uw_1020

While looking through the livejournal communities, I struggled to find any that fit my interests so I used a community from outside of livejournal. The website is called Liberty Ballers, a 76ers blog that is a part of the website SB Nation. I chose this community because the Sixers are definitely my biggest interest and of all things that I’m a fan of, I definitely spend the most time on them. The site is updated many times a day. I couldn’t find how many members the community has but the blogs facebook page has over 1000 likes if that counts for anything. The focus of the community is the Philadelphia 76ers, but posts often contain just about anything you can think of. The members of the community seem to be between the ages of 16-25 based on the historical player references that I see. They are from all over, not just Philly. The current site editor lives in LA and the previous, and creator of the blog, lives in Texas. Nothing really surprises me about the community, just a lot of good basketball conversation. The discussions usually are about specific players and how they are playing, stupid things these players have posted on twitter or instagram, and talking about what the team’s next moves should be, in terms of trading or adding players. Tumblr seems to be all pictures and is something I would maybe, only use if I was extremely bored and didn’t have the attention span at the moment to actually read something (that came off pretty harsh).

Philadelphia sports have probably been the biggest part of my life since my first Sixers game at age 5. My grandpa had season tickets and would bring me to the MLK day game every year until I was old enough to start going regularly. Once I got to middle school and high school, I was going to about 20-25 games a year. It's very rare for me to miss a game on television and I frequently visit Sixers blogs, mostly libertyballers.com. Although I love all sports, basketball and the Sixers are definitely at the top of my list. I definitely would consider myself a huge fan of the Flyers, Eagles and Phillies as well. Tomorrow morning, me and my roommate are driving back to Philadelphia to see the Flyers season opener. Watching the Trekkies documentary was shocking to me, but the more I think about it, I realized that I probably spend more time and money following my favorite sports teams than the Trekkies do on their hobby, based on the numbers they said in the documentary. Although I have been a temporary fan of different shows and music since I was younger, the only things that has been constantly prevalent in my life have been these teams.

I’m exploring the dynamic of the relationship between two very distinct fan groups within the same general fan community. The so called “stat-heads” and “old schoolers” in the sports fan community have the same interest but still disagree about so much. I take a look at important pieces of work that contributed to this divide, such as Moneyball, and conducted several interviews with members of the fan community themselves. I argue that both sides of the argument do very avoidable actions that either taunt or unintentionally anger the other group. Both sides could learn greatly from each other but instead don’t take the time to listen to the other. I gain first hand knowledge of these opinions by interviewing several people that I know have been very vocal, one way or the other. As a member of the community myself, I have a large amount of previous knowledge as well. I haven’t found a similar piece of work before so I hope that this will be a wake-up call of sorts to those reading it involved in this community.

I think that one key concept was staying neutral, and approaching my topic from two sides and not holding any bias. Once my research encompassed material arguing two sides of my topic, I fused them and made it an informative psychologically pointed paper. There were some difficulties I found writing this paper. One of them was finding information on certain things. I wanted to define a normal social relationship but had a hard time finding any sources who were willing to define this. There were many that defined problems in relationships, but not many the defined norms. I had to use very dry definitions of personal relationships to fix this problem. When shaping this paper I was targeting youth, or really anyone who has not so many friends, but is a fan of many things and enjoys spending more time with their books or Youtube than real people. I wanted this audience to know that they are not abnormal, they just socialize different than some people. But that they should monitor their relationships and make sure that they do have a least a couple interpersonal ones.
I think that I did contribute to a conversation. I did not find any sources covering parasocial relationships that approached the topic the way I did. I talked about both the negative and positive of parasocial interactions and then combined the information that I provided and created a solution of some sort. I can take the knowledge of annotated bibliographies, the IBEAM approach, and that research is not horrible when you know the right places to look. The sources serve every purpose in this piece. There would be no research paper without them, they provide clues, information, ideas, statistics, and much much more. A research paper is nor a research paper without sources.

Reflecting on the semester: My confidence of writing was pretty good going into this process. I was a strong writer and had written many a research paper before this. But doing this paper I learned so much. I have never written a paper, research or otherwise in this style so it was nice to learn a new way to research and write. I would approach this situation similar to how we did in this class. I would figure out my topic, then my purpose for writing the paper, then my lens and I would go from there.

Parasocial relationships are interactions experienced between a fan and a celebrity. This one-sided relationship is often mistaken as something that occurs strictly in people with problems forming interpersonal social relationships. This paper is going to present what most consider a normal social relationship, and then compare it to a parasocial relationship. Both positive and negative examples of a parasocial relationship are going to be explored as to show the reader how parasocial interactions can be both healthy and unhealthy. The purpose of this paper is to argue that parasocial relationships can healthily co-exist with interpersonal relationships.

