Greetings, whistle-pigs! Er…groundhogs.
I’ve created a WordPress site that will serve as the platform for my digital essay. The link is: popexaminer.wordpress.com
A. Brief Summary: My digital essay is not only argument-driven but also theoretically-based, meaning I’m trying to pull together various threads of scholarship into one “cohesive” whole: celebrity, media, and fan studies, as well as interdisciplinary work on social media. In doing so, I’m pursuing the question of how fans use social media to construct new pop celebrities, as the title of my essay implies. What is live on my WordPress site thus far is a series of five posts that serve as the theoretical framework for my project. What I have left to compose is my case study, which will focus on Betty Who. By the end of my essay, I hope to prove how a “proto-celebrity” no longer needs to rely solely on the machinations of a PR team to gain and sustain media exposure; rather, fans do much of the footwork these days out of sheer interest in the proto-celebrity at hand and in sharing them with the rest of the world in the hopes of creating a fan community.
B. Gaps and/or Problems: As I stated above, the most obvious gap is my missing case study on Betty Who, which I’m still working through. In terms of problems, I have two concerns: (1) how “multimedia” or “digital” my project is, and (2) how my tone translates onto a blog. I’m afraid of sounding disingenuous by pandering to what a “blogger” should sound like, but I’m also afraid of sounding too academic. At the end of the day, though, I’d rather sound academic (and risk sounding pretentious) than phony.
C. What Sort of Feedback Would Be Most Useful: Here are some guiding questions that way I can avoid micromanaging. How can I better include more “affordances” of the web to make my project seem more multimedia? Keep in mind, though, that my case study of Betty Who will be very multimodal. Are there any places where you think I could condense or pull back on some of my theorizing/frameworking? How well do you see my own authorial voice coming through (since I draw from the work of numerous scholars)? Additionally, I’m conceiving each post as both a separate entity and a part of a larger whole. Does each post achieve those criteria? If not, which ones could I improve, and how could I improve them? Finally, one smaller point: is it redundant to repeat the same, long title for each blog post? Would it be more effective if I just titled them “Part x of ???” or something that more accurately reflects the specific post’s argument, paired with the “Part x of ???” parenthetical?
Writing in a Digital Age 