Fanception and Musical Fan Activity on YouTube

Author(s):  
Christopher Cayari

Everyone is a fan of something, whether it be musicians, sports teams, popular culture icons, or social media stars. This chapter adapts a concept from a blockbuster movie called Inception to develop the theory of fanception, a phenomenon in which a person develops their own fandom within an already established group of fans. It provides examples of how fans’ musical user-generated content on the popular video streaming site YouTube contribute to musical learning and virtual communities. YouTube has provided a site for people to create musical Harry Potter puppet shows, one-person a cappella homages to popular commercial artists, and massive virtual choirs organized by contemporary composers. By understanding the practices within fandoms that affect the way people create content through social media, educators may be able to develop curricula and projects that help students create within the classroom, thus equipping them with the skills to be lifelong music makers and content creators.

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Jeacle

Purpose Online user reviews have increasingly become a popular means by which the lay person can both procure advice and offer personal opinions. Amazon, the electronic retail giant, is a prominent example of a site which hosts such user generated content; the opinions of its repository of reviewers have become an important source of assurance provision. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that Amazon provides an example of how audit logics have entered new spaces. In Amazon, the author witnesses the construction of auditability in the virtual world. This may explain the popularity and authority seemingly enjoyed by user reviews. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses the methodological approach of netnography (Kozinets, 2002). This new methodology has emerged in order to undertake ethnographic research within virtual communities. Applying this methodology to the case of Amazon involved becoming familiar with the operational features of the site and analysing its textual discourse. Findings The paper identifies in Amazon, Power’s (1996) three examples of how auditability is invoked: through rhetorics of measurability, auditable systems of control, and reliance on experts. The paper therefore argues that online user reviews are reflective of the extension of audit society into the virtual world. Originality/value The paper explores the possibilities of the virtual world for accounting research, a world which is an increasingly prominent feature of popular culture. In addition, the paper responds to recent calls to examine the processes of assurance provision beyond the traditional domain of financial audit.


First Monday ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah T. Roberts

The late 2016 case of the Facebook content moderation controversy over the infamous Vietnam-era photo, “The Terror of War,” is examined in this paper for both its specifics, as well as a mechanism to engage in a larger discussion of the politics and economics of the content moderation of user-generated content. In the context of mainstream commercial social media platforms, obfuscation and secrecy work together to form an operating logic of opacity, a term and concept introduced in this paper. The lack of clarity around platform policies, procedures and the values that inform them lead users to wildly different interpretations of the user experience on the same site, resulting in confusion in no small part by the platforms’ own design. Platforms operationalize their content moderation practices under a complex web of nebulous rules and procedural opacity, while governments and other actors clamor for tighter controls on some material, and other members of civil society demand greater freedoms for online expression. Few parties acknowledge the fact that mainstream social media platforms are already highly regulated, albeit rarely in such a way that can be satisfactory to all. The final turn in the paper connects the functions of the commercial content moderation process on social media platforms like Facebook to their output, being either the content that appears on a site, or content that is rescinded: digital detritus. While meaning and intent of user-generated content may often be imagined to be the most important factors by which content is evaluated for a site, this paper argues that its value to the platform as a potentially revenue-generating commodity is actually the key criterion and the one to which all moderation decisions are ultimately reduced. The result is commercialized online spaces that have far less to offer in terms of political and democratic challenge to the status quo and which, in fact, may serve to reify and consolidate power rather than confront it.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146879762110451
Author(s):  
John Connell ◽  
Xuesong Ding ◽  
Phil McManus ◽  
Chris Gibson

