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McNair Scholar, 2025
Major: Communication Arts: Cinema & Media Arts
Mentor: Dr. Jeffrey Klenotic
Research Title: The Investigation of Resonance
Abstract:
Living in the twenty-first century in a media-dominated society, attention and engagement have explicitly become some of the most sought after and invaluable commodities in the world. The structures within the digital media people consume are strategically employed using various techniques, cues, and technology to produce a resonance within the viewer. This resonance can be defined as the psychological, emotional, and physiological engagement that is produced within a human being that allows his or her attention to be seized. As technology develops, these cues and strategies become increasingly aligned with the specific viewer based on pattern recognition to curate media based on one's own interests and patterns. This research will investigate patterns of correlations, if any, between the engagement of audiences and cues and codes within three pieces of content from the HBO show The White Lotus. To find any correlations between the media text and the audience's engagement, sets of comments that belong to carefully chosen scenes and pivotal moments in the narrative will be collected and manually analyzed. For this study, a combination of methodologies will be used where both a textual analysis and an audience analysis will be merged, taking a middle-level approach where both forms of analysis are considered for the purpose of the study. The aim of this research is to find any recognizable patterns of correlation between the date of engagement (audience analysis) and the cues within the three pieces of media text (textual analysis) to find empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the cues that produced a resonance with audiences. If specific correlations between the cues and the comments are found, there may be both engagement and economic implications that could be reproducible for higher probability of resonance with the viewer based on the analytics of audience engagement.
