In the past, video game communities have been studied after they have already been well-established. Studying the Overwatch fandom now, less than a year after the game’s release, while its community is still growing, allows me to observe the way gamers bring prior fandom experiences to a new game and the way a new fan community establishes its own practices. Moreover, the Overwatch fandom is growing at a time when technology is rapidly changing the way fans share transformative works and the way media companies interact with fans. Studying Overwatch fan communities now can give a sense of what is and is not changing and how it might affect fandom.

This dissertation explores the process of meaning transformation in digital participatory culture by examining the replication, mutation and circulation that iconic news images undergo in cyberspace through Internet memes. With triangulation of visual historical analysis, visual rhetorical analysis and iconographic tracking, the project argues that members of remix culture weaponize the digital derivatives of the famous images through manipulation to renegotiate history, dispense social justice in the absence of other recourse and engage in political activism. Such transformations, as this project shows, are likely to weaken the rhetorical powers of iconic images to define collective memory, a role they have played for decades. With the use of Internet memes, members of the public can now re-remember history outside the iconic accounts, producing their own interpretations of events that contribute to public discourse. Internet memes that exist alongside their iconic visual counterparts democratize the process of meaning making and remembering in remix culture, promoting polyvocality in favor of singular versions of the past. Such fragmentation of master narratives highlights the changing role of iconic pictures in the process of signification thanks to technology. Keywords: Iconic images, Internet memes, signification, digital participatory culture, collective memory.

As the use of mobile technologies, consumer electronics and the internet expand, there are more opportunities for young visual designers around the world to gain access to design industries. Yet differences in infrastructure and spatial configurations create distinct obstacles and opportunities for emerging designers from marginal contexts, as often these infrastructures are not designed with them in mind. Employing a practice perspective, which brings together concerns around identity and infrastructure, I used ethnographic and exploratory methods to understand the creative practices of a group of young, resource-constrained, aspiring creatives from Cape Town, South Africa, who are enrolled in design courses. This thesis explores tensions between authentic creativity and continuity, as well as notions of democratization in visual design practices. Off campus, young people predominantly appropriated mobile devices as infrastructure for creative practices. They used data frugally, grabbed media in patches and snippets, and used multiple free applications together to forge creative work, participation and distributions. These practices, which include mobile-based photography, design and branding, were situated in particular creative worlds, which revolved around distinctive visual styles. Instead of vast networks with flows of data that connect infinite nodes, these creatives experienced the web and digital media as an assemblage of technologies and tariffs for mobile data. Thus, these media-related practices were more ‘patchworked’ than networked. Once enrolled in design courses, a very different repertoire of protocols, standards, materials, technologies, concepts and ways of being became infrastructural to these young people’s participation in formal visual design practices. For many participants, an enduring distance separated them from those embodied, technical and spatial requirements for later professional participation in the design industries. These tensions demonstrated how very particular configurations of resources are infrastructural to visual design practice associated with formal industries. Infrastructure and practice are thus dynamically and asymmetrically mutually constituted. This thesis employs improvisational jamming to make the role of infrastructure visible, along with specific mobile design practices. Many of these mobile systems were standardized and encoded with cultural norms, giving creatives second-hand discourses from which to build their own creative artefacts. These case studies draw attention to the global standardization of infrastructures for creative practice, which threatens to flatten the cultural richness of local creative voices.

The question of fidelity, which has long been at the center of adaptation studies, pertains to the problem of authorship. Who can be an author and adapt a text and who cannot? In order to understand the problem of fidelity, this thesis asks larger questions about the problems of authorship, examining how authorship is changing in new media. Audiences are taking an ever-increasing role in the creation and interpretation of the texts they receive: a phenomenon this thesis refers to as participatory authorship, or the active participation of audience members in the creation, expansion, and adaptation of another's creative work. In order to understand how audiences are creating texts, first the place of the player within video games is addressed. Due to the nature of the medium, players must become active co-creators of a video game. Drawing a parallel between video game players and performance, it is argued that players must simultaneously perform and author a text, illustrating the complex and multilayered nature of authorship in video games. In the second chapter the role of the fan is examined within the context of the My Little Pony fandom, Bronies. Like players, fans take an active role in the creation of the text and destabilize the traditional notion of authorship by partially controlling of a text from the original author. By examining the place of the player and the fan the traditional notion of authorship is destabilized, and the more open and collaborative model of participatory authorship is proposed.

This study seeks to understand ways in which members’ experience a sense of belonging within Sephora’s own commodified community: Beauty Insider. Three research questions are presented, the final one being of highest importance: in which way do members of Beauty Insider experience a sense of belonging? To be able to understand the members, previous research is presented where Muniz & O’Guinn’s (2001) study on Brand Communities is essential, as well as the study conducted by Dholakia et al. (2004) on participation within communities. To better understand what activities members engage in within communities, a theoretical framework based on fan cultures, consumer culture and participatory culture is presented to gain a better understanding of the aspects of a community. This study will approach the research questions mainly using focus group interviews, as well as a necessary description of the discourse content of the platform to better understand the context of the study. The study concludes by presenting a result and an analysis that is, mostly, in line with previous research as well as discovering new aspects of members attitudes towards Beauty Insider and which meaning members experience as a result of participating in different activities within the community.

