Playing with politics

Another paper-spruiking post.

Playing with politics (PDF download) is a reasonably final draft of a paper that will be appearing in a special issue of Convergence later this year. The special issue is about mobile media and mobile games, so I’ve tried to shape the argument so that it’s explicitly relevant to that theme.

But this paper is an outcome of ideas I’ve been kicking around for a long while, some of which I presented in a seminar at the University of Sydney last April, and at another one at UC last August.

Those ideas include the concept of post-broadcast democracy, which I’ve found productive in a number of papers now, and the idea of Twitter faking as a kind of performative satire. Material gleaned from interviews with Twitter fakers is at the heart of the paper.

Most important of all for me, perhaps, is the idea that the minority of politically engaged citizens in Western democracies constitute a kind of political fandom, with similarities to other kinds of fan cultures. I don’t quite get around to thinking about whether democracy or a fourth estate is sustainable on the basis of this audience in this paper, but I will soon.

Anyway, as always, bouquets and brickbats welcome.

UPDATE Um I actually put up a PDF that’s not in landscape this time.