Fan Practices and Convergence

Nancy Baym, in Interpreting and Comparing Perspectives in the Audience Community, discusses fan practices and activities, in particular those of members of the rec.arts.tv.soaps (r.a.t.s.) newsgroup. She asserts the four maion features of active soap fandom include the personalization of the text, character interpretation, speculation and informative practices. Baym writes from a viewpoint sympathetic to both fans and soaps, both of which are often treated somewhat pejoratively.

For myself, I found myself most strongly identifying with the textual personalization process, whereby viewers make the shows personally meaningful. This can be through identification with a character (I AM Buffy), imposition of the self into the drama (I'm Buffy's best friend), or relating the textual events to personal experiences (Oh My God, when Buffy staked that vampire, it was just like that time when I...). (And of course, I am not being pejorative here, I have already admitted to being an avid Buffy fan, consider all jokes to be deprecating of self, not others).

An interesting part of new media enabled fandom is the way that media platforms can converge to provide a whole new way to experience the text, soemtimes completely separate from the primary text itself. Indeed, Baym mentions that some readers of r.a.t.s rarely, if ever, watch the actual soap, and instead rely on the newsgroup as their sole form of textual consumption.

An interesting example of media convergence in fandom is outlined by Brooker (2001) in “Living on ‘Dawson’s Creek’: Teen viewers, cultural convergence, and television overflow,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no.4, pp. 456-472. This essay discusses the ‘overflow’ of primary media texts, in particular the title show, across multiple media platforms – most notably, internet sites. This media convergence can be between the primary text and ‘official’ secondary texts (such as the network-developed Dawson’s Creek homepage) or with ‘unofficial’ fan-created texts, as well as the recent emergence of sites that fuse the two. The textually specific multi-media platforms are described as ‘cultural convergence’, and it is argued that these exclusively dedicated secondary texts encourage fan interactivity and participation, and provide an immersive experience that is an extension of the original narrative. While the ‘official’ website is produced to provide structured, directional interactivity purposely created to tie in with the original text, the ‘unofficial’ texts are often frowned upon by the owner-producers as violating both intellectual property principles and the sanctity of the original text.

In a small study, Brooker also examined audience predisposition to practice cultural convergence, and concludes that gender, national context and socioeconomic background are all influential factors. His results also suggest that the secondary texts, whether official or unofficial, remain ancillary supplements to the primary text itself. This is in contrast to Baym's findings, the discord maybe resulting from the very different audiences that consume each show.

Another viewpoint about fandom and convergence is discussed by Matthew Hills (2002) in “Conclusion: new media, new fandoms, new theoretical approaches?,” in Fan Cultures, London: Routledge, pp. 172 – 185. Hills argues that the Internet, specifically online newsgroups, through virtue of constant accessibility to media content and other media users, has completely altered fan practices. He therefore suggests that online fandoms cannot be viewed as merely versions or translations of offline fandoms, but as successful entities within the new cultural and media convergence. Hills suggests that just as new media have greatly enabled fandom through the partial deconstruction of the social divisions once so limiting to participants, so too it has placed new pressures on these communities. This leads to his proposal of ‘just-in-time’ fandom, the result of spatio-temporal rhythms influencing fandoms' operation, an example being the significant time lapse between screening of television shows in America and in other countries, the different chronologies effectively alienating the two fan communities.