Let's have respectful discussions that bring people together.

1. Fandom

2. “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple
writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of
dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is
focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The
reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are
inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but
in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the
reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone
who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is
constituted.”
Roland Barthes, The Birth of
the Reader (1977)

3. MEDIA CONVERGENCE
We are living in an age when changes in communications,
storytelling and information technologies are reshaping almost
every aspect of contemporary life -- including how we create,
consume, learn, and interact with each other. A whole range of
new technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate,
appropriate, and recirculate media content and in the process,
these technologies have altered the ways that consumers interact
with core institutions of government, education, and commerce.
Henry Jenkins

4. Fans & Kingdoms of fans
• A fandom can grow up centered around any area of
human interest or activity.
• The subject of fan interest can be narrowly defined
– focused on something like an individual celebrity
– more widely defined, encompassing entire hobbies, genres
or fashions.
• groups of people fascinated with any subject
• Fandom as a term can also be used in a broad sense to
refer to an interconnected social network of individual
fandoms, many of which overlap.

5. Definitions
• fandom can be defined or explained as the state of being a
fan or all that encompasses fan culture and fan behavior in
general, or the study of fans and fan behavior.
• the definition of an audience is: an assembly of listeners or
spectators.
• the definition of fanatic is: marked or moved by excessive
enthusiasm and intense uncritical devotion.
• the definition of a fan is:
1) an enthusiastic follower of a sport or entertainment or
2) an enthusiastic admirer (as of a celebrity).

6. Fan Activities
• Members of a fandom associate with one another
• fan conventions and publishing and exchanging fanzines and newsletters
• communications and interaction for the purpose of archiving detailed information
pertinent to their given fanbase.
• Some fans write fan fiction, stories based around the universe and characters of their
chosen fandom.
• Some also dress in costumes ("cosplay") or recite lines of dialogue either out-of-
context or as part of a group reenactment.
• Others create fan vids, or analytical music videos focusing on the source fandom,
and yet others create fan art.
• Such activities are sometimes known as "fan labour" or "fanac," an abbreviated form
of the phrase "fan activity."
• The advent of the internet has significantly facilitated fan association and activities.
• Fandom is sometimes caricatured as religious faith

7. Two images of the fan
 Obsessed individual & Hysterical crowd
 Critique of modern life
 Characterization of fandom as pathology
 Elitist and disrespectful beliefs about common life

8. Fandom as pathology
 Literature on fandom – images of deviance
 Fanatic
 Fan – social & psychological pathologies
 Fandom is excessive

9. Fan as Creative Consumer
• Technology & consumption
• Fan as passive receiver (Hypodermic Syringe?)
• Fan as creative consumer
– Recontextualization of existent cultural products
– Purchases of a commodity (cultural product) is only
the first step
– Means of declaring your exaggerations
• Elevation of consumer as creator does not deny the
role of the producer (Uses and Gratifications)

10. Creative Fans
• semiotic productivity is when fans use their object
of fandom to create social meaning in their own
lives (ex. a fan who gains confidence watching his
or her favorite character on TV).
• enunciative productivity is when fans express their
fandom to the outside world through speech or
appearance (ex. fans wearing their favorite team's
jerseys)
• textual productivity is when fans create texts based
on their object of fandom

11. Theories of fandom
 romantic attachment
 Identification
 fantasy
 Fans as Tastemakers
 Collective support and/or admiration for…
 A collective celebration of mutual taste/preference in –
 A ritual gathering (physical or virtual)

12. Relationships between fans
Instead of monetary reward, one of the major rewards of
fan labour is the formation of relationships between fan
creators and other fans.
relationships created through fan exchanges are often as
important, if not more so, than the products exchanged.
The focus on relationships separates fandom economic
practices from the capitalistic practices of everyday life.
From an economic anthropology viewpoint, the products
of fan labour are a form of cultural wealth
valuable also for their ability to interrelate the fan works,
the fan-creators, and the original media property itself
through conversation and fan work exchanges.
Fans, in other words, are “affines” of media property and
of other fans.

13. Legal issues
• Most fan labour products are derivative works
• they are creative additions or modifications to an existing
copyrighted work
• or they are original creations which are inspired by a
specific copyrighted work
• Some or all of these works may fall into the legal category of
transformative works (such as a parody of the original),
which is protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law. This
law does not, as yet, occur in the English system.
• corporations continue to ask fans to stop engaging with
their products in creative ways (UMC, WB, SONY etc
waging war with Youtube users)

14. Fandom
 a site of collective memory
 community as the center of an emotional life
 issues of gender, ethnicity, class, national identity,
transnational identity and power through global
consumer culture
 Interpretive communities

15. So let’s have (fandom) fun!
 What is your idea of a ‘fan’?
 Have you ever been a ‘fan’ of something?
 Have you participated in a fandom?

16. Tasks
Get online! Find out what’s out there for the fandom
of your choice.
Read/write/watch some fan created works.
What are your impressions of the ‘fan community’
for your chosen text? Feedback!