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Browsing by Author "Elkins, Evan, committee member"

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    DC unmade: failure, fandom and the Justice League films that could have been
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Greene, Ryan, author; Diffrient, David Scott, advisor; Martey, Rosa, committee member; Burgchardt, Carl, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee member
    Unmade films have received little attention as a general category, and this is doubly so for unmade superhero genre projects. The fact that these unfilms are failures in otherwise vibrant action franchises has typically led to their elision from canonical narratives. In studying two of the many defunct superhero films in Warner Brothers's DC catalog, it is possible to compare the failures of each in order to discern the industrial and narrative practices that contributed to their collapse. I apply scholarship on failure and comic book film adaptation to the case of George Miller's Justice League: Mortal. I trace the director's grand vision of a franchise juggernaut that was ultimately cancelled due to a confluence of bureaucratic interference and backlash against the promise of unlimited, speculative success. I then turn attention toward WB's second attempt to create a superhero ensemble film, Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon's Justice League (2017). From the ashes of the film's financial under-performance and critical failure rose a dogged fan movement to release an unknown and totally different director's cut. To understand this fan community and its impact on unproduction, I evaluate the Snyder Cut movement's defense of Zack Snyder's unmade DC Extended Universe, their battle against Warner Brothers and their refusal to accept failure. Taken together, these two unproductions demonstrate two divergent visions of failure. One lacked fan backing and so rests inert, its pieces scattered across the internet. The other rose from the unfinished realm of shadow cinema, lifted up by fans who vilified its producer while demanding that executives pay for its release.
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    Digital network composing practices: digital removal in the Try Guys media ecology
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Banuelos, Mia, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Doe, Sue, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee member
    With an increased accessibility and democratization of digital editing tools, recomposition has the potential to occur to any text or artifact circulated in a digital space. One form of recomposition that must further be considered is digital removal practices, including erasure, deletion, deflection, and exclusion of human or non-human objects in a digital composition. These practices have the potential to impact digitally networked composing practices and how we think about rhetoric and writing in media ecologies. This thesis focused on the intersection of digital removal practices and Ridolfo and DeVoss' theorization of rhetorical velocity, which considers composing for recomposition, and its co-influence on digitally network composing practices. Through a case study of The Try Guys, a group of popular YouTube personalities, this thesis explored the influence of a participatory culture in a media ecology and the role recomposition plays in a public scandal. Data was collected from The Try Guys media ecology surrounding the removal and/or revision of a former member, Ned Fulmer, and the larger medial ecology comprising The Try Guys' social media presence. These data illustrated the significant influence of participatory culture, as an influx of users associated with The Try Guys fandom contributed to the rhetorical velocity and recomposition of information and context produced by the Try Guys. Specifically, data illustrated that participatory cultures can and do shape how digital removal unfolds within and beyond digital networks. This thesis (1) emphasized the increased influence of a participatory culture on the curation and circulation of content in a media ecology and (2) explored how digital removal practices have the potential to influence how we theorize rhetorical velocity and how we must be strategic for composing as authors, writers, users, creators, inventors, teachers, and students.
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    Exploring apps users' experiences with app notifications
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Bombardi-Bragg, Madeline Renee, author; Sivakumar, Gayathri, advisor; Abrams, Katie, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee member
    There is a cultural tendency towards technological consumption that leads many people to spend an abundant amount of time interacting with technological devices. These interactions can at times make users feel stressed, annoyed, distracted, or left with feelings of constant pressure to 'check-in' with their online environments. Since such feelings are undesirable, their occurrence is likewise problematic. An important solution to one part of this problem lies with implementing better interface design for user experiences. When web designers, project managers, marketers, app developers and publishers, actively elicit and listen to reports of consumers' experiences with their products, both parties benefit from mutual guidance. The following research explored app users' experiences with, feelings towards, and overall impressions of app notifications to understand and unveil the individual differences that lead users to have different experiences and emotional responses to app notifications. Using the phenomenological approach, the researcher conducted ten in-depth, semi-structured interviews to provide a rich examination of users' experiences with app notifications by way of discussing their specific experiences in an attempt to understand what contributes to a positive or negative app notification experience. Thematic analysis was used to organize the collected data and identify possible themes. The study conclusion posits that users have negative experiences and harbor negative feelings towards app notifications because they lack additional control over their settings which helps users filter out online information that is deemed unimportant or received at undesired or inopportune times.
