Intertextual Interactions: The Crafting of Fandom, Ownership and Authenticity (original) (raw)
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Studies of fan groups in recent years have increasingly focused on the internet as a locus of communal activity for participants. Certainly this is not an unexpected paradigm shift. Prior to the advent of the internet, and its subsequent adoption by fan communities, being a fan was largely a proposition that required participants to engage in physical encounters where culture was transmitted on a personal, often individual level. However, as the internet collapses barriers of time and space fandoms have become a well connected global village capable of coordinated and immediate worldwide participation. As involvement in these mediated cyber modes of community formation and maintenance increases one must wonder what is at stake for these newly minted online fandoms. In this work the author will take the position of arguing that these groups form not only as a means of expressing communal identity but also as a method of asserting their hegemonic control over a collective ‘base text.’ This essay explores the formation of online communities around specific cultural artifacts and seeks to define what is meant in describing these mediated cultures as a ‘group.’ Much of the argument will center on the power dispute over hegemonic control between fans of a cultural artifact and the original producers of that text, situating this conflict in the fan experience. This dispute between cultural producers and consumers will bring sharply into focus the capabilities of online media and expose one of the myriad reasons why fandoms create and function in virtual spaces.
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Fanfiction is the creative appropriation and transformation of existing popular media texts by fans who take stories, worlds and/or characters as starting points and create their own stories based on them. As a cultural field of practice, fanfiction questions prevalent concepts of individual authorship and proprietary of cultural goods. At the same time, fanfiction itself is challenged. Through processes of mediatization, fanfiction grew and became increasingly visible. Third parties, ranging from the media industry (e.g., film studios) and copyright holders to journalism and academia, are interested in fanfiction and are following its development. We regard fanfiction communities and fan acting as fields for experimentation and as discursive arenas which can help understand what appropriating, writing and publishing in a digital culture and the future of writing might look like. In this paper, we outline important debates on the legitimacy and nature of fanfiction and present preli...
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The modern reception of popular media is being infused with new and contradictory definitions of authorship that are characterized by online activism, fan-communities and their developing forms of self-expression. Canon Fodder is a theoretical approach to the power struggle between fandom and media producers in the face of contemporary realities of the online age and the media conglomerates who inform both audience and creator. The debate of creative ownership over texts is continued via online producer‐consumer conflicts and real-world legal controversies. This study largely acts as a response to Henry Jenkin’s formative work Textual Poachers, complicating his utopian notions of fandom-as-rebellion. Canon Fodder updates fandom by showing them to be multi-faceted communities rife with constant contradictions. Through an understanding of the ‘fannish’ dialect, it is noted how academic terms such as ‘auteur’ and ‘canon’ are colloquialised and altered in fandom settings to accommodate the various values of that circle, whether divisionary or inclusionary. The interconnected nature of forums, social media and fan-sites have generated new types of reader bridging the gap between users and producer. The essay also questions the community nature of fandom, declaring them an ‘anti-community’ and how that disruptive ‘rogue reading’ negatively reaches media institutions. The divide between fandom in-fighting is identified as a political one as opposed to a purely commercial or gendered one. Splitting and showcasing recent developments in exclusionary and inclusionary circles, revealing fandom as a community ultimately dependent on conflict. Conflicts in the new interconnected online platform that ventures into fields such as copyright legislation, identity politics and the role of fan-activities in the sociological study of ‘participatory culture’. This in-fighting also holds consequences for the studio that encourage such acts of devout community-led fandom. Research delves into multiple reflective case studies- examples that define, reinforce or change our understanding of a ‘social author’ (a broad definition of creator or distributor that is able to shape cultural memory). By focusing on non-traditional authors and auteurs, this research aims to explore the extents to which the ‘author’ title can be applied and the cultural ramifications for such changes in popular media consumption.
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