Done and dusted

8,617 words, 3 Chapters, an log, introduction, conclusion and an annotated bibliography later, I completed my PIP and handed it in on the 13th of August 2012. Literal tears have been wept for this, money has gone out the window and 30 pages have been printed. That's probably a whole infant tree. It's done. It's gone. I'm finished. Biggest rollercoaster of a PIP ever. I'll post up the thing next year or something....if I remember to. Or maybe when I get my results back. GIANT THANK YOU AND LOVE TO ALL WHO HELPED AND ASSISTED AND PARTICIPATED OMG YOU'RE ALL AMAZING, BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.

MCI TV Ad 1994

People here communicate mind to mind. There is no race. There are no genders. There is no age. There are no infirmities. There are only minds. Utopia? No, the Internet.

Email Correspondence Analysis:

Defining fandom:
     B: There are different definitions: realm of fans -> community; can be collective or individualistic
     L: Strong affective tie towards object or person

Change in fan culture:
     Both say same thing: In terms of culture, it is still the same but the expression is totally transformed via internet

Gender demographic shift in fan culture:
     B: More female in general. Uses a gem of an example with Doctor who (male dominated Classic who vs. female dominated New Who)
     L: Roughly even between male and female, no change
Both point out that it depends on what fandom and what kind of fan activity. Focus group also said this.

Hardcore fandom:
    Both say that there is no real definition of "hardcore". One person's view of what a "hardcore" fan may be another person's view of what a "casual" fan is.
    B: She uses personal accounts to clarify what she means by this. She also equalises fandom with other aspects such as being an atheist, feminist, Welsh and her education with fandom; all of which shape her identity in an equal manner.

B mentioned not being sure how I'd add hyperreality for this. She mentioned a guy name Nathan Jurgenson and his ideas of offline and online and all these other theories at is pure gold for my third chapter. So will post my findings on his studies later.

So a lot of shifting in my chapters now. You have no idea how happy I was when I saw these replies and such.

Who can explain fan speak better than fans?

FANDOM TRANSLATION

Fan:	my creys. my feels. hold me.
Translation:	The emotional impact of this episode/line/character is almost beyond my capacity to hold in my feelings. I could really use the support of my fellow fans
Fan:	how does your face even work you DICKFACE JUST TAKE MY OVARIES YOU ASSWIPE ugh i will never be able to reproduce
Translation:	I find this person to be very attractive and I'm left stunned by his/her seemingly flawless physical appearance.
Fan:	i cannot. i am unable to can.
Translation:	I am deeply in awe of this art/fanfiction/person/etc. It feels as though I've temporarily lost the ability to function.
Fan:	omg omG I HATE YOU FUCK YOU UGGGH GO DIE
Translation:	I love you. Every fiber of my being burns with a passion hotter than one thousand white-hot suns. I may or may not have a chewed-gum shrine of you in my closet.

I Live Life on Tumblr

This is actually perfect. It sums up both (cyber)fandom and tumblr in the form of an 80s power rock song:

Description of life on Tumblr set to the classic "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel. Lyrics below.

This exists because no, I don't have any dignity left, and because yes, Tumblr has become my actual real life, and because IT'S SUMMER AND I REGRET NOTHING ehehehehe

I wanted to make a video for the song displaying photographic evidence of all objects described (the AMURRICA eagle especially), but then I remembered that my video editing software expired two days ago, so. If you feel particularly inspired to do so for me, I'll love you five-ever, and all that.

find me on tumblr - http://batmansymbol.tumblr.com

Lyrics:

Fangirl squeals, Doctor Who, reblog is all I do,

watching Sherlock, Reichenfeels, we need Season Three.

Gorgeous graphics, keyboard smashing, signal boosts and Mako-bashing,

Bryke is trolling, Moffat's trolling, perfect OTP,

Social justice, F-bombs, food porn, om nom nom,

Mean Girls, "The Life and Times," and lawnmowers that can fly,

Please stop tagging your hate, this fic never updates,

all my feels, oh my Godtiss, holy shit I'm gonna cry!

