“You know what your trouble is? You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.”

~William Gibson “The Winter Market”

A Narrative of My Professional Service

An issue that I have with discussing an area of the tenure review like professional service is that I don’t perform those actions for the purpose of recognition. I, like others those that perform the most service for a discipline, an association, an interest division, or even a conference, do...

Continue Reading

SxSW 2019

The Psychology of Zelda has allowed me to travel throughout the United States to promote the book. This type of travel would typically be limited to going to Barnes and Noble throughout Ohio to sign copies of the book. I have been fortunate enough however to go to conferences to...

Continue Reading
Henry Jenkins discussed the actions that fandoms take to perform their enjoyment of their favorite mediated content. The best example of a fandom that performs passionately their enjoy of an intellectual property are Star Wars fans.

Jenkins’ Five Levels of Fandom Activity

Henry Jenkins (1992) wrote about in his foundational work “Textual Poachers: Television Fan & Participatory Culture" about five levels of activity that fandoms traditional engage in when interacting with core texts essential to their favorite shows, books, movies, or other artifacts of popular culture. Fans of their content will begin...

Continue Reading

Oliver, Bee, Minhaj, and Nolan

It's been more than three years since Jon Stewart left the Daily Show and placed the hosting responsibilities in the capable hands of Trevor Noah. The show has changed from an editorializing platform that used comedy as the medium of discourse to a show that satirizes current events to create...

Continue Reading

The Appalachian Evolution

The following was my panel pitch for the 2018 SxSW Conference for the Intelligent Future track With the recent focus on the region (thanks to books like "Hillbilly Elegy," "White Trash," and others), it is important for interactive professionals and organizations to start looking at Appalachia as an avenue of...

Continue Reading

Theorizing the Web 2016

One of the reasons I tend to return to the Theorizing the Web conference is that it represents this cool hybrid between an academic conference, a performative space, a professional development hangout, & a grad/undergrad research workshop. It has the trappings of the traditional conference with semi-structured panels and experts in various...

Continue Reading

The College Media Hub

The following was my panel pitch for the 2016 SxSWEDU Conference Ohio Northern University (ONU) created a new program "Multimedia Journalism" as a response to the change the media economy. Part of this change meant folding the local campus newspaper (Northern Review) into the rest of the media at ONU and...

Continue Reading

A Future Workforce

According to the Brookings Institution (2004) and several other key economic and technology thinktanks, there is a notable skills gap occuring in the marketplace that is affecting businesses (especially businesses in the tech sector) in their ability to find skilled employees to fill entry & mid-level job openings. This session...

Continue Reading