Suchergebnisse

Although, as qualitative consumer research and material culture studies have demonstrated, objects can be rich sources of meaning and stability, they also entail basic limitations on human action. Interviews conducted as part of a study of one city's nerd-culture scene permitted analysis of the constraints that materiality imposes on fan activity. Fans must have access to certain physical objects in order to realize their practices, and collecting, storing, and purging these objects in domestic spaces constitutes a pragmatics that sets limits and exerts pressures on participants.

This book offers a series of short, provocative essays about value and reputation in the world of American comic books. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's analyses of fields of cultural production, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time explores why works have the reputations that they do and what it might take to re-structure the comics world along different principles

Some initial findings are presented from a media monitoring project on the Covid-19 pandemic's impacts on comic cons and other fan events during 2020. We analyzed a sample of 77 items from a corpus of 813 articles, identifying story lines and themes that framed this moment of upheaval and uncertainty.

Background:To investigate whether duration of residence (DOR) impacts dementia literacy in Chinese Americans aged 40–64.Material:A total of 151 Chinese Americans answered a self-administered, true/false survey assessing knowledge of dementia symptoms, treatment, cause and prognosis. Two groups were dichotomized and compared based on DOR in the USA.Discussion:DOR did not greatly impact the understanding of dementia between respondents with a < 20-year versus a ≥ 20-year DOR. Both groups exhibited deficiencies in recognizing the symptoms of dementia.Conclusion:Gaps in dementia knowledge reflect a stigma surrounding mental illness among Chinese Americans, and impact the seeking of professional care.

San Diego Comic-Con is North America's premiere fan convention and a key site for mediating between media industries and fandom. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Comic-Con to abruptly move its programming onto an array of digital platforms in an apparent "platformization" of the con. Informed by research on fan conventions, media industries, and the platformization of cultural production, this analysis of the online convention argues that Comic-Con was primed for platformization because it is already platform-like. Conventions organize markets, infrastructures, and governance to bring together attendees, media industries, and other "complementors." Moreover, platform logics were already shaping the convention pre-pandemic in the form of experiential marketing and brand activations designed to capture attendee data. Rather than a radical break, the Comic-Con@Home online convention and in particular Amazon's Virtual-Con activation are part of a longer process of reconfiguring the relationships between fan conventions, cultural producers, and platforms.

When comics fandom emerged as a distinct media-oriented community in the 1960s, one of the things it brought with it from science-fiction fandoms was the convention. Buoyed by the synergistic relationship between Hollywood and the San Diego Comic-Con and the growing prominence of 'geek' culture, comic conventions, comic art festivals and related media fandom events across North America have enjoyed enhanced prestige, attention and attendance over the last fifteen to twenty years. But what kind of event are these 'con events'? This article builds on a cultural mapping survey of convention organizers. The survey's goal was to suggest something of the scope and diversity of the contemporary sector. Behind this variation, we define the con event as an organizational and cultural form that is (1) oriented to media, (2) audience-facing and (3) concerned with circulation.

Point of Sale offers the first significant attempt to center media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture. It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars with their fingers on the pulse of both the changes that foreground retail in a digital age and the history that has made retail a fundamental part of the culture industries. The book reveals why retail matters as a site of transactional significance to industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and interactional participation for consumers. In addition to examining how industries connect books, DVDs, video games, lifestyle products, toys, and more to consumers, it also interrogates the changes in media circulation driven by the collision of digital platforms with existing retail institutions. By grappling with the contexts in which we buy media, Point of Sale uncovers the underlying tensions that define the contemporary culture industries