Rhiannon Bury Book order

This book documents and interrogates the evolving engagement with digital television. It highlights how television content has been decoupled from traditional broadcast schedules through digital video recorders (DVRs) and streaming platforms like Netflix, Vimeo, and YouTube, as well as downloading sites such as iTunes and The Pirate Bay. Additionally, content is no longer confined to the television screen due to digital convergence and divergence, resulting in the rise of computer and mobile screens. This work offers an in-depth empirical investigation into these technological changes and their implications for viewing habits and fan participation. It provides a historical context for television's role as a household broadcast medium and its connections to participatory culture. Utilizing survey and interview data, the book reveals how the meanings and uses of contemporary television are influenced not only by digitalization but also by domestic relationships and emotional connections to specific shows. Furthermore, it redefines what it means to be a participatory fan, exploring how established practices like information-seeking and community-building are transformed and how new practices emerge through social media. This book is valuable for anyone involved in teaching or studying media and communications.

Cyberspaces of Their Own interrogates the social and spatial relations of the rapidly expanding virtual terrain of media fandom. For the first time, issues of identity, community and space are brought together in this in-depth ethnographic study of two female internet communities. Members are fans of the American television series The X-Files and the Canadian series Due South. Forging links between media, cultural and internet studies, this book examines negotiations of gender, class, sexuality and nationality in making meaning out of a television show, producing fiction based on television characters, creating and maintaining online communal relations, and organizing cyberspace in a way that marks it out as alternative to that which surrounds it.