Fiske's 'textual productivity' and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction? (original) (raw)

Partly in response to debates surrounding participatory culture and what's been dubbed 'web 2.0', writers in fan studies have recently made use of John Fiske's classic (1992) tripartite model of semiotic, enunciative and textual production to theorise online fandom's creativity (e.g. Crawford 2012; Sandvoss 2011; Scott 2008). In this article, I consider the difficulties with using Fiske's (pre-Internet) model to think through alleged democratisations of web 2.0 fan productivity. Firstly, what is to be counted as a 'text' in a world where comments, tweets and status updates can all potentially constitute forms of fannish textual productivity, and where Fiske's three categories can be rapidly cycled through, and readily hybridized, thanks to social media? And secondly, to what extent does Fiske's refusal to distinguish between 'fan' and 'official' production lead to a situation where fan-cultural distinctions and evaluations regarding the 'quality' of fan creations are downplayed? I identify a tension in web 2.0 scholarship between those who follow Fiske's populist cultural politics, problematically positing fan creativity-without-expertise (e.g. Gauntlett 2011; Shirky 2010), and those who-equally problematically-seek to recuperate an amateur/professional binary (e.g. Keen 2008; Lanier 2011). Drawing on a series of case studies, I argue that questions of expertise and distinction remain highly relevant to fans' productivity, thereby challenging both the cultural-political heirs to Fiske's 'active audience' position, and their opponents who have taken a derogatory stance in relation to fan creativity. Ultimately, I suggest that digital fandom's affordances and activities indicate a fluidity of semiotic, enunciative, and textual productivity, returning us to Fiske's own hesitancy surrounding these terms, and cautioning us against simply applying fixed categories to digital fandom. However, I argue that a 'return to Fiske' can usefully highlight varying relationships between fan expertise and web 2.0's democratisation of production. Rather than this being a dialectic or paradox, it is managed via differing fan-cultural 'moral economies' (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013).