Though researchers have discussed adolescents' uses of social media and Web 2.0 texts outside school, little research has analyzed how such texts are used in classrooms. This study examines various perspectives on a group of high school students engaged in blogging as part of two language arts courses over an eight-month period. Research questions focused on how students conceived of and interacted with their readers, how they used structural features of the blogging platform to connect their blogs to one another, and how discourses of freedom of speech online led a few students to transgress school norms. To answer these questions, I studied examples of eighty classroom blogs from my own high school students, conducted interviews with eight students, and maintained researcher field notes. I analyzed this data using a combination of discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, while applying social network analysis to understand how the blogs were connected through the key feature known as Following. My findings suggest that the connectivity offered by Web 2.0 enabled students to reach and communicate with authentic audiences who could recognize and validate their identity performances. Further, I argue that though certain features of Web 2.0 media are incongruous with many conventional classroom norms, teachers should work to bridge those gaps.

Sports fandoms, historically, have been categorized as a male domain, even in academic studies. Therefore, as Formula 1 has been a sport with a remarkable increase in digital engagement and women are one of their main target audiences, I study Spanish F1 female fans’ behaviours, attitudes, and motivations towards F1 and Twitter as part of their fan experience. Through nethnographic methods, where semi-structured interviews and participant observations have been central, I try to gain knowledge about individual experiences as well as the functionality of the F1 Twitter community. It is illustrated that F1 female fans cannot be considered a homogeneous group by applying a postmodern feminist approach where identities are considered to be fluid, fractured, and in constant flux, distancing from previous feminist ideals that promoted binary and determinate gender concepts. Raney’s affective, cognitive and social/behavioural sets of motivations are employed in order to contemplate F1 female fans' motivation for consuming F1 and choosing Twitter as the social network to follow the sport. Moreover, Jenkin’s participatory culture is taken into account to analyse the F1 Twitter community. Patterns regarding becoming a fan due to Alonso's success and family ties, common interests in information and shared F1 popular knowledge are encountered. However, diverse usage of Twitter and different levels of sense of belonging to TwF1 are also displayed. Hence, I conclude that more research is needed to gain a better understanding of them because despite displaying different facets, F1 female fans are ‘authentic’ fans who should be taken into consideration by sports, media and fan studies in addition to sports organizations and fellow fans.

Web 2.0 and the new decentralized, many-to-many technosocial tolls empower consumers and users to reproduce, and distribute content on their own and without permission, shifting the boundaries of participation. Alternative collaborative communities that produce and distribute information, knowledge and culture without seeking profit or operating hierarchically challenge and/or correct commercial entities. This thesis deals with such a variety of collaborative community: the scanlation community. It explores, describes and explains what differences there are in the practices and understandings of scanlators, with a special focus on their attitudes towards legal ownership and profit motives.  The main research question is: How do scanlators understand their cultural production, reproduction and distribution practices; with a special focus on which meanings do they ascribe to copyright infringement and the anti-profit motive? In particular, the study provides answers to the following questions: How do some become scanlators? What are the motives of the scanlators? How is scanlation organized? How is it managed? Which beliefs underpin it? Further impacts on and implications for the cultural industry of manga and the society at the level of politics, economy, and culture are taken into account and disccussed. Bruns' produsage based model of collaborative content production and usage is taken here as the main theoretical tool to analyze the participants, processes and principles of the scanlation community. Other concepts derived from fans studies and the political economy of media and communication complement the theoretical framework. Twenty qualitative interviews with individuals contributors to the collaborative process of content creation in a variety of groups were conducted.  The analysis of the results of the research suggests that scanlators collaborate in competition and cooperation with their open, free, ad hoc and heterarchical alternative model of (unauthorized) manga tranlation, reproduction and distribution to correct the many shortcomings of the traditional model: it is free, faster and universally accessible; whereas the latter is expensive, slow, and geo-locked. Moreover, scanlators recognize author's moral rights and do not a priori disregard copyrights, but criticize licensing and rights handling mechanisms together with economic and political censorship. Finally, although they do not want to be paid for their free affective labour, they are not adverse to commercial approaches to their produsage, if these take place on their own terms. This thesis serves as a contribution for the better understanding of communal produsage practices, by the produsers themselves.

The purpose of this study is to explore the Swedish site Funbeat which is a space dedicated to people who share an interest in exercising in general, and running in particular. By applying a netnographic analysis, I will investigate if Funbeat matches the criteria of a participatory culture and how the members manage to establish a collective intelligence within the community. In order to achieve this, I will analyze the interactivity between the participants which occurs in discussion threads concerning injuries related to running, in the sites discussion forum. The results will then be discussed in relation to previous research within the field for participatory culture, collective intelligence and interactivity. The outcome of the study revealed that Funbeat can be regarded as very good example of a participatory culture. By each member sharing their individual knowledge in matters regarding injuries, a collective intelligence was established. This knowledge has been acquired by personal experience, by consulting a physiotherapist or by sharing information which intend to serve as self-help for other members.

The purpose of this study was to describe participation in a new context in which niche journalism is combined with online communities. The majority of past research regarding participation in journalism is focused on traditional journalism and the definition of the term needs to be updated. The aim of the study was to describe participation amongst niche pure players. Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, a survey study and semi-structured interviews were conducted. The two empirical aspects resulted in a perspective of participation amongst five pure players, sharing a similar niche. The results of the study showed that niche pure players create user participation by combining journalistic participation with participation in online communities. Empirical data showed a correlation between user participation in the two different sections of the sites. Users with higher participation in one of the sections also partook more in the other. Furthermore, another correlation found was that users who considered it important to be able to partake in a discussion of the journalistic content, also considered the online community to be of great importance to the site. Additionally, the study showed that there is an exchange of information and knowledge, being regarded by the users as something of high value. By providing a platform for horizontal communication between users in the form of a forum, in which users are able to freely create and share content, a participatory culture is created. This participatory culture further increases the degree of user participation in the journalistic content.