In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a
Mediated World, Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington have
edited a collection of essays that explore how fans make use of their chosen
texts and justify why this exploration is valuable.
The
editors give a brief overview of “fan scholarship”. Its first iteration took
inspiration from de Certeau’s notion of bricolage, where fans make use of mass-mediated
narratives in subversive ways. John Fiske and Henry Jenkins describe how fandom
was “a collective strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities
that in their subcultural cohesion evaded the preferred and intended meanings
of the power bloc”.
Public
recognition and understanding of fandom has profoundly changed over the past
several decades. Moving from broadcasting to narrowcasting, fans are no longer
ridiculed but courted as advertisers and producers compete for their dollars
and eyes. People now communicate (their identities, worldviews, etc.) through
their fandoms.
The
second wave of work on fan audiences focused on the replication of social and
cultural hierarchies with fan subcultures. Rather than see fandom as a means
for empowerment, the taste hierarchies among the fans themselves emulate the
wider social inequalities. Fans essentially maintain social and cultural
systems of classification. “Blackberries, iPods, PSPs, laptops, PDAs, and cell
phones all bring fan objects out with their users to the subway, the street,
and even the classroom. These changing communication technologies and media
texts contribute to and reflect the increasing entrenchment of fan consumption
in the structure of our everyday life.”
The
third wave of fan studies offers new answers to the question of what they are
for. Fandom itself is not an object of study, but part of the fabric of our
everyday lives, and can provide insights into our daily existence. The study of
fans can help us understand how we relate to others, meet challenges, identify
our place in the world, and how we read the mediated texts that facilitate all
of the above.
This
third wave is broken into six themes: emphasis on the symbolic and
representations that mark contemporary mediated worlds, the dissolution of
boundaries between different textual forms (high & pop culture), changing
relationship between physical and virtual space, interplay between global and
local in globalization, new identities arising out of the transformation of
production and consumption in light of social and technological change, and the
formation of conflict in mediated discourses (fan-tagonism).
Cornel
Sandvoss notes that synthesizing fan studies with reception aesthetics enables
us to explore aesthetics, a field sometimes ignored by critics, as a subjective
category with objective criteria. Matt Hills advocates the generalized hybridity of contemporary media academics (academics
who are also fans of what they write about) as helpful in avoiding the fallacy
that scholars are objective, bias-free bringers of free thought. Rebecca
Tushnet discusses the difficult notion of copyright law within the
transformative fair-use doctrine. Technology gives fans greater creative control
and re-mix capabilities, and there can be semiotic dissonance between what an
author (profession or amateur) intends to produce and what others think the author has produced. Alan
McKee argues that fans of theory are no different than fans of other cultural
phenomena. Similar to Hills’ contention, he advocates fan studies as a way of
opening up the methodologies of analysis. We all bring something to the table
(as a “fan” of some bias, approach, ideology, perspective, text, or trend) and fan
studies bring this out into the open. There are quite a few other essays here, but these are the ones that interested me. Henry Jenkins also does the epilogue and sums up the increasing salience of fan culture.
Gray, J., Sandvoss, C., & Harrington, C. L. (2007). Fandom: Identities and communities in a mediated world. New York: New York University Press.
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