Be cool is really difficult.
Because of that I’ve never been.
But I’ve start to recognize what is cool and what is not.
Then I moved to USA, and I started to get confused.

Check the list (ITA VS USA)

To smoke:  cool  VS   uncool.

Wearing jumpsuite at school :  what?   VS  normal.

Refill water bottle:  uncool   VS  you have to! (we have to save the planet).

Drink beer:  cool  VS  super cool.

OK. Now that I’ve checked that I’m uncool in both the country, I feel myself again.

The speech will be presente at the conference “Transforming Audiences 2″. 3 September 2009, University of Westminster. London, UK.

“The contemporary media landscape is a complex global environment that recently evolved to a many-to-many communication channels of interactive technologies. In fact, due to the digital convergence, old and new media collided in a cross-media platform where the audiovisual narratives are created not only from the media industries (primary and secondary texts) but also from the grassroots participatory cultures (tertiary texts) (Jenkins 2006). Those sociotechnical changes affect also the way people manage their presentation of selves and interact in their everyday lives. In fact media audiences are evolving into networked publics (boyd 2008) that participate in the construction of niche peer cultures. It is the case of fans, consumers with an intense engagement with a media content, genre or celebrity, that adopt digital social media with the aim to communicate with like minded people. Fan cultures and special interest groups thus emerge from the ongoing interaction of the fans in different social spaces, that could be both online (fan communities) and offline (fan conventions).

My study focuses on how fan cultures can be understood as a starring system: a network of multifaceted and multisited individual and collective performances of fan audiencehood where the boundaries between media figures (and academics) and viewers are blurred. In fact, during an explorative ethnography on Italian television fandom I‘ve observed the emergence of a networked collectivism of amateur experts (Baym 2007) that performs their competence and their passion publishing tertiary texts as fansite, fanart (video remix, avatar, wallpaper, …), fanfiction and fansubs.

In order to describe the starring system from the point of view of the audiences, I argue that the researcher should embark on an ethnographic experience to dialogue with fans and to give narrative visibility to her identity as an aca/fan thus performing her audiencehood. For this reason I propose to combine an analytical auto-ethnography (Anderson 2006) with a multisited participant-observation.”

I was desperate. More than an housewives. Because I had a job but no reason to do it. So I decided to change project and I needed a role model. Surfing the web I’ve foud the field that I wanna explore (fan cultures) and the researchers that I wanna to became (d.b., N.B., H.J.).
The only problem was that they were to far away. So I decided to apply the six degree of separation theory to the IR Community, and after five years I can demostrate (with only one case, that of course it isn’t enought xP) that the degree are just three:

Me was o_O.

Me meets L.P. (1° degree) that introduced Me to ethnographic research on Internet Cultures.

Me meets F.G. (2° degree) that welcomed Me to the italian research community on social media.

Me meets d.b. (3° degree: target reached) that:

1 – inspired Me to deeply explore the trasnational flux of internet contents. In fact I was focused on the relation between American and Italian fan cultures. But what about the eastern contries, for example Cina, where the fansubber are faster that everywhere else? How many level of cultural re-interpretation (misinterpretation, recreation, irony, personalization) emerge?

2 – suggested Me to adapt the methodology to the youth : let’s follow them wherever they are. Let’s catch them from different channel. Online, offline, with e-mail, with flyers.

And now me is *_*…
…and (almost) ready to go back to the field work.

Pink Field Work

Presentation prepared for Modernity 2.0. Emerging Social Media Technologies and their impacts | Urbino, Italy 29 June/5 July 2009

01010001010101010000101010001 –> The Internet

01010;-)0<a>0:(010100LOL01010 –> The Web

0101XOXO010:)))))0101xP0100♥… –> The Networked Digital Media

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