Henry Jenkins's pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and socially connected consumers of popular culture, and that they represented the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, media producers and advertisers, not to mention researchers and fans, take for granted the idea that the success of a media franchise depends on fan investments and participation. Bringing together the highlights of a decade and a half of ground-breaking research into the cultural life of media consumers, "Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers" takes readers from Jenkins's progressive early work defending fan culture against those who would marginalize or stigmatize it, through to his more recent work, combating moral panic and defending Goths and gamers in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Starting with an interview on the current state of fan studies, this volume maps the core theoretical and methodological issues in Fan Studies. It goes on to chart the growth of participatory culture on the web, discuss blogging as perhaps the most powerful illustration of how consumer participation impacts mainstream media, and debate the public policy implications surrounding participation and intellectual property.
- "Meaning is contextualized. It grows out of an affective set of experiences, and is the vehicle for creating social connections with other people. So it's not purely an intellectual or abstract, cognitive category for me: it's embedded and embodied in all kinds of affect."
- "Matt Hills has criticized the first generation of fan rsearchers, myself included, for pulling back from the affective dimensions of fandom in favor of a focus on the cognitive dimensitons of meaning production. Meaning in that sense is divorced from the emotional investments fans make in particular"
- "HJ: I think it was Lawrence Grossberg who said, "If writing about popular culture isn't political then what good is it?" My answer is that there are plenty of things you can say about popular culture that aren't motivated purely from a political or moralistic stance..."
- "As an academic you speak with a certain degree of authority. I can't be a normal fan anymore, not because I've somehow distanced myself from fandom, but because I'll talk in the room and the response is different."
- "And to some degree that has to be grounded in some literalization, so for me the difference between a religion and a mythology is that a mythology can articulate a set of ethical or moral values through stories, and people are deeply invested in those stories. They retell them, they recirculate them"
- "...Fandom is not about Bourdieu's notion of holding art ata distance, it's not that high art discourse at all; it's a bout having control and mastery over art by pulling it close and integrating it into your sense of self."
- "Fandom is a vehicle for marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, and so on) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; fandom is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests, a way of tranformin"
- "Fandom is a vehicle for marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays and so on) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; fandom is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests, a way of transformin"
A Rosenberg by Any Other Name
"At This Defining Moment"
Boulevard of Dreams
Snitching
Handsome Nanda (Clay Sanskrit Library)