New Media and Popular Culture

MITH is pleased to sponsor the first of several Digital Dialogues this semester which will spotlight current research by faculty Fellows and Graduate Student award recipients. In this first installment, doctoral candidates Asim Ali (American Studies) and Marc Ruppel (English) share recent work presented at national conferences in their field for which they received MITH Travel Grants. Join us this time for a heady brew of Buffy, Batman, readers, fans, new media, narrative, and religion. "Religion, Internet Fandom, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer" by Asim Ali In this presentation, I will discuss the mediated interaction of popular culture and religion. I will focus in particular on fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer; this presentation will be based on my ethnographic analysis of that particular group of fans who frequented the official Buffy internet fan site known as The Bronze. There are several ways in which Buffy and religion interact. First, the show is replete with religious references and imagery, and reflects the critical perspective of creator Joss Whedon, an avowed atheist who apparently had few qualms about criticizing religion via Buffy. However, fan interpretations of the religious symbolism in Buffy are often contradictory and contested. Second, not only is there religion in Buffy, but Buffy itself can be seen as a religion. Whedon is the creator of a founding mythology, which he and his production staff–similar to a hierarchically organized clergy–canonized via Buffy. Furthermore, there are several institutions–analogous to a hierarchical laity, of which The Bronze, being officially sanctioned, is at the top–through which the text is interpreted and modified. Third, even though The Bronze is now defunct, the community lives on through several internet sites. Although The Bronze is fragmented and the community no longer has a central location or unifying concept, it maintains its cohesion through a matrix of connections based on the common bond of having been a Bronzer. In this sense, it functions much like a global religious community. "Idealized Stories, Idealized Readers and Idealized Consumers: Batman Begins and the New Narrative Model" by Marc Ruppel In her recent article "Narrative and Digitality" (2005), Marie-Laure Ryan describes what she calls texts that think with their medium. These texts possess properties of interactivity/ reactivity, variability, multi-sensorality and networking capabilities. Unique to these sorts of texts is the "ability to create an original experience which cannot be duplicated by any other medium, an experience which makes the medium seem truly necessary" (516). Keeping this distinction in mind, this talk will argue that convergent corporate organizations are enabling a new kind of story structure, a cross-sited narrative, that not only implicates the reader/user/viewer in the active construction of an ideal narrative (one that exists as the product of a blending of several variant stories), but also forces an assimilation of the medial "thoughts" of a particular channel. Using the film and video game adaptations of Batman Begins as prototypical examples of cross-siting, I will discuss the ways that the structure of the Time Warner Corporation directly influences the form(s) of the dispersed narrative, and posit that the synergy so often sought within this sort of venture ends up vastly complicating issues of authorship, framing and continuity, leading to a shift from a Barthesian idealized reader to something more akin to an idealized consumer. Consequently, instead of narrative being contingent upon a single medium with an isolated set of "thoughts", we need to begin talking about an idealized narrative with multiple medialities, one that exists in both local material and non-material "in-between" states of meaning.