The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (an incomplete summarisation and analysis)

Edited by Lisa A. Lewis 
Routledge 1992

"Historical propensity to treat media audiences as passive & controlled, its tendency to privilege aesthetic superiority in programming, its reluctance to support consumerism, its belief in media industry manipulation. The popular press, as well, has stigmatised fandom by emphasising danger, abnormality and silliness. And the public deny their own fandom, carry on secret lives as fans rick the stigma that comes from being a fan."

"Perhaps only a fan can appreciate the depth feeling, the gratifications, the importance for coping with everyday life that fandom represents."

PART I: Defining fandom

Fandom as Pathology: The consequences of characterisation by Jolie Jensen

• There are two types of fans: obsessed loner and the hysterical crowd
• Obsessed loner = intense fantasy relationship with celebrity figures -> stalking, threatening, killing
• Hysterical crowd = drugs, violence, alcohol, sexual and racial imagery associated (young hysterical fans)
• The fan is defined as a response to the star system. This means that passivity is ascribed to the fan he or she is seen as being enthralled /brought into existence by the modern celebrity system via mass media. 
• "Erotomania" or the "Othello Syndrom" is an increasingly narcissistic society or maybe the fantasy life we see on television
• Caughey = media addicted age, celebrities function as role models for fan who engage in 'artificial social relation'
• Schickel = compares deranged fans and serial killers to 'us' ("normal" fans)
• Fandom as psychological compensation - psychological version of the mass
• Society critique = Fandom, especially 'excessive' fandom, is defined as a form of psychological compensation, an attempt to make up for all that modern life lacks. 
• Para-social interaction = surrogate relationship - inadequately imitates normal relationships

The Cultural Economy of the Fandom by John Fiske

• Fandom is typically associated with cultural forms that dominate value system denigrates: music, novels, comics, celebrities
• Fans fiercely discriminate against what makes a (true) fan and what falls in that fandom
• D'Acci (1988): 'Cagney and Lacey' Fans -> Use show = higher self esteem, confidence to stand up for self, adult woman took inspiration to risk starting own business
• This popular discrimination involves the selection of texts that offer fans opportunities to make meanings of their social identities an social experiences that are self interested and functional
• Cultural tastes as practices are produced by social rather than individual differences, and so textual discrimination and social discrimination are part of the same cultural process within and between fans just as much as between fans and other popular audiences
• Fans make their culture out of the commercial commodities of cultural industries
• Fandom is a heightened form of popular culture in industrial societies that the fan is an 'excessive reader' who differs from the 'ordinary' one in degree that than kind

PART II: Fandom & Gender

Something More than Love: Fan stories on film by Lisa A. Lewis

This is a list of films that portray the extremes of fandom and fans:

• Hollywood or bust
• The Fan
• Comeback to the Five and Dime Jimmie Dean, Jimmie Dean
• I Wanna Hold Your Hand
• King of Comedy
• Heartbreak Hotel

PART III: Fans and industry

Fans as Tastemakers: Viewers of Quality Television by Sue Brower

Fans dictating the course and popularity of a show and how it relates. 

• Role for a play incirculating social and aesthetic opinions in our culture
• Television series develops a following among people who both discover and create in Dick Hebdige's terms, a 'symbolic fit' between certain expressive materials and their lives (199, 11). 
• By their activity in relation to the cultural form, they refine and enhance its social image while, as fans, claiming it as symbolic of their identity

Tutorial #4

A long overdue tutorial with the teacher saw me panic and cry on the inside.

I was initially excited to present all the primary research I've done. My focus group, the questionnaire and the convention. I was pretty progressive.

And then I realised I didn't have a proper question. I thought I did. But I don't. So pretty much I am screwed. I have 7 weeks to research, analyse and write up a 7000 report.

The good news is I found what I need to do within the next week and a half. Bad news is I have to do it within a week and a half. So I will definitely be just focussing on this for a while.

I was explaining to teacher everything I could about fandom and in the end I just wanted to show how crazy it can make people and what extents it makes people go to. This is all mumbo jumbo right now. A constant stream of consciousness. It was quite hard explaining fandom to a person who claims to have no obsessions in life.

So main focus from now on = HYPER REALITY. A theory/term developed by Jean Baudrillard in 1980s. Going beyond popular culture, the new level in which we reach that not only blurs the line between fantasy and reality but where fantasy nearly overtakes the aspects of real life.

Makings of a question:

To Infinity and Beyond!

Fandemonium and Hyperreality

The evolution of popular culture into the realms of fandom and the influence of cyber-community life on fans 

To what extent does "hardcore" fandom inflence the lives and identities of fans?

Hypothesis: That "hardcore" fandom significantly blurs the distinction between hyperreality and "real" reality

Chapter 1: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" (Star Wars)

The definition of fandom, the fans and the history of fandom studies. The move to cyber-fandom. Pop Culture evolution, birth of fandom. 

Chapter 2:

Living a life through fiction. Fandom Addiction. Beyond escapism. 

Chapter 3: 

Worlds within worlds: Baudrillard meets Joss Whedon. The theory of hyperreality and it's application to fandom today. 

Google: Fandom Addiction

People to e-mail and interview: http://fanstudies.wordpress.com/about/ and Adam Possamai

List of books to track down and borrow

State library most likely:

• Theorizing Fandom: Subculture and Identity by Cheryl Drake Harris
• Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins
• The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media by Lisa A. Lewis
• Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith

Should probably mention:

I've changed my cross-cultural perspective to gender. I've noticed that in the past it was male dominated and rare to see female fan participation in television or film fandom. Nowadays I'm getting the sense that this is the complete opposite today. Many cyber fandom activities and websites are now led by females. This is of course a generalisation and a slight guess. So....ignore those last two sentences.