I live life on Tumblr

Yeah, I went through hell

to get this URL

cause I live life on Tumblr

Let me love you, bby,

so call me maybe?

Hiddlestoners, Cumberbabes, who cares if they're twice our age?

Shipping schism, activism, Stewart and Colbert.

Real talk, spam? block, Steve and Tony, Johnlock

and on art blogs, random pics of hair.

Yes this, now kiss, all my feelings in a gif,

Princess Kuzco, SOPA ban, lost ability to can,

Fanart, safe for work? Blatant porn, don't look

Fluffy fics, fanmix, what the hell is Facebook?

I live life on Tumblr

Yeah, I went through hell

to get this URL

cause I live life on Tumblr

Let me love you, bby,

so call me maybe?

Rage toons, screAMING YELL, Merthur and Destiel,

Ruined life, (you tool,) learned more from my dash than school.

Goodbye MegaUpload, reblog this potato!

Cat pics are heaven-sent, "fuck you" is a compliment.

Superwholock, John Green, badass Katniss Everdeen,

Douche anons, torrent host, this has been a text post,

Bridesmaids, irony, overuse of "literally"

GPOY, lol nope, how'd this get ten thousand notes?!

I live life on Tumblr

Yeah, I went through hell

to get this URL

cause I live life on Tumblr

Let me love you, bby,

so call me maybe?

Ovaries long-gone, screw M. Night Shyamalan,

Askbox limits suck, I'll tell you 'bout Homestuck.

Game of Thrones, out of spite, killed off everyone you liked

-Amurrica is so free, Post-Potter Misery

Sepia? Hipster found! Existential quotes abound,

Missing E., can't unsee, ehehehe LOKI'D!

I live life on Tumblr

Yeah, I went through hell

to get this URL

cause I live life on Tumblr

Let me love you, bby,so call me maybe?

All my creys, typeface and vids I do not understand

Wow rude, spONGEBOB sTOP, too bad I can't Photoshop

Canon/fanon, what the hey, think I'll ship it anyway,

Be right back I'm tearbending, why is Finchel still a thing? ((sorry, authorial bias showing, heh))

Special snowflakes, Yu-Gi-Oh, da da dadadada da da AFRO,

Germany, Italy, ship them like Dramione.

No regret, that I met, strangers on the internet

thanks to Rule 34, I can't even anymore!

I live life on Tumblr

Yeah, I went through hell

to get this URL

cause I live life on Tumblr

Let me love you, bby,so call me maybe?

Hey, I just met you... and this is crazy. But here's my number, so call me maybe?

Pierre Bourdieu

Famous and beloved sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher. How much do you reckon one would earn from being those three things? Off topic. Bad

Pierre Bourdieu is another referenced a lot by fan scholars. He has a lot of theories so it might be hard to get through them all and trying to adapt them to fan culture.

Main theories for consumption:

• Economic, social and cultural capital: 
  • Economic capital: command over economic resources (cash, assets).
  • Social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support. Bourdieu described social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition."
  • Cultural capital: forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society. Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system.
  
