Participatory culture and You
Many traditional media experts like Michael Budd, Robert Entman, and Clay Steinman have and (continue to) underestimate the importance of fandom on culture itself. These theorists would insist that the audience is a submissive one…but to these theorists I must quote Bob Dylan, "the times are a changing.'" As fan circles became more intricate and numerous, new types of fan participation has cropped up in the past years such as blogs (on culture, politics, etc.), music mash ups (like Danger Mouse's the Grey Album), and youtube parodies, etc. So these days, what does it actually mean to be a fan?
For this we turn to expert Michel De Certeau, who first coined the term "textual poacher" after he compared readers to nomads, "traveling from text to text." He said that, while readers don't create the text directly themselves, they do have an active role in the meaning of any particular work.
Henry Jenkins notes the origins of the word "fan," come from the Latin word "fanaticus;" which translates to, "of or belonging to the temple, a temple servant, or a devotee." In turn, its interesting to note the similarities between the religious worship of a God or deity, and the sometimes extreme (almost religious) adoration that can be involved in being a "fan" of a TV show, film actor, musician, or any other thing in popular culture.
Being a textual poacher of popular culture means taking something away from the sometimes-dispensable world of mass media. To look at the world of the Star Trek franchise one quickly notices how the fans have created their own culture by "poaching" and readapting many themes, motifs, messages, and characters from the show into their own lives. These fans dress up like their favorite characters, use fictional languages from the show, and even conduct large-scale conferences with other fans across the globe. Creepy? Perhaps. Powerful? Definitely.
After these clubs gained notoriety on a national scale, it came as no surprise when the networks took a gamble at the franchise again, beginning with the Next Generation from 1987-1992, and ending with Star Trek Enterprise in 2005. A shining early example of how fans pulled their resources together to invest time in a television franchise and influence a major business to back the project
In keeping with the almost religious adoration involved in fandom, it should come as no surprise, that as media fans, we "worship" as a way of filling needs and wants deep within our unconscious. For instance, Henry Jenkins noticed that the largest group of fans, by far, is middle-class white women looking for meaning or substance outside of their home lives. The need for glamour, beauty, romance, and good conversation is often times met through soap operas and celebrity programs.
Media expert Stuart Hall has a theory that is based in the Marxist school of thought. He says that the general populace has an "ideology" that can create commodity fetishism. By living in a capitalist society, he says that selling the products depicted in the media (books, films, albums, etc.) becomes the media's primary concern, saying these "products" are meant to appeal purely to the dominant ideology, so as to make the maximum amount of profit. Any other meanings taken away by the audience are purely coincidental he says.
Theorists like J Fiske would agree that popular culture is one for the proletariat, he argues that there now exists a difference between "official culture" and "popular culture." Frsike says that while, "popular culture" may be constructed from the official culture of the people, "popular culture" and the realm of fandom is something completely distinct and oppositional to the official dominant culture.
continued in part 2