Interpersonal Culture on the Internet. Television, the Internet and the Making of a Community

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Year:
Pages:304
ISBN:0-7734-6380-1
978-0-7734-6380-6
Price:$219.95 + shipping
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“Community” is a highly contested concept, and in the milieu of mass media, it is even more highly fraught. The book bolsters our understandings of the substantive processes involved, particularly those of boundary formation, spatial dimensions of communities, and how communities are always both embedded and emerging entities. Finally, it deals with the question of how seamless and/or disruptive the new technology of the Internet is vis-à-vis our traditional practices of community formation and maintenance. Ethnographic in method, and deals with community concepts such as networks, geography, boundaries, and politics.

Reviews

"The authors have provided a story of boundaries and boundary trespass, an insider's account of a community formed at the crossroads of commercial cultural consumption and new technologies, of face-to-face interaction only possible following mediated and re-mediated interaction through Whedon's too-smart Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, and its web- and narrative-based watering hole, The Bronze ... In the tradition of thorough participant-observation ethnography, the authors capture the mundane worlds of people who watch television, become fans of a particular series, go online to talk about that series, and end up developing a community ... This final product is a tightly-woven and theoretically-informed narrative ethnography of real/virtual community development to which the authors invite our participation ..." - Professor Kathryn Henderson, Texas A&M University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface by Kathryn Henderson
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Vampire slaying on TV, the Internet, and Ethnography – Come as You Aren’t?
1. The Place of Networks, Networks in Place
2. Remaking the Local and Remaking the Locale
3. Border Patrol: Rule-Making and Community Boundaries
4. Practicing Bronzer Politics: Demanding a Voice, Reforming, and Revolting
5. The Television Node Revisited – How or When Will The Bronze Leave Buffy Behind?
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

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