Friday, May 22, 3:00-5:00PM in CEAS 319 (1155 E 60th St)
Daniel Johnson, “Re-collecting Old Media: The Intimate Transmissions of Amachan”

On Friday, May 22, please join us in welcoming Daniel Johnson, who will present a paper that is part of a larger project on what Daniel calls “convergence anxiety.” As Daniel explains, “This refers to the tensions between different types of users, producers, and audiences in contemporary media culture within discourses (and processes) of media convergence. The plan is to draw on a range of case studies from a variety of fields (television, internet, film, gaming, etc.) to consider some of the affective attachments and social organizations that appear around different media cultures and how those attachments animate particular media forms in anxious ways. Key to this sense of anxiety will be the question of gender and how different types of performers and consumers have their identities intensified, threatened, and turned into spectacle by shifting patterns of reception and exposure in contemporary media landscapes. This paper, ‘Re-collecting Media: The Intimate Transmissions of Amachan,‘ discusses some of these ideas in relation to a 2013 TV serialized drama from Japan. My interest in this show stems from the way it represents ‘old’ media forms like VHS and television in relation to ‘new’ media forms like broadband and online media. It is particularly through how some sense of a value system of intimacy in media culture seems to emerge from Amachan‘s investment in tangible media forms, inelastic broadcast time, and personal curation that these topics will be discussed.”

A draft of Daniel’s paper is available at this link. If you have not received the password for the post, or if you have concerns about accessibility, please feel free to contact Nicholas Lambrecht at lambrecht at uchicago.edu. Light refreshments will be served at the workshop. We look forward to seeing you on Friday!