LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media

Nicholas Taylor · Chris Ingraham

2020년 2월 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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208

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LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media provides a multi-faceted exploration of LEGO fandom, addressing a blindspot in current accounts of LEGO and an emerging area of interest to media scholars: namely, the role of hobbyist enthusiasts and content producers in LEGO's emergence as a ubiquitous transmedia franchise. This book examines a range of LEGO hobbyism and their attendant forms of mediated self-expression and identity (their “technicities”): artists, aspiring Master Builders, collectors, and entrepreneurs who refashion LEGO bricks into new commodities (sets, tchotchkes, and minifigures). The practices and perspectives that constitute this diverse scene lie at the intersection of multiple transformations in contemporary culture, including the shifting relationships between culture industries and the audiences that form their most ardent consumer base, but also the emerging forms of entrepreneurialism, professionalization, and globalization that characterize the burgeoning DIY movement.

What makes this a compelling project for media scholars is its mutli-dimensional articulation of how LEGO functions not just as a toy, cultural icon, or as transmedia franchise, but as a media platform. LEGOfied is centered around their shared experiences, qualitative observations, and semi-structured interviews at a number of LEGO hobbyist conventions. Working outwards from these conventions, each chapter engages additional modes of inquiry-media archaeology, aesthetics, posthumanist philosophy, feminist media studies, and science and technology studies-to explore the origins, permutations and implications of different aspects of the contemporary LEGO fandom scene.

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Dr. Nicholas Taylor is Associate Professor of Digital Media at North Carolina State University, USA. He applies critical, feminist and posthumanist perspectives to ethnographies of digital play. His work explores the intersections of subjectivity, communicative practice, technologies, and play across a variety of contexts, from competitive gaming tournaments to LEGO conventions.

Dr. Chris Ingraham is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Utah, USA. He performs scholarship that engages rhetorical theory, media studies, and ecological thought to explore the material and affective aspects of cultural politics in everyday life. His first academic book, Gestures of Concern, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.