Contemporary Interactive Media and Convergence

As media technology continues to evolve, television paratexts and convergence practices are becoming more and more integrated into the viewing experience (Gray 2010; Ross 2008). Programming now asks viewers to extend their consumption by visiting the show’s official website, entering/voting in various tangentially-related contests,56 and engaging with multiple social media practices including sharing, tweeting, hashtagging, etc. Reality television in particular has been especially insistent upon the importance of paratexts and converged viewing habits; the focus on consumption blends well with the practice of directing viewers to share their purchases via social media (connecting these activities back to the primary text through the use of hashtags). Furthermore, network programming strategies that group similarly themed texts together into an officially-named block (like TLC’s “Friday is Brideday” lineup, of which SYTTD is a part) extend older flow strategies that aimed to subtly encourage viewers to “stay” with the entire evening’s lineup by extending this programming flow across platforms. TLC’s “Friday is Brideday” lineup has its own page on their website (whereas other pages are devoted to single shows), comes with its own official hashtag for use on Twitter (#brideday), and

connects social media activity to the programs by integrating viewers’ pictures and tweets in the actual text. Reality television producers’ ever-more-frequent engagement with Twitter in particular prompted its inclusion in the present study.

Reception studies and fan studies are important sites of scholarship in any project on identity. Fan studies developed in the 1980s and 1990s, and grew largely out of work being done in cultural studies and television studies. This early work focused mainly on the idea of the active audience and resistant readers, and frequently focused on texts that traditional media

56 _{For instance, Say Yes to the Dress has sponsored a “Say Yes to the Dress Dream Wedding Sweepstakes” with} department store J.C. Penney (www.shopyourway.com/DreamWedding).

scholars viewed as unworthy of study;57 for instance, scholars such as Ien Ang (1985) and Jacqueline Bobo (2003) looked at the female audiences of Dallas and The Color Purple, respectively, and how they made meaning out of the texts. In Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins (1992) looked at fan productivity in the form of such activities as fan fic, slash, filking, fan art, conventions, and reviews, and the field of fan studies was born. This new area of study was primarily aimed at examining the agency and participation of fans of media texts. Jenkins foregrounded the power and influence of the fans/readers in the production process, and positioned fans as producers as well as

consumers. Jenkins goes on to address this and other themes of convergence culture in his later works, Convergence Culture: When Old Media and New Media Collide (2008) and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (2006), noting that convergence speaks to both the convergence of roles (pro-sumers) and the convergence of different media platforms (fans will go across platforms to obtain information/content related to their object of fandom). Similarly, Sharon Marie Ross's (2008) Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet looks at how both fans and producers are responsible for creating this convergence content.

This struggle over the balance of power between producers and consumers is also discussed in Jean Burgess and Joshua Green's (2009) YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, where they look at the history of YouTube and the different types of content

(and interactions) present. Burgess and Green differentiate the traditional media available on the site from user-generated content, and also point out that YouTube is constantly being

confronted with questions of authenticity and ownership. Jonathan Gray's (2010) work in Show Sold Separately also addresses this idea of paratextuality and the power of the fans in creating many pretexts themselves. However, in “Are We All Produsers Now?” Elizabeth Bird (2011)

cautions against conflating the labels producer and consumer (into the hybrid “produsers”) because this ignores the structural inequalities and unequal balance of power that is still present in the media industries today. Additionally, she also recommends that researchers not focus so much on online audiences and their activities that they ignore the many ways that viewers engage with the media off-line.

Fan studies and new media research have also begun to address the impact of social media,58 and one area that has recently begun to draw attention is that of “trolling” in online communities. While few scholars have yet to engage with this relatively new practice, popular press sources have begun to recognize this new form of shaming as a unique component of virtual communities. In The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih (2009) describes trolling as “dragging issues through the community so as to incite a reaction or disruption” (170); similarly, in Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web, Cole Stryker (2011) defines trolling as “the act of agitating or fooling people for fun” (94). Trolling is a concept that may help to explain or enlighten the discussion of celebrity reality TV weddings, especially in light of the massive online presence of the Kardashian family as discussed in Chapter Four. Similarly, in preliminary analyses of wedding-themed reality television, the act of shaming is one theme that seems to appear across multiple narratives, and so it will be reviewed here.