Henry Jenkins - fandom blog tasks

Factsheet #107 - Fandom

Read Media Factsheet #107 on Fandom. Use our Media Factsheet archive on the M: drive Media Shared (M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets) or log into your Greenford Google account to access the link. Read the whole of Factsheet and answer the following questions:

1) What is the definition of a fan?

• Fanatic: a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal - shortened to fan.

2) What the different types of fan identified in the factsheet?

• Hardcore/True Fan
• Hard core fans identify themselves as the ‘insiders’ within any given fandom and consider themselves to be aficionados of their chosen media text. They spend a lot of time and often money in becoming hard core fans. They take pride in how long they have been a fan and also the quantity and quality of the knowledge they have amassed whilst being a fan.
• Newbie
• Newbies, as the name suggests, are new fans of any given text and do not have the longevity of devotion or depth of knowledge that hard core fans have and are initially viewed as the ‘outgroup’ within fandoms.
• Anti-fan
• ‘Anti-fans’ are those which identify themselves with media texts but negatively so; they loathe or hate the text but unlike ‘true’ fans they do not form their relationship with a text through close readings, they develop their emotional attachment ‘at a distance’ (Gray) through marketing publicity such as trailers. Hills argues that the ‘anti-fan’ seems to be a negative stereotype of a text or genre such as ‘all people who watch chick flicks are dim’ or ‘people who watch horror must be sick in the head’.

3) What makes a ‘fandom’?

• While it is now used to apply to groups of people fascinated with any subject, the term has its roots in those with an enthusiastic appreciation for sports.

4) What is Bordieu’s argument regarding the ‘cultural capital’ of fandom?

• Bordieu argues a kind of ‘cultural capital’ which confers a symbolic power and status for the fan, especially within the realm of their fandom.

5) What examples of fandom are provided on pages 2 and 3 of the factsheet?

• Sherlock Holmes fans
• Liverpool
• Rocky Horror show
• Lord of the Rings
• Family Guy
• Harry Potter
• The walking dead

6) Why is imaginative extension and text creation a vital part of digital fandom?

• Fans use the original media texts and get creative and innovative with the material. Crawford suggests that it is this which distinguishes fans from ordinary consumers. They engage in diverse activities such as ‘the production of websites, mods and hacks, private servers, game guides, walkthroughs and FAQs, fan fiction and forms of fan art, fanvids’ all of which have been aided by digital technology. Digital fandoms use technology in multiple ways and Fiske sees this as the ‘cultural economy’ of fandoms, one that is focused not on making money but on expressing the complex ideas and value systems behind fandoms.

Henry Jenkins - degree-level reading

Read the final chapter of ‘Fandom’ – written by Henry Jenkins. This will give you an excellent introduction to the level of reading required for seminars and essays at university as well as degree-level insight into our current work on fandom and participatory culture. Answer the following questions:

1) There is an important quote on the first page: “It’s not an audience, it’s a community”. What does this mean?

• Services that transform the relationship between media producers and consumers. As they explain, “MySpace, Flickr, and all the other newcomers aren’t places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons”

2) Jenkins quotes Clay Shirky in the second page of the chapter. Pick out a single sentence of the extended quote that you think is particularly relevant to our work on participatory culture and the ‘end of audience’ (clue – look towards the end!)

• Shirky, in effect, seems to be traversing the same terrain fan studies traveled several decades ago, reasserting the emergence of the active audience in response to the perceived passivity of mass media consumers. Of course, in this formulation, it is the technology that has liberated the consumer and not their own subcultural practices.

3) What are the different names Jenkins discusses for these active consumers that are replacing the traditional audience?

• Some call such people “loyals,” stressing the value of consumer commitment in an era of channel zapping; some are calling them “media-actives,” suggesting that they are much more likely to demand the right to participate within the media franchise than previous generations; some are calling them “prosumers,” suggesting that as consumers produce and circulate media, they are blurring the line between amateur and professional; some are calling them “inspirational consumers” or “connectors” or “influencers,” suggesting that some people play a more active role than others in shaping media flows and creating new values.

4) On the third page of the chapter, what does Wired editor Chris Anderson suggest regarding the economic argument in favour of fan communities?

• offered a particular version of this argument about grassroots intermediaries creating value, what has come to be known as the “long tail.” Anderson argues that investing in niche properties with small but committed consumer bases may make economic sense if you can lower costs of production and replace marketing costs by building a much stronger network with your desired consumers.

5) What examples does Jenkins provide to argue that fan culture has gone mainstream?

• The new multipliers are simply a less geeky version of the fan—fans who don’t wear rubber Spock ears, fans who didn’t live in their parents’ basement, fans who have got a life. In other words, they are fans that don’t fit the stereotypes. These writers are predicting, and documenting, a world where what we are calling “fan culture” has a real economic and cultural impact; where fan tastes are ruling at the box office (witness all of the superhero and fantasy blockbusters of recent years); where fan tastes are dominating television (resulting in the kind of complexity that Steven Johnson celebrates in his new book, Every- Afterword: The Future of Fandom 359 thing Bad Is Good for You [2005]); where fan practices are shaping the games industry (where today’s modders quickly get recruited by the big companies).

6) Look at the quote from Andrew Blau in which he discusses the importance of grassroots creativity. Pick out a sentence from the longer quote and decide whether you agree that audiences will ‘reshape the media landscape from the bottom up’.

• The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers[. . . . ] A new generation of media makers and viewers are [sic] emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.
• Consumers are now creating their own media as amateurs and hobbyists emerging due to their love and admiration for other media works leading to a change in how media is consumed as there are now more people who are capable of creating media.

7) What does Jenkins suggest the new ideal consumer is?

• The ideal consumer watched television, bought products, and didn’t talk back. Today, the ideal consumer talks up the program and spreads word about the brand. The old ideal might have been the couch potato; the new ideal is almost certainly a fan.

8) Why is fandom 'the future'?

• fandom is the future. I use the word “fandom” and not “fans” here for good reason. To me, it seems a little paradoxical that the rest of the people involved in this conversation are more and more focused on consumption as a social, networked, collaborative process (“harnessing collective intelligence,” “the wisdom of crowds,” and all of that), whereas so much of the recent work in fan studies has returned to a focus on the individual fan.

9) What does it mean when Jenkins says we shouldn’t celebrate ‘a process that commodifies fan cultural production’?

• We should certainly avoid celebrating a process that commodifies fan cultural production and sells it back to us with a considerable mark-up. Yet, these same trends can also be understood in terms of making companies more responsive to their most committed consumers, as extending the influence that fans exert over the media they love, and fans as creating a context in which more people create and circulate media that more perfectly reflects their own world views.

10) Read through to the end of the chapter. What do you think the future of fandom is? Are we all fans now? Is fandom mainstream or are real fan communities still an example of a niche media audience?

• there has been a radical expansion of what we mean by fan culture—a movement to diversify the kinds of media content and fan activities we study (beyond the early focus on science fiction to include the full scope of the contemporary creative economy—sports, soap operas, the literary canon); a movement to expand the historical context of fan culture (to deal with fandom as a set of historically specific practices and cultural logics that have shifted profoundly over the past decade, let alone in the course of the past several centuries); and an expansion beyond American fans to understand fan culture as operating within a global context—and indeed, to understand fandom as a key driver opening Western markets to the circulation of Asian-made media products, for example. I am deeply excited by each of these moves to broaden the context and mission of fan studies and to thus complicate further our initial assumptions about what constitutes a fan.