No thanks to the time crunch last week, my paper didn't turn out as good as I would have liked it to, but my topic of immersion really caught Dr. Burton's interest. In all honesty, I wrote about immersion because that was the topic that caught my interest.
I would like to continue exploring the topic of immersion, partly to articulate my ideas the way I would have liked to in the paper and partly to see if there is actually evidence to support my claims. I want to focus specifically on immersion in fan culture. I think Dr. Burton got my number during the interview when he asked me to describe a digital subculture. Fan culture is the subculture I am most familiar with and most deeply immersed in myself. I like being a fan of popular sci-fi and fantasy brands because they give me something in common with other people, even if my tastes aren't quite as conventional as other fans'. I feel like this is a topic that would give me an excuse for answering my own questions about fandoms and also exploring how fan cultures behave as, well, cultures, and how do people behave or immerse themselves within these groups or within the imaginary worlds they have in common.
I feel like since working on the paper that using the term "culture" has been a reminder that I am an anthropology minor. In an anthro class I once took the professor once asked me what English has to do with anthropology? Well, everything. Language and literature are what make us human. Referring to Dr. Wickman's lecture on Wednesday, the humanities exist to help us think and engage, and people who are immersed in fan cultures think and engage in specific ways because their worldviews are informed by certain media. In a telephone conversation I had with my dad earlier today, he commented on my ideas about war and peace, justice and right and wrong, etc in the draft of a fantasy novel I am working on. I told him that I got my deep ideas on these subjects from reading the Redwall and Harry Potter books as a teenager. Within a fandom, fans engage with certain media that, via their immersion, give them reasons to think deeply about certain issues.
I am also encouraged to go in this direction because I have other classmates discussing these issues, specifically Kylee, who wants to discuss fan fiction, and Mary, who is curating material on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is going to be exciting!
This will be really interesting I think, Lizy. I mentioned this in class to you, but I think fan fiction is a really cool manifestation of immersion and the idea of the social proof spiral. It might be worth exploring that a little bit.
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