Fan Power

The week 7 reading, 'Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture' by Henry Jenkins, proposes new conceptions of media usage by fans. This chapter is about the evolution of audiences within media culture with the advent of the Internet. Initially, audiences merely consumed media texts and the ongoing privatization of the media and its producers resulted in audiences feeling disillusioned at their perceived lack of power and cultural influence. However, Jenkins contends that their role has been radically transformed. The proliferation of new media tools has provided the means for these avid fans to develop new ways to interact with media content and has repositioned audience and fan cultures as interactive and participatory.

Jenkins outlines the main objective of these newly empowered fans as being to extend their experience of the original text. He specifically uses the example of Star Wars fans manipulating Star Wars and other texts, particularly in the making of ‘amateur’ films. The Internet is described as integral to the continuation of this cultural reproduction, affording these active participants new ‘spaces’ to display, discuss, create and critique their own work, the work of fellow fans, and the original text.

This reminded me of a current high-profile example of cultural reproduction, Brokeback to the Future. This is a short spoof/trailer/mashup created by some film students from Emerson College, Boston . They mashed together footage from the Back to the Future films to construct a gay-cowboy-romance, a la Brokeback Mountain. Underscoring the entire production is the distinctive twang of the Brokeback theme song. This piece of cultural reproduction is of such a high standard and so cleverly executed that it has received massive amounts of publicity and 'hits'. In fact, I actually first read about it in a newspaper (hard copy too, not online).

The article also proposes the idea of producer / fan ‘feedback loops’, whereby media producers actively include enigmas, codes and loose ends that overtly encourage fan discussion and activity; or where fans manipulate and recreate the original text, display it on the Net, and the most potentially commercial ideas are then taken up by the owner-producers and absorbed back into the mainstream media. A current example of this is in the Da Vinci Code movie, where director Ron Howard and writer Dan Brown created codes and puzzles and then embedded them in certain frames so that fans will be able to discover and solve (and, I'm sure Sony hopes, buy the DVD) and continue to 'play' with the text outside the traditional mode of monologic consumption.

[Sidebar: I found this site. It is awesome and made me laugh so much. It is called wookieepedia and is a wiki devoted to Star Wars facts, and it is a perfect example of the media convergence discussed in the article. Plus, Creative Industries people seem to love wikis, so bonus brownie points.]