courses@JLR: F11 (Brandy's section) - Fandom discussion questions (OPTIONAL)

Julie Levin Russo
390 days ago

You can make up a missed section response or get more "website participation" points by posting a discussion question here.

Ryan Davenport

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Ryan Davenport
385 days ago

Fandom seems to have gotten its start a number of years ago with shows like Star Trek. Inspiring fans to participate in the show outside fo the conventional hour slot they saw it per week. This started conventions and the like where fans of all sorts could flock to appreciate their show, in this case Star Trek. After many years fandom has evolved, namely due to the proliferation of the media and internet. Shows like How I Met Your Mother have huge fan bases that create blogs, Youtube channels, character websites, etc. dedicated to this show, which I described in my first video project. Simply fandom has been enhanced be the furthering of technology and allows for people to now enjoy their favorite shows more than ever.

Meaghan Carroll

Meaghan Carroll
385 days ago

Reading about audience research and convergence culture taught me that fandom is any group of audience members that share a common interest – I used to think fandom only referred to the scifi genre. Personally, I have never been interested in the science fiction genre so when I heard fandom was this week’s topic I was a little nervous. After reading Jenkin’s article I recognize that this subculture of audience exists for many kinds of media. When reading about these active media members I could not stop thinking of the avid Harry Potter followers. Ranging in age from children to elders, people dress up as the characters and go to book signings, conventions, and to see the new movies at midnight when they came out. When I decided to research deeper into the Harry Potter fandom, I actually found that it was the anniversary of the battle that killed Voldemort (May 2). I was brought to the website, www.harrypotterfandom.net, a place visited daily by many Harry Potter enthusiasts. The fans constantly post updates of celebration through blog posts, pictures, and videos. A line that actually made me laugh was “On May 2^nd of 1998, Harry Potter defeated Lord Voldemort on the grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. We remember this day by celebrating and remembering the lives of the many who lost their lives during those dark times.” This made me laugh because I am not a part of this fandom subculture and reading about how seriously people feel and speak about characters and events that have not actually happened is something I am unfamiliar with. This site also includes a remake documentary of the battle that killed Voldemort with people dressed up as the characters involved providing interviews about the battle. Included is the link to the first section of the documentary if you wish to take a look. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBEVM9QHn_Q&list=PL46950D4B1F0F21E4&index=6&feature=plpp_video

Jelena Jelusic

Jelena Jelusic
384 days ago

In Jenkins' and Green's text fan communities play an important (if not always properly recognized and appreciated) role in conceptualizing trends in production, transmission and development of TV programs. On the one hand, they have the potential to threaten economic supremacy of media conglomerates, while, on the other hand, they produce materials that can be exploited to further promote and reinforce the influence of major producers of TV programs. In the text we've read, they belong to the domain of "subculture," but, in my opinion, our perception of fandom is different from Jenkins' and Green's.

Through my personal interactions I came to perceive fandom as a waste of time rather than potentially influential and effective labor. (NB - Downloading music illegaly from my experience does not necessarily imply that we are fans of the artists. More commonly, it is a way to connect with peers or identify with particular lifestyles associated with corresponding music genres. An average iTunes library of a young adult probably contains way too many artists for the owner to be a fan of every one of them.) In my opinion, as TV programs multiply and mobilize mediums other than television itself, we are attracted to certain tropes (for example gossip, love/sex triangles, fashion) rather than individual shows.

In fact, fandom itself increasingly becomes a trope that is used in TV shows, perhaps most prominently in The Big Bang Theory. In this show, the "subculture" of sci-fi fandom is depicted humoristically - it is likeable but ultimately unnecessary and irrelevant for general population. Understanding of the show depends on our recognition of references to pop culture (that is on our partial belonging to fan communities) as well as our ability to maintain critical distance from fandom and our recognition of it as ultimately outdated. Does this mobilization of fandom as a trope in TV fiction have any potential to effectively reduce the influence of fan communities in shaping of TV materials?

Siera

Siera
384 days ago

Coppa’s essay deals with “vidding,” a practice of taking clips from television shows and putting them to music to create a narrative of sorts. In the example video she discusses, “A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Hot Hot Hot!),” a number of tropes or parts are fetishized – dance floors, swordfights, whipping off eyeglasses. She claims that this process of vidding complicates traditional gender norms. “Vidding, as an art form made through editing, also complicates the familiar symbolic characterization of women sewing and men cutting. Vidding women cut, slicing visual texts into pieces before putting them together again, fetishizing not only body parts and visual tropes, but the frame, the filmic moment, that they pull out of otherwise coherent wholes.” (107) She also says that it displays a way of watching television that is familiar to many female fans, “a selective seeing, or seeing in parts.” (109) So to me it seems as though vidding is not complicating any gender norms, because it seems to encourage the obsessive style of watching television that Coppa says is typical of female fans. Is vidding a gendered practice? And while vidding is largely practiced by females, what does it mean that fan film is a male-dominated practice? (Fan film refers to anything from faux trailers to full-length movies).