afterword by Henry Jenkins
New York University Press, 2007
"Most people are fans of something. If not, they are bound to now someone who is...fandom matters because it matters to those who are fans. However beyond this, the contributions fan studies have made varied in the course of what we, in retrospect, can summarise as three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades."
First wave: power, inequality, discrimination
- de Certeau's theory (1984)
- John Fiske - fans are "associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race"
- Bi-polar struggle between hegemonic culture industries and fans
- FANS IN MAINSTREAM
- Era of broadcasting changed to narrowcasting (niche marketing, target marketing; dissemination of information to narrow audience, no general public. Includes television and radio. Aiming media messages at specific segments of the public defined by the values, preferences o demographic attitudes)
- Deregulation of media markets and reflected rise of new technologies, the fan as a specialised yet dedicated consumer has become centrepiece of media industries' marketing strategies. Rather than ridicule, fan audiences are now wooed and championed by cultural industries.
- Mainstream appreciation of being a fan
- Changing representation of fans in mass media
- Became more than mere act of being a fan of something, it was a collaborative strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities
- Fan studies: negative protrayal/imagery/stereotype of fans by authorities, media and other non-fans. Low on social/cultural hierarchy
- Tactics of fan audiences in their evasion of dominant ideologies
- Camille Bacon-Smith, Henry Jenkins, Roberta Pearson, Constance Penly, John Tulloch
Second wave:
- Leitmotif in the sociology of consumption by PIERRE BOURDEIU
- Replication of social, cultural hierarchies within fan - and subcultures, as the choice of fan objects and fan practices of fan consumption are structured through out habitus as a reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural and economic capital
- Interpretive communities of fandom (as well as individual acts of fan consumption) embedded in the existing economical, social and cultural status quo.
- Gender, the taste hierarchies among fans themselves are described as the continuation of wider social inequalities.
- Conceptual shift of fan studies to fans seen as not a counterforce to existing social hierarchies and structures but, in sharp contrast, as agents of maintaining social and cultural systems of classification and this existing hierarchies
- Bourdieuvian perspective to unmask false notion of popular culture as a realm of emancipation
- 1&2 wave = focus of particular audience groups: fan communities, subcultures, interaction between members of such group either as interpretive and support networks, on in terms of cultural hierarchization and discrimination through distinction. Focus primarily on only one, possible the smallest subset of fan groups on wide spectrum spanning regular, emotionally uninvolved audience member to petty producers.
3rd wave:
- Increasingly diverse in conceptual, theoretical and methodological terms.
- Fans = common mode of consumption
- Cyberfandom (online) is the shift/migration to the internet for fans and fandom. Specialised sites for specific fandoms, congregational sites for multiple fandoms in one (Television Without Pity; TWoP), accessible via Blackberries, iPods/iPhones, PUPs, laptops and cell phones
- Off the web: celebrity, television and film gossip magazines, entertainment programs on television for people who want latest news and updates (cable, radio, satellite channels)
- Chnging communication technologies and media texts contribute to and reflect increasing entrenchment of fan consumption in structure of our everyday life
- MICRO = fan, intrapersonal, pleasures & motivations, relationship between fans and fan objects
- MACRO = readings, tastes and practices are tied to wider social structures yet extends the conceptual focus beyond questioning of the hegemony and class to the dearching social, cultural and economic transformations of our time. (dialect between global and local; rise of spectacle and performance in fan consumption)
- Fan patterns, behaviour, types of consumption and interaction are becoming more integrated/integral in every day life in modern societies (global phenomenon)
- Sybiosis: cultural practice and perspective of being a fan + industrial modernity at large
- Fan studies = key mechanisms through which we interact with the mediated world at the heart of our social, political and cultural realities and identities.
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