Abstract
In this paper, I describe participation in reality television online communities as a case of cultural convergence (Ito, in press; Jenkins, 2006) across old fan fiction and online community practices. The ways in which reality TV fans engage as media producers parallels the ways in which researchers who study other new media such as video games describe the rich discourse, enduring community, and media mixing required to participate in these settings (Ito, in press; Steinkuehler, 2006). I argue here that the characterization of these worlds as communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), the dominant analytic framework for online communities, does not fully capture the way learning (and therefore becoming) happens in reality TV online communities and suggest ways to reframe this model. Finally, I propose directions for future research focused on understanding reality TV online fan communities as informal learning environments that require participants to engage in rich cognitive and sociocultural media literacy activities.
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