Complex relationships exist between rationales for visiting, experiences and perceptions. Tourists are influenced by others, increasingly through social media as electronic word of mouth (ewom). While visitation rationales associated with popular culture are well documented, less understood is how social media use among specific cultural groups constructs and fuels new fictitious sites of popular cultural tourism, through what we call ‘soft heritage’. Particular physical qualities (often visual) endow places with a distinct but fabricated heritage value, linked especially to fictional characters in popular culture. Tourism numbers grow accordingly, as soft heritage sites become marked places for tourists of specific cultural backgrounds. This is illustrated through the case of the University of Sydney, which in the 2010s became a significant destination for Chinese tourists. Through mixed-methods research involving participant observation and interviews with 85 Chinese tourists, the rationales, experiences and perceptions of Chinese tourists were explored. Reasons for visiting included group tours, education, heritage and photography, but a key attraction was the ‘Harry Potter building’, a site not in JK Rowling’s books, nor involved in the making of the films, and not previously a tourist attraction. So much did social media and the Harry Potter Building influence tourism that the University became the most prominent of the city’s several ‘marked places’ (daka). The participatory character of Chinese social media, combined with architectural heritage and the enthusiasm of many younger Chinese tourists for Harry Potter, led them to create a new Chinese tourist site (or daka destination) without input from the management of the place itself.


Communicology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-179
Author(s):  
E.S. Nadezhkina

The term “digital public diplomacy” that appeared in the 21st century owes much to the emergence and development of the concept of Web 2.0 (interactive communication on the Internet). The principle of network interaction, in which the system becomes better with an increase in the number of users and the creation of user-generated content, made it possible to create social media platforms where news and entertainment content is created and moderated by the user. Such platforms have become an expression of the opinions of various groups of people in many countries of the world, including China. The Chinese segment of the Internet is “closed”, and many popular Western services are blocked in it. Studying the structure of Chinese social media platforms and microblogging, as well as analyzing targeted content is necessary to understand China’s public opinion, choose the right message channels and receive feedback for promoting the country’s public diplomacy. This paper reveals the main Chinese social media platforms and microblogging and provides the assessment of their popularity, as well as possibility of analyzing China’s public opinion based on “listening” to social media platforms and microblogging.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Forgie ◽  
Hollis Lai ◽  
Bo Cao ◽  
Eleni Stroulia ◽  
Andrew James Greenshaw ◽  
...  

UNSTRUCTURED As many as 80% of internet users seek health information online. The social determinants of health (SDoH) are intimately related to who has access to the internet and healthcare as a whole. Those who face more barriers to care are more likely to benefit from accessing health information online, granted the information they are retrieving is accurate. Virtual communities on social media platforms are particularly interesting as venues for seeking health information online because peers have been shown to influence health behaviour more than almost anything else. Thus, it is important to recognize the potential of social media to have positive mediation effects on health, so long as any negative mediation effects are reconcilable. As a positive mediator of health, social media can be used as a direct or indirect mode of communication between physicians and patients, a venue for health promotion and health information, and a community support network. False or misleading content, social contagion, confirmation bias, and security and privacy concerns must be mitigated in order to realize full potential of social media as a positive mediator of health. In any case, it is clear that the intersections between the SDoH, social media, and health are intimate, and they must be taken into consideration by physicians. Here, we argue that a paradigm shift in the physician-patient relationship is warranted, one where physicians: a) acknowledge the impacts of the SDoH on information-seeking behaviour, b) recognize the positive and negative roles of social media as a mediator of health through the lens of the SDoH, and c) use social media to catalyze positive changes in the standard of care.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110088
Author(s):  
Ioana Literat ◽  
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik

Adopting a comparative cross-platform approach, we examine youth political expression and conversation on social media, as prompted by popular culture. Tracking a common case study—the practice of building Donald Trump’s border wall within the videogame Fortnite—across three social media platforms popular with youth (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram), we ask: How do popular culture artifacts prompt youth political expression, as well as cross-cutting political talk with those holding different political views, across social media platforms? A mixed methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative content analysis of around 6,400 comments posted on relevant artifacts, illuminates youth popular culture as a shared symbolic resource that stimulates communication within and across political differences—although, as our findings show, it is often deployed in a disparaging manner. This cross-platform analysis, grounded in contemporary youth culture and sociopolitical dynamics, enables a deeper understanding of the interplay between popular culture, cross-cutting political talk, and the role that different social media platforms play in shaping these expressive practices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Villa ◽  
Gabriella Pasi ◽  
Marco Viviani