For me the BEAM method was extremely helpful in the research process. Even though it was hard to find something to fit specific parts it ended up being worth it.
I found describing the “so what” part difficult. Why should someone who is uninterested in a specific topic be interested in at least reading it.
I was targeting mainly those interested in the power of fans, which is anyone who is a fan really. It focuses on gaming, but it can easily relate to many other mediums
I think it contributed to the conversation of fan participation.
The BEAM schema. How to research and finding out how to narrow your scope.
Showing to the readers that this isn’t just theory but has happened and is happening right now
From a 5 out of 10 to a 7. I felt I was alright, but I feel much more confident after this
I would talk to friends in the field or people in the class interested in it. From there I would talk to the teacher describing my problem with the assignment and seek their advice.

Using the BEAM method was extremely important and helpful during the writing process of my paper. I stumbled upon certain difficulties while writing my paper such as not being able to narrow down my topic to answering the question "so what?" In order to solve this I continued on with my research broadly, and then I stepped back and analyzed the information I had. From this point I asked myself why people would care about my topic and what new information I was relaying. Additionally, the peer editing sessions and just tossing around ideas during UW classes were very helpful. Throughout my essay I tried to target a younger audience. I wanted to focus on how television changed over time, and so the age would have to be from my own generation since then the audience would get the references and be able to relate to both watching shows like the Cosby Show to watching Modern Family. I kept a formal tone within my essay. There were several skills and techniques I learned to utilize such as BEAM and creating overviews/outlines. My sources both support and counterargue my main topic. I quoted and cited certain sources to support my opinion, then I used the counterarguments to maybe say what the audience was thinking. I would then argue back again as to why the counterargument was irrelevant.

I never wrote long papers so this class definitely boosted my confidence and helped to show me that it isn't as difficult. If I had to write a paper on a subject I was unsure about, I would research the topic then look at other papers that had similar topics or outlines then model mine accordingly.

Reflection on the Final Paper
1. Annotated bibliography helped me to gather all my sources effectively and allowed me to easily organize the structure of my paper. It somewhat served as a blueprint of my paper by providing a clear vision of what I will be writing about for each paragraph.

2. One of the challenges I faced in writing this paper was organizing research materials and using them to come up with a good thesis or an argument. I had previously found many sources dealing with football fandom and football fans' identity but I had to come up with a good, thorough argument with these sources that is not too broad and vague.

3. I plan to target football fans in general, especially those who actively engage in English Premier League to support their club. I believe focusing on the study of identity will provide fans of Premier League clubs an opportunity to learn more in-depth about football fandom in which the fans themselves are involved. Most importantly, I plan to make my research something that is worth taking notice of by all football fans and even fans of all other sports as well. I hope it draws a lot of attention from committed fans since this work deals with the fans themselves and it will simply serve as a mere reflection on their own identities and culture.

4. I believe I contributed to the study of football fans’ loyalty and identity. A considerable amount of research has been done on this topic, but my plan is to explore and incorporate the two concepts, fans’ loyalty and their identity formation, to show how fans’ strong loyalty is formed and what impacts it has on football society.

5. Through this project, I learned how to conduct a thorough research (which I personally regard as the hardest part) and how to plan out and organize sources, thoughts, argument, and so on to write an effective paper.

6. I think sources help writers to effectively break down their argument in their papers. I believe having a considerable amount of sources reflects how much research has been made by the author and makes the paper to look more convincing to readers.

Reflection on the Semester

1. The most important thing I learned in this class throughout this semester is research methods, such as finding books in the library or finding scholarly articles on online databases. I came to understand that research is the most important step in writing a clear and thorough paper.

2. I would first do some research online to learn more about the topic and acquire abundant sources there. Then, I would develop a clear thesis or an argument before planning out the structure of the paper.

Reflection on the Final Paper
I found it very beneficial to break up the paper into pieces and work on each of them individually, instead of trying to write the whole paper at once. I found that it was difficult to find sources that backed up what I was specifically targeting because not much research was done on the topic. I dealt with this issue by branching off of my topic idea and finding sources that would back up those ideas. When shaping this project, my target audience was the audience of the Journal of Gender and Society. Gender & Society publishes theoretically engaged and methodologically rigorous articles that make original contributions to gender theory and how they are shaping societies views.
I will shape my writing to meet the journals take on a multidisciplinary, intersectional, and global approach to gender analyses. I have learned how to properly site and look for scholarly sources that would help in any paper I write. I have also learned how to use my resources to find legitimate articles such as scholarly articles. The sources I have used in this piece serve as the building blocks for my argument and support the argument I am making.

Reflection on the Semester
Before entering this class, I was not comfortable writing from a scholarly perspective because I had never done it before. Now, I am comfortable writing in scholarly terms because I have enough practice.
I would first try to gain knowledge of the topic I would be writing on by finding sources that give background information on the topic. I would then find sources that are written in the same genre and use them as a basis to how my piece should be structured.