Hi guys! It’s Abi and I’m back with my last blog post! Doing these have been surprisingly fun just as I hope that reading them has been enjoyable for you!

I wanted to talk a little about the difference between watching something at home and watching something in a group setting. I’ll also mention the cheering atmosphere. The viewing experience from home and a theater is very different. Your presence is more intense if you do not watch it at home. If the screen is larger the impact is bigger. When more people are cheering, you are more likely to get more into it than if you are home alone cheering by yourself. The cheering atmosphere has been proven to have made the audience have a better enjoyment factor (Kim, K., Cheong, Y., & Kim, H. 2016). For instance, I went to the midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Part 2. I did this because of the atmosphere, I wanted to be surrounded by fans who loved Harry Potter as much as me and the excitement right before the film was intense. You could feel the excitement in the air. My friends and I had decorated shirts with everything Harry Potter and wore them to the premiere! Everything about the theatre made it more intense, the screen, the sound, and just how everyone was very excited. You were immersed with everyone who were excited about this! Another example is how for the Mayweather and McGregor fight many people went to bars to watch the fight. My parents own a restaurant in the casino and they charged $50 a person for people to watch the fight there. The restaurant was packed and they had around 150 people waiting outside trying to get in, they got people trying to bribe them $6000 just to get in. This is strange because why would people want to do this when they could just watch it at home? The atmosphere! When watching with all the people who are just as excited as you it gives you a whole other experience. The enjoyment is way better and the suspense of the fight is intensified.

I also want to talk a bit about rituals. My parents and I had rituals with Dancing with the Stars. We would watch the episodes every week when it came out religiously. We would get our favorite snacks and drinks and we would park ourselves in front of the TV. It made the experience very enjoyable. Eating your favorite junk food while watching it with people who love the show just as much as you were way more fun than if I just watched the show by myself and not eating anything! I also had a ritual with my parents for a couple years where we would watch Criminal Minds together and talk about the episodes. It was a good moment for all of us because we got to bond and love something together.

Next I wanted to talk about being a fan! I personally feel like I get super obsessed with things and then eventually I grow out of it and it goes away. I have many examples of this for instance my photo of Tom Felton and I. I met him at Fan Expo in 2011. Then in 2012 fan expo I met Matthew Gray Gubler from Criminal Minds!

I mean the Matthew Gray Gubler is in the background of the photo, sadly we only got his autograph and pictures with him from afar, we were not allowed to ask for photos with him. For both these events I woke up very early and waited in line all day. When I met Tom Felton he was my favorite celebrity of all time. With Matthew Gray Gubler at the time he was also my favorite celebrity of all time. It changed in the span of a year.

I was so obsessed with Criminal Minds. I would have called myself a Producer. What my two friends and I did was create a Criminal Minds Parody of the TV show. We filmed 40-minute-long episodes that we made up ourselves. We each were around 8 characters. We would write, act and produce these episodes and put them on YouTube.  If you are interested here is a link to one of the most embarrassing things I voluntarily did in my life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXCl8s25aPA&t=12s

I just have that personality that when I like something I like something to the extreme. For instance, with Harry Potter my room was covered in so much memorabilia.

I also had a huge Twilight obsessions (like every teenage girl back in the day). You know the drill. Read the book a million times, watched the movie a million times, had Twilight t-shirts, had Twilight posters, had Twilight journals, had the Edward Cullen doll. It was intense.

Eventually like all the other things I’ve been obsessed with the obsession goes away. I haven’t loved anything steadily for a while, yes I still like all those things but I’m just a fan now, I’m not obsessed still.

I am a huge fan of Veronica Mars so when I read the article Crowdfunding: A Spimatic application of digital fandom and found out that Veronica Mars the movie was fan funded I totally understood. Veronica Mars is an amazing show and I know how many fans it has, if I had known about the fan funding when it was happening I probably would have contributed.