  
  • Cultural capital has three subtypes: embodied, objectified and institutionalised (Bourdieu, 1986:47). Bourdieu distinguishes between these three types of capital:
    • Embodied cultural capital consists of both the consciously acquired and the passively "inherited" properties of one's self (with "inherited" here used not in the genetic sense but in the sense of receipt over time, usually from the family through socialization, of culture and traditions; a meme). Cultural capital is not transmissible instantaneously like a gift or bequest; rather, it is acquired over time as it impresses itself upon one's habitus (character and way of thinking), which in turn becomes more attentive to or primed to receive similar influences.
      • Linguistic capital, defined as the mastery of and relation to language (Bourdieu, 1990:114), can be understood as a form of embodied cultural capital in that it represents a means of communication and self-presentation acquired from one's surrounding culture.
    • Objectified cultural capital consists of physical objects that are owned, such as scientific instruments or works of art. These cultural goods can be transmitted both for economic profit (as by buying and selling them with regard only to others' willingness to pay) and for the purpose of "symbolically" conveying the cultural capital whose acquisition they facilitate. However, while one can possess objectified cultural capital by owning a painting, one can "consume" the painting (understand its cultural meaning) only if one has the proper foundation of conceptually and/or historically prior cultural capital, whose transmission does not accompany the sale of the painting (except coincidentally and through independent causation, such as when a vendor or broker chooses to explain the painting's significance to the prospective buyer).
    • Institutionalized cultural capital consists of institutional recognition, most often in the form of academic credentials or qualifications, of the cultural capital held by an individual. This concept plays its most prominent role in the labor market, in which it allows a wide array of cultural capital to be expressed in a single qualitative and quantitative measurement (and compared against others' cultural capital similarly measured). The institutional recognition process thereby eases the conversion of cultural capital to economic capital by serving as a heuristic that sellers can use to describe their capital and buyers can use to describe their needs for that capital.
• Habitus: Habitus is the set of socially learned dispositions, skills and ways of acting that are often taken for granted, and which are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life.The particular contents of the habitus are the result of the objectification of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity. The habitus can be seen as counterpoint to the notions of rationality that is prevalent within other disciplines of social science research.It is perhaps best understood in relation to the notion of the 'habitus' and 'field', which describes the relationship between individual agents and the contextual environment. 
• [Thank you Wiki]
• I've realised that I spelt 'Bourdieu' wrong in my labels.....

Michel de Certeau part 2: Summary Points

Ok this is the only short summary I could find that I understood to an extent:

http://recombinant.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/the-practice-of-everyday-life-michel-de-certeau-summary-points/

For more in depth but easy-to-understand explanation (not referenced in this post):

http://www.arasite.org/decwalk.htm

The Practice of Everyday Life – Michel De Certeau – Summary Points

General Introduction

- an investigation into how ‘users’ operate
- traditionally considered to be passive and guided by established rules

- last 300 years has focused on the idea that the individual is an elementary unit of society
- groups are form out of individuals and are always reducible to individuals
- purpose of the study is to make systems of operational combination explicit
- expose the actual everyday actions of consumers
- “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”

Consumer Production

- studies of popular culture and marginal groups
- did not locate cultural differences in groups associated with ‘counter-culture’

Usage, or Consumption

- many studies have looked at the representations of a society on one hand and how it behaves on the other
- analysis of tv broadcast images (representation) and time spent watching tv (behaviour) should be complemented by studies of what the cultural consumer ‘makes’ or ‘does’ with these images during this time

- production vs consumption – the latter is devious, silent and invisible

- example of Spanish colonizers forcing their culture upon indigenous Indians; they did not reject or alter them but rather subverted them by using them for ends and references that the Spanish could not relate to or understand
- comparison with consumer culture; the ‘common people’, like the Indians, have a foreign culture imposed upon them by the Elites, but often subvert this culture by using it in ways the producers did not intend

- the presence and circulation of representations tells us nothing about what they mean to people
- we must analyse the manipulation of cultural objects by ‘users’ other than its makers
- difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in its use

- performance vs competence; the act of speaking is not the same as having a knowledge of the language
- language is “an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers”
- users make countless transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules

The Procedures of Everyday Creativity

- Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault – instead of analyzing the ‘apparatus exercising power’, he focuses on ‘the mechanisms that have sapped the strength of these institutions’
- ‘grid of discipline’ becoming more widespread; how does society resist this? how do people manipulate the mechanisms of discipline or conform to it so they can evade it?

