I wanted to point the way to some interesting posts from various Consulting Researchers with the Convergence Culture Consortium. A variety of our affiliated thinkers maintain regular blogs regarding their opinion of the latest developments in the media industries, and a wide variety of other subjects.
Henry Jenkins posted a piece on his blog last week emphasizing his own interest and respect with NBC's Heroes and his reading of a recent interview with Heroes executive producer Jesse Alexander, in which he brought up reading Jenkins' book Convergence Culture. Henry links his look at fan communities with Rob Kozinets' recent writing on wiki-media.
Jason Mittell writes about the contest among the different cities of Springfield across the country to claim The Simpsons and to host the premiere for the upcoming Simpsons Movie. The state Mittell calls home, Vermont, won the contest.
Grant McCracken poses some interesting questions about celebrity and stardom in television and film, based on his own discontent that interviews with actress Kyra Sedgwick were not nearly as interesting as her portrayal of Brenda Leigh Johnson on The Closer has been. He compares the increasing complexity of television characters with some simple-minded approaches of how to handle public relations for the personalities playing these parts. See more at his blog.
Rob Kozinets has made an interesting series of posts from an essay that he originally wrote--and which was rejected--from a book project in 2003. He writes of the piece, "I drew on my background dabbling as a science fiction writer, and tried to combine that style with an academic prose, situating myself in the story at the time and blending my own actual research with other nonfiction writing to devise a science fiction short story that also serves as a social scientific article, complete with references." See the first part of this nine-piece series at Rob's blog, Brandthrosophy.
Ilya Vedrashko is one of our C3 alumnus, now working with Hill-Holliday. He gives his opinion on one of the newest buzz-books, The Cult of the Amateur, on his Advertising Lab blog. He writes, "It would even make a good book, as perhaps it one day will. But that good book isn't Mr. Keen's. Instead, Mr. Keen's book is one of bizarre inconsistencies, of self-righteous cliches, of stretched or omitted facts, and of shrill Ann Coulteresque diatribes that are entertaining in their boldness but quickly become boring in their monotony."
Also, see a three-part interview with David Edery on his work at Xbox Live Arcade. The second and third parts are here and here.
