Hollis Griffin, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media, has recently published two articles.

The first, titled "When mass culture meets high culture: reality television and big data at the art museum" and published in the International Communication Association's Communication Culture and Critique journal, uses a museum installation, America's Got No Talent, as a case study in examining cultural beliefs related to reality television and social media.

Ultimately, Griffin argues, "By erasing the differences between disparate categories of programming and oversimplifying the decision-making practices of television’s institutions, the artwork exhibits common ways of devaluing reality television in popular vernacular." He goes on to point out that the exhibit "communicates a series of cultural beliefs about what people should consume and how they should be in the world" and that "[s]uch commentary is never innocuous."

 

The second article, "Sexual diversity and streaming television: Toward a platform studies approach to analyzing LGBTQ+ TV," has been published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. In it, Griffin argues that economic diversity has a notable impact on the kinds of sexual diversity available for streaming, and that combining texual analysis with a platform-studies approach can allow for analysis of LGBTQ+ television in new ways. 

Through the use of four LGBTQ+-themed programs, Griffin shows that "close readings that remain attuned to how the platform economy results in both tendencies and possibilities in the texts created and circulated there gestures to the ideological limitations of media commerce as well as the potential to create transformational representations of LGBTQ + lives, desires, and cultures."