- micro-politics as everyday tactics of evasion from the imposed dominant cultural order
- consumers who are pushed to the limit and who resist social norms form a sort of network of ‘anti-discipline’

The Formal Structure of Practice

- assumption that everyday operations conform to certain rules
- what is an art or ‘way of making’?
- popular culture = arts of making
- an art of combination that is intertwined with an art of using

- two types of investigation, 1) descriptive analysis of readers’ practices, urban spaces, everyday rituals, resues of collective memory. 2) tracing the origins of the forms of these operations, e.g. the recomposition of a space by familial practices and the ‘art of cooking’

- sociologists, anthropologists and historians have examined mixtures of rituals and makeshifts (bricolages), manipulations of spaces, operators of networks (e.g. Goffman, Bourdieu, Mauss, DÈtienne, Boissevain, Laumann)
- linguistics: analysis of everyday interactions in relation to structures of expectation, negotiation, and improvisation of ordinary language. (e.g. Garfinkel, Labov, Sachs, Schegloff)

- formal logics, analytical philosophy: action, time and modalisation
- Noam Chomsky’s study of the oral uses of language

The Marginality of a Majority

- an exploration of the types of operations that characterize ‘consumption’
- to find the origin of the creativity via appropriation that this hypothesis says is inherent in the act of ‘consuming’ culture

- mass marginality: marginal groups have now become the silent majority

- the practice of re-use or adaptation of products is related to social situations and power relationships

- “The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, lends a political dimension to everyday practices”

The Tactics of Practice

- consumer vs producer dichotomy; the collected material, a limited number of practices (e.g. reading, talking, cooking), the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to seemingly unrelated scientific fields

Trajectories, Tactics, and Rhetorics

- consumers as ‘unrecognised producers’ and ‘poets of their own acts’
- comparison between consumers and autistic children in terms of what they produce

- limits of statistical analysis; captures material of consumer practices but not their form
- statistical analysis of this kind finds only the homogenous, missing out on the reality of the ‘artisan-like inventiveness’ of common consumers

- differentiation between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’

- strategy: the overarching plans of large institutions or power structures
- tactics: belongs to the ‘other’; depends on time; always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on the spur of the moment; kairos

- many everyday activities are tactical in nature, e.g. talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, as do ‘ways of operating’

- tactics: intelligence is inseparable from them; strategies: based on objective calculations from a collective power or institution; tactics do not seek to take over or win and does not engage in sabotage

- rhetoric: ‘ways of speaking’; manipulations are related to the ways of persuading the will of the audience

- connection between the Sophists and tactics
- Sophist position: make the weaker position seem the stronger
- claimed to have the power of turning the tables on the powerful by making use of the opportunities in any given situation

Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc.

- focus on reading as an example of an everyday practice that produces without capitalizing
- production vs consumption; writing vs reading; consumer as a voyeur in a ‘show-biz society’

- reading as an act of production that is not recorded; akin to a once-off silent performance

- the reader interprets the writer’s words subjectively, making them their own; thus, ‘the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news’

- the text is like a rented apartment where the occupier makes changes in the same way that a speaker changes a text by using their native tongue, accent or turns of phrase.

- reading is an art that is anything but passive, resembling the art whose theory was developed by medieval poets

- the art of conversation creates a collective communication that belongs to no one and everyone

- the possibility of establishing a reliability within the situations imposed on an individual
- making it possible to live in these situations by reintroducing into them an art of manipulating and enjoying

Extensions: Prospects and Politics

- analysis of tactics extended to two areas, 1) prospects / futurology, 2) the individual subject in political life

- futurology: falls short of adequately analysing ‘space’, focus on ‘simulation’
- relationship between rationality and imagination; the tactics of practical investigation vs the strategies offered to the public as the product of these practical operations

- the ‘split-structure’ of so many organisations requires a rethink of all the ‘tactics’ neglected by traditional scientific enquiry

- Freud’s civilization and its discontents; the microscopic connections between manipulation and enjoyment
- “the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it”

- Quote from John Everyman: “When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras…. You’ve no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it’s incredible how one grows.”