theory.Item INVISIBLE LABOR FOR DATA: INSTITUTIONS, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND VIRTUAL SPACE(2015) CHEN, YUJIE; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Americans are accustomed to a wide range of data collection in their lives: census, polls, surveys, user registrations, and disclosure forms. When logging onto the Internet, users’ actions are being tracked everywhere: clicking, typing, tapping, swiping, searching, and placing orders. All of this data is stored to create data-driven profiles of each user. Social network sites, furthermore, set the voluntarily sharing of personal data as the default mode of engagement. But people’s time and energy devoted to creating this massive amount of data, on paper and online, are taken for granted. Few people would consider their time and energy spent on data production as labor. Even if some people do acknowledge their labor for data, they believe it is accessory to the activities at hand. In the face of pervasive data collection and the rising time spent on screens, why do people keep ignoring their labor for data? How has labor for data been become invisible, as something that is disregarded by many users? What does invisible labor for data imply for everyday cultural practices in the United States? Invisible Labor for Data addresses these questions. I argue that three intertwined forces contribute to framing data production as being void of labor: data production institutions throughout history, the Internet’s technological infrastructure (especially with the implementation of algorithms), and the multiplication of virtual spaces. There is a common tendency in the framework of human interactions with computers to deprive data and bodies of their materiality. My Introduction and Chapter 1 offer theoretical interventions by reinstating embodied materiality and redefining labor for data as an ongoing process. The middle Chapters present case studies explaining how labor for data is pushed to the margin of the narratives about data production. I focus on a nationwide debate in the 1960s on whether the U.S. should build a databank, contemporary Big Data practices in the data broker and the Internet industries, and the group of people who are hired to produce data for other people’s avatars in the virtual games. I conclude with a discussion on how the new development of crowdsourcing projects may usher in the new chapter in exploiting invisible and discounted labor for data.Item Subjacent Culture, Orthogonal Community: An Ethnographic Analysis of an On-Line Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fan Community(2013) Ali, Asim; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents an ethnographic analysis of the community of fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer whose members frequented the online linear posting board known as The Bronze. Buffy originally aired from 1997 until 2003, but the community that formed at the official Buffy fan site in 1997 continues on in real life and on line, having survived the end of Buffy and the closure of all three of its official posting boards. This study uses an interdisciplinary combination of textual analysis and ethnographic techniques (interviews, participant observation, autoethnography, cyberethnography) to ascertain the importance, relevance, and meaning of The Bronze community to its members, known as Bronzers. I argue that the nature of the linear posting board allowed Bronzers to form a unique and long-lived community by using The Bronze in creative and imaginative ways. In particular, language--to some degree appropriated from Buffy--was used by Bronzers to write a better world for themselves on line. Hence, the community is built on (and maintained by) language that is used in an unusually postmodern manner. As a group, Bronzers tend to be highly educated, literary, and artistic. To Bronzers, much of Buffy's appeal was its emotional realism and imaginative depth. Unusually for television, these elements were combined with strong female leading roles, a cast of bookish and somewhat countercultural characters, and a foregrounding of emotionality and interpersonal relationships. Bronzers were drawn to these aspects of Buffy--which formed its "gothic aesthetic"--and in turn created their own somewhat countercultural community, one that came to reflect their own close ties and emotional attachments. I argue that The Bronze community exists subjacent to mainstream cultural formations, and orthogonal to real life communities. Using this framework, a number of implications emerge for computer-mediated communication in general, including an explanation for the prevalence of hostility in online communication. Furthermore, when situated in its broader context, The Bronze can be seen as a meager palliative to the damaging effects of contemporary post-industrial capitalism, one that nonetheless illumines the brightly stultifying commonplaces that lead people to seek shelter in dimly-lit imagined spaces.Item Museums, Social Media, and the Fog of Community(2011) Wong, Amelia Selene; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the early twenty-first century, museums increasingly turn to "social media" to engage audiences and in these efforts they routinely imagine them as "communities." This dissertation tends to the politics of that choice, which extends a long history of museums employing community as a strategy towards institutional reform. Museums invoke community in numerous ways but without typically articulating those meanings, even though they influence the implementation and evaluation of social media projects. I argue that this lack of articulation creates a "fog" over practices--an ambiguous and confusing context of work--in which community operates as a "self-evident good," but serves traditional interests as much as transformative ones. To expose the many ideas that lay within this fog, I examine how American museums invoked community throughout the last century, showing how they use it both to reinforce their power and alter relations with audiences. After exploring how community has been conceptualized through networked digital media and social media--technologies and a culture that emphasize openness, communication, collaboration, and the materialization of digital bodies--I show how museums continue to use community in complex ways. As social media conflate community with communication--specifically "face-to-face," or immediate, communication, I argue they influence museums to over-value visible acts of communication, which narrows their understanding of online visitor engagement and dilutes the potential of community to shape projects that more conscientiously serve audiences and institutional reform. To illustrate the complexity of these ideas at work, I present three case studies of museums using social media to construct community: the Getty Center's blog, A Different Lens; the Japanese American National Museum's website, Discover Nikkei; and the website of the Science Museum of Minnesota's Science Buzz. I expose the definitions of community at work in each, examine how they influence the use of media, and work to limit and serve the project's various democratizing goals. The conclusion offers a nascent problematique that suggests more critical approaches museums may take for invoking community and using social media towards democratizing aims.