Media and Communication Ph.D. Dissertations

Exploring Non-Activist Alternative Media: Audiences and Content

Date of Award

2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Department

Media and Communication

First Advisor

Joshua Atkinson (Committee Chair)

Second Advisor

Stefan Fritsch (Other)

Third Advisor

Bailey Dick (Committee Member)

Fourth Advisor

Yanqin Lu (Committee Member)

Abstract

The ongoing transition of Web 2.0 into Web 3.0 has had interesting effects of mediated communication, especially for online content creators. In the current Internet era of alternative media, this has had a great impact on the world of blogging, no longer requiring specific web development skills to be successful. This study explored non-activist alternative media content creators, who specifically create non-political content. These content creators were explored in two ways: by examining their audiences as well as their content. In this case, two research sites were explored: Angry Metal Guy and Nattskog’s Blog. Both sites create blog posts containing music reviews, interviews, and live concert reviews for extreme metal bands. Genre theory, affordances, and remediation theory were important lenses which were applied to the two research sites and a qualitative content analysis was used to reveal how genre, affordances, and remediation appear on Angry Metal Guy and Nattskog’s Blog. Audience interactions and their effect on content creation was explored using interviews. In total, twelve interviews occurred, lasting one-to-three hours. It was discovered that these non-activist alternative media content creators had mixed feelings concerning their perceptions of journalism, or if they consider themself a journalist. Journalistic doxa was used to help explain this phenomenon, but it is also important to note that these mixed feelings on how non-activist alternative media content creators perceive journalism may lead to lasting effects on how we define participatory journalism in the future. It was also found that in terms of audience interactions, constructive and destructive forms of criticism had the most impact on content creation. Through qualitative content analysis, 50 individual blog posts were examined in this research. It demonstrates that no new genre frameworks are present between the two research sites, but discovers genre fluidity, which I define as the culmination of different genres working together, in this case, to positively impact the user experience. This research reveals affordances are similar due to the nature of website hosts and their design, but is greatly impacted by the level of audience participation. It also discovers that remediation is regularly used in the content creation process for non-activist content creators due to the ease of repurposing digital media, such as photos and videos, from other parts of the Internet.

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