Thanks to Dr. Vivanco, who is 200 times more cool than “Los Vivancos,” we have… an academic paper about you.
No, really.
Awhile back Candy and I were contacted by a grad student doing an ethnographic study of the Bitchery style of communication.
Miriam Greenfield Benovitz presented her paper, “The Interactive Online Romance Community: Contests and ‘Covers Gone Wild’” at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association in May 2008, and her paper has been made available online. You can find a link to the PDF on that page.
Another link to the PDF can be found at the Romance Wiki page on Academic Essays online.
Wow. Dude. AWESOME. Way to go, Miriam!
Getting ready for RWA National? We are. So are the folks at Blogging National. Jane and many others did a group blog last year, but we’re not doing it this year – so if you’re looking for a pile of RWA news, look to Twitter, and to that site for all the latest.
Stay tuned to this spot for details on Bootleg Bosoms Signing on Thursday night during Happy Hour.
What you got in the way of plans for RWA?
Bootleg Bosoms, Rogue Workshops, catching up with some invites to introduce myself to on-line friends, and attempting to look cool, calm, and collected despite this being my first RWA Nationals, and worrying that I’m going to look (and be) and complete NOOB! Oh…and some workshops. I really need to narrow down those 40 I highlighted to something manageable like five or six, huh…. *wanders off to do that*
The thing I’m most looking forward to at Nationals is meeting *in person* all the great folks I’ve met over the internet in this great romance community of ours. Silver, I’m there with the over-workshop-itis syndrome. Um, which way to the cloning machine? The thing I’m trying not to think about is the RITA awards. OMG. I still don’t have a pair of shoes to wear!
captcha – using29. I’ll be using 29 brain cells by the time Nationals is over…
Well, that’s my geeky thing this week; I read through the paper.
It’s pretty good. My major quibble is the usual problem with an ethnography: It may not be a representative view of the community, and by focusing on particular aspects it magnifies them so they seem like they’re central features. I’m reminded of that thing where someone presented a distorted view of American culture by emphasizing health, cleanliness, and doctors. And spell American backwards. (“The Nacirema people believe that the human body is intrisically disposed towards illness and that ill health centers on the mouth. In the majority of homes there are shrines where the Naciremans clean their mouth and teeth as a daily ritual.” Although the writer managed to obscure it even more.)
I understood that she was taking the contests and the cover snark as studies of the communication, but the detail I encountered as I read on made them sound Very Important (to me, at least.)
And I’ll come clean. I found this place through the cover snark. It made me lose several hours as I went through them. Also, people thought I was freakin’ nuts from me laughing so hard (I have a really disturbing laugh when I’m laughing as hard as I can).
Despite my quibbles, I like it. It’s a good paper. And may I comment on the size of Miriam’s metaphorical testicles to be using “Go Ahead, Win Some Shit” and make it sound academic?
Yay, Scrin, I made it to page 15. I got all nostalgic for the Guess that Lonely Heart contest and then remembered that there was no way I would ever win a title because I was so bad at guessing, that even when one of my favourite books was described I failed to recognise it. Besides which, the best title is over on the Dear Author site.
Interesting to see Scrin’s perspective, because I didn’t think it was a good paper. IMO it didn’t really say much; it was fairly superficially descriptive, rather than analytical, and it didn’t appear to work from much of a base of knowledge of either the community (which the author acknowledges as an artifact of time pressure) or the subject matter of the community events in question: that is, the romance genre or the current scholarship on the genre. But the most aggravating thing to me was something that’s all too common in this type of social science survey: the air of surprise at any nuanced thinking on the part of the interviewees. Why yes, readers of romances and smart-ass blogs *are* capable of integrating opposing viewpoints and perceiving ambiguity and tensions. Surprise!
Arriving on Tues. My mantra for the Literaracy Signing is ‘don’t buy books, you will have to ship them home’. This mantra has not worked at any RWA signing I have been to. Hanging with Cherries and Wiffers and other good friends. Cheering on Samantha Graves. Enjoying all the RWA events . Planned ahead and have my Rita dress and shoes.
Lots of plans. Number one: surviving my first booksigning ever 😀 I’m trying really, really, really hard not to overplan, but the schedule wonk in me wants to wallow in 2nd, 3rd, 4th & 5th options for all of the time slots 😀
Bootleg Bosoms Signing on Thursday night? Very cool. I hope I can swing by before the Daphnes!
I shall be there! I’ll be at the Literacy Signing, and want to go to the Bootleg Bosoms signing, but I have friends that may be meeting around that time. However, we may be meeting in the same place. At the bar, right? And I get to moderate the Tor spotlight, which I find very nifty, since I’m writing for Tor just now. 🙂 I’m moderating something Friday morning, too.
I have sparkly shoes I could wear to the RITA ceremony, but…they’re awfully painful. I may not take them. However, that is a sitting event… I’ll think about it. I’m going to fold up a duffel bag in my suitcase on the way to D.C. so I can put books, or dirty clothes, or something in it on the way home, and get my books home. (Though I’m trying to convert to my Sony reader more exclusively.) I’m reading the new J. Quinn on it right now…
It’s good to know it’s available on PDF. I know it isn’t the best paper as that one’s the condensed version (yay page limits on conference papers).
RfP, you’re absolutely right in that it wasn’t focused on romance per se. I am a communication scholar so for me it wasn’t about romance but rather how people talk about romance, which means that if I can only have X number of pages I’ll cut the discussion on romance. I’m sorry that it came off as surprise when discussing nuanced opinions. It certainly wasn’t intended that way. That’s something I’ll have to work on.