In lecture, it was also talk about how Anna Todd became famous because she wrote fanfiction online. A couple years ago I read Anna Todd’s first book After and I did not like it but I found the writing style very addictive, it was like a drug. The content was so dramatic and the characters were so stupid but I read that 500-page book in the span of 48 hours, it was addicting. She got so unconventionally famous and for that you have to give her credit, she did it because you loved writing and made a living out of her passion.

Next I wanted to discuss people who have gone viral. There are so many people who have gone viral, Rebecca Black, Alex from target, and the cash me outside girl. There are also different news articles about the world that I find that go viral. For example, when those bombings in London happened or the shootings in Las Vegas happened in a sense they went viral too.

 In the article about Twitter it mentions how news can be consumed from Twitter. For example, the latest thing I saw on Twitter was related to Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber getting back together. There are so many news articles that I find because of Twitter. Another example was the whole Twitter fight between Jake Paul and Alissa Violet. They are two people who got famous from Vine and became YouTubers, they had a huge secret relationship and when things got messy between them it became very public. They roasted each other on Twitter and now everybody knows their story. The article also talks about how SME’s. SME’s are Social Media Editors. Social Media Editors are journalists who produce content on Twitter and are more relatable to the consumers (Wasike, B. 2017). I don’t follow any SME’s on any social media platform but that’s because I don’t follow much news. Maybe Just Jared but he is the only one. Just Jared is a guy who reports on all the celebrities on his website. I do follow Ellen on Instagram. Ellen in a way is a Social Media Editor. She talks a lot about the news of celebrities, has her own show and is very relatable to consumers. Everyone loves her.

Nowadays media and technology has advanced so much. You can watch any media on demand. Before we had DVD rental places and many people bought DVD’s and VHS tapes, now nobody does that we all watch Netflix or TV and movies online. Personally, I watch a lot of YouTube videos, I watch them whenever I want but YouTube was only created in 2005, which was not very long ago. Lots of people now multi task with screens. They watch two screens at once (Astigarraga Agirre, I., Pavon Arrizabalaga, A. & Zuberogoitia Espilla, A. 2016). I have seen this occur multiple times. I have witnessed my friends watch TV but also be on their phone at the same time, I have done this too. You scroll through your phone absentmindedly but are still watching the TV screen. My brother does this with his IPad and TV. It is a way to keep your brain completely occupied because sometimes I find that I can lose interest in parts of a movie or TV show so I go on my phone for something else to do too.

More and more people are interacting online and putting things out there. I for instance am a prosumer. I produce things online and consume things online. I consume things online all the time! What have I produced? I have made multiple YouTube videos in high school with my friends, we have made many different types of content for YouTube. I also had a Tumblr blog in high school that had 10,000 followers. I also use Goodreads very much. Like I have mentioned multiple times I love to read. Goodreads is a site where you can review books. Just this year alone I have read 95 books, clearly I read a lot. I have reviewed many of those books and have many friends on that social media platform. I am giving out content for people to read and see what I thought about that book.

 I have enjoyed sharing my audience experiences and all I have learned in this course.

 References:

Astigarraga Agirre, I., Pavon Arrizabalaga, A. & Zuberogoitia Espilla, A. (2016). Active audience?:           interaction of young people with television and online video content. Communication &         Society 29(3), 133-147.

Booth, P. (2014). Crowdfunding: A Spimatic application of digital fandom. New Media & Society,           17(2), 149-166. doi:10.1177/1461444814558907

Kim, K., Cheong, Y., & Kim, H. (2016). The Influences of Sports Viewing Conditions on Enjoyment            from Watching Televised Sports: An Analysis of the FIFA World Cup Audiences    in Theater vs. Home. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 60(3), 389-       409. doi:10.1080/08838151.2016.1203320

Wasike, B. (2017). Persuasion in 140 characters: Testing issue framing, persuasion and credibility via Twitter and online news articles in the gun control debate.    Computers in Human Behavior, 66, 179-190. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.09.037