AbstractSocial media allow to fulfill perceived social needs such as connecting with friends or other individuals with similar interests into virtual communities; they have also become essential as news sources, microblogging platforms, in particular, in a variety of contexts including that of health. However, due to the homophily property and selective exposure to information, social media have the tendency to create distinct groups of individuals whose ideas are highly polarized around certain topics. In these groups, a.k.a. echo chambers, people only "hear their own voice,” and divergent visions are no longer taken into account. This article focuses on the study of the echo chamber phenomenon in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, by considering both the relationships connecting individuals and semantic aspects related to the content they share over Twitter. To this aim, we propose an approach based on the application of a community detection strategy to distinct topology- and content-aware representations of the COVID-19 conversation graph. Then, we assess and analyze the controversy and homogeneity among the different polarized groups obtained. The evaluations of the approach are carried out on a dataset of tweets related to COVID-19 collected between January and March 2020.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2098596
Author(s):  
Anna Cristina Pertierra

Since the late 1980s, Filipino entertainment television has assumed and maintained a dominance in national popular culture, which expanded in the digital era. The media landscape into which digital technologies were launched in the Philippines was largely set in the wake of the 1986 popular movement and change of government referred to as the EDSA revolution: television stations that had been sequestered under martial law were turned over to family-dominated commercial enterprises, and entertainment media proliferated. Building upon the long development of entertainment industries in the Philippines, new social media encounters with entertainment content generate expanded and engaged publics whose formation continues to operate upon a foundation of televisual media. This article considers the particular role that entertainment media plays in the formation of publics in which comedic, melodramatic and celebrity-led content generates networks of followers, users and viewers whose loyalty produces various forms of capital, including in notable cases political capital.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Tipu Sultan ◽  
Farzana Sharmin ◽  
Alina Badulescu ◽  
Elena Stiubea ◽  
Ke Xue

There has been increasing interest in coastal tourism, sparking a debate on the responsible environmental behavior of travelers visiting sustainable destinations. To mitigate this issue, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and environmental activists are trying to develop strategic approaches (i.e., by using digital technologies) to enhance the sustainable behavior of travelers. Environmental responsiveness and its impact on sustainable destinations is gaining attention by companies, scholars, and institutions. However, the relevant literature has not addressed social media user-generated content regarding sustainable destinations. Sharing stakeholder knowledge, activities, and experience on social media could accomplish this goal. Hence, this paper aims to explore travelers′ responsible environmental behavior towards coastal tourism within the social media user-generated content paradigm. To measure the effect of user-generated content (UGC), i.e., cognitive triggers and affective triggers, on the responsible environmental behavior of travelers, a survey questionnaire was used to collect data (n = 506) from the world’s longest sandy sea beach, Cox’s Bazar, located in the Southern part of Bangladesh. The data were examined by structural equation modeling (SEM). The results revealed that cognitive and affective triggers of user-generated content influence travelers’ environmental concerns and attitudes, making a significant contribution to shaping responsible environmental behavior. Additionally, the findings show that environmental concerns and attitudes play a significant role in producing commitment towards a sustainable coastal tourism practice. This study contributes to the effectiveness of user-generated content for persuasive interactions with destination marketing organizations to develop sustainable tourism practices.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1332
Author(s):  
Hong Fan ◽  
Wu Du ◽  
Abdelghani Dahou ◽  
Ahmed A. Ewees ◽  
Dalia Yousri ◽  
...  

Social media has become an essential facet of modern society, wherein people share their opinions on a wide variety of topics. Social media is quickly becoming indispensable for a majority of people, and many cases of social media addiction have been documented. Social media platforms such as Twitter have demonstrated over the years the value they provide, such as connecting people from all over the world with different backgrounds. However, they have also shown harmful side effects that can have serious consequences. One such harmful side effect of social media is the immense toxicity that can be found in various discussions. The word toxic has become synonymous with online hate speech, internet trolling, and sometimes outrage culture. In this study, we build an efficient model to detect and classify toxicity in social media from user-generated content using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The BERT pre-trained model and three of its variants has been fine-tuned on a well-known labeled toxic comment dataset, Kaggle public dataset (Toxic Comment Classification Challenge). Moreover, we test the proposed models with two datasets collected from Twitter from two different periods to detect toxicity in user-generated content (tweets) using hashtages belonging to the UK Brexit. The results showed that the proposed model can efficiently classify and analyze toxic tweets.


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