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    Listening to difference: the construction of intersectional identity in VALORANT's sound design
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Adams, Tate, author; Parks, Elizabeth S., advisor; Johnson Schroeder, Morgan K., committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee member; Martey, Rosa Mikeal, committee member
    As sound studies begins to interface more prominently with communication studies, the majority of research concerns rhetorical implications of vocality and sound's potential for argumentation and advocacy. This thesis contributes towards a growing body of research that identifies sound's influence in shaping our understandings of intersectional identity by providing several examples of how analyzing mediated sound design can uncover latent discourses of cultural difference. By combining communication studies, game studies, and sound studies it begins to establish a lexicon for discussing otherwise ineffable forms of representation in immersive and interactive media. This thesis sets out to answer two main research questions (RQs). RQ1 questions "How is player identity constructed in VALORANT through its voice communication affordances?" while RQ2 interrogates "How is intersectional identity communicated through VALORANT's sound design?" The three content chapters work in tandem to answer these research questions, and then reflect on what those answers mean for VALORANT players and audiences, scholars of games and sound, and the field of communication. This research is useful to VALORANT's player base and the widespread audience it commands insofar as it calls to the forefront the discourses of cultural difference which undergird the game's virtual acoustic design and sound affordances. Understanding that scholars of media, cultural studies, and communication overlap with gaming audiences, I am also optimistic that this thesis will inspire further work around sound design's potential for communicating discourses of cultural difference. For game studies scholars, this work encourages a dedicated practice of listening to and for discourse of cultural difference in games. Sound is an often-underserved element of games in critical scholarship, and (responding to RQ2) this thesis demonstrates how much hidden meaning is embedded in the subtle details of developer's sound design choices. This study contributes to game studies scholarship by excavating the potential of virtual acoustic to represent cultural difference. Specifically, Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate how virtual acoustic design is used to immerse players and characters within a particular diegetic context (space, place, time) in digital environments. Further, Chapter 3 also brings into focus the politics and economics of representation entailed in cosmetic accessorizing in online gaming. For scholars of sound, this thesis exemplifies the importance of developing critical tools for understanding how audio cues are used in mediated sound design to communicate notions of intersectional identity. As a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field, sound studies scholars could contribute a great deal of knowledge towards the different ways in which representations are codified in industrial practices. When communication studies turns its attention toward mediated sound design it is especially well-oriented to understand and critique the influence of virtual acoustic design on our conception of social reality. This study emphasizes the possibilities for rhetorical scholarship to critically assess forms of representation that are otherwise quite difficult to put words to. This thesis also exemplifies the potential of adopting vibration as a central organizing metaphor for communication theory. An acoustic approach to orientation in Chapter 2 conceptualizes sound design as innately rhetorical, and often strategic. A vibrational reading of stereotype in Chapter 3 which emphasizes the ephemeral, dynamic, and immersive nature of representation. A resonant approach to access and advocacy in Chapter 1 uses the metaphor of apprehending vibration to highlight the importance of feeling heard in relation to representation, safety, and community.
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    Representation and legitimation in streaming television's teenage girl traumedies
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Barnes-Nelson, Madison, author; Marx, Nick, advisor; Elkins, Evan, committee member; Wolfgang, David, committee member
    My objects of study for this project are three streaming television series: Hulu's Pen15 (2019-2021), HBO Max's The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021-), and Channel 4/Netflix's Derry Girls (2018-2022). These series comprise a hybrid television genre I term "teenage girl traumedy." I argue that teenage girl traumedies lend teenage girl characters empathy and emotional complexity not historically afforded to them on television. Using these three series as case studies, I argue that the genre is legitimized culturally and industrially in two ways: 1) through textual appeals in narrative and visual form to feminist discourse and 2) paratextual branding in trade press and interviews with creators that centralize these series' feminist messages of teenage girls' trauma as a distinctive, competitive quality in streaming television. My three case studies depict emotional and bodily traumas on different levels, from the intimate and individualized, interpersonal and institutional, to the national. I show trauma growing and spreading as my thesis develops, as a way to show how teenage girl trauma manifests as personal shame and how the coping process for teenage girls bumps up against interpersonal, institutional, and national spheres. Industrially, my thesis explores the tension between creators who produce subversive, feminist art and the commercially driven streaming services that employ them. I am interested in understanding how these creators write television that delves into themes of young women's sexual and psychological trauma, developing out of previous decades of television that portrayed teenage girls as one-dimensional.
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    Theorizing commensality discourses: food truck communication and influence in local culture
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Combs, Mitch, author; Aoki, Eric, advisor; Khrebtan-Hörhager, Julia, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee member; Carolan, Michael, committee member
    Food trucks offer spaces of commensality where people negotiate cultural identity and senses of place though practices, tastes, and performances communicated through enactments of food sharing. In this dissertation, I theorize commensality as a rhetorical texture of subcultural ideology, a rhetorical texture of resistance to cultural gentrification, and as a digital process of online community building. I use rhetorical criticism and ethnographic methods of participant observation to analyze physical spaces of food truck commensality in Fort Collins, Colorado: The FOCO Food Truck Rally and North College Avenue. Additionally, I conduct a media discourse analysis of the Fort Collins food truck Instagram community. Overall, I argue that commensality operates as a subcultural ideology resistant and reifying of gourmet elitism, a rhetoric of difference resistant to cultural gentrification, and a process digital commensality building community through social mediated branding, networking, and audiencing.