Planning for this Essay I

I figured that since this essay is to be written on a blog it is probably more natural to write like a blogger than an academic, i.e. instead of writing up a draft then edit over time, I will be posting new ideas and analysis day by day and eventually link them altogether to form a complete argument.

However to still keep this essay academically credible, I came up with this idea to separate all postings in this blog into two categories: THE ESSAY and THE THOUGHTS. Entries under the first category would be what you call ‘the actual essay’ whereas a posting like this one would fall under the later. THE THOUGHTS tend to supplement THE ESSAY but does not form part of this assignment.

After several days of careful consideration I have chosen the following research question:

2. Why is media fandom so central to the notion of convergence culture? What does this mean for less invested consumers?
Use a case study of a particular fan-community to illustrate your argument.

Machinima (click to view definition on Wikipedia) seems like an interesting case to study for this question. The fact that I've already done some research on Machinima for my first assignment in this subject would also make my task a little bit easier.

Before I derive my own research topic from the above question, I would usually do some research before hand to know what resource is readily available to me. There is obviously no way that I can avoid ‘the guru of media convergence’ Henry Jenkins, but unfortunately all his books in the uni library are on reserve and can only be borrowed overnightly or for 2 hours, which isn’t what I would call ‘readily available’. I will try my luck in the e-journals with keywords like ‘fan community’, ‘machinima’, ‘convergence culture’ and ‘Henry Jenkins’

So off I go, until enough research is done to give me a clear picture of what I will be writing in this essay, hang around for the next post.