Textual Poachers Response - Mary DelGrande

Poachers

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Chelsea Clements' Textual Poachers Response

Reading Chapter 6, entitled "Welcome to Bisexuality", sparked my interest due to my involvement in the class Mediated Sexuality's. In this chapter I was introduced to the concept of Slash: a genre of fan stories positioning homoerotic affairs between series protagonists. According the chapter, slash originated as a genre of fan writing within Star Trek fandom in the early 1970s. 

Slash was met with criticism, with an essay by Kendra Hunter dismissing slash as a form of "character rape" and a violation of the fans' desire to remain faithful to an original program. 

This quote is what made me think of the concept of aura. What fans are doing by creating these story lines that are far away from the creators intentions, is prying these characters from their aura. This is very similar to what I spoke about regarding queer theory. Media can perceived in many way, including ways in which creators and producers did not intend. Slash seems to be taking queer reading to another level. Not only is the reader or viewer creating a queer reading of Star Trek and Kirk and Spock's relationship but they are going to the additional level of creating a new plot line outside of the original series. 

Initially, I thought that fans must be writing this Slash because of the lack of GLBT characters on television and an obvious lack of same sex affection on TV and in the movies, with very few exceptions. 

It was a surprise to me to see that slash could be seen as a projection of female sexual fantasies. According to feminist Joanna Russ, slash contains elements that women find are lacking in pornography: the lovers' personal interest in each other's minds, the tenderness, the refusal to rush into a relationship, the exclusive commitment to on another. 

Contstance Penley helps me understand my confusion about women's role in this male homoerotica.

"the tendency of slash writers to depict Kirk and Spock as lovers while simultaneously asserting the the protagonists are not gay and have no history of previous homoerotic experiences; such a formulation allows the writers to maintain their own sexually charged relationship with these characters even while they are describing Kirk and Spock's commitment to each other. "

This is a concept that is interesting, yet confusing and will definitely be a topic that I bring up in my Mediated Sexualities class. 

On a side note, I was thinking about the idea of fanatics taking their "original" material too far. While the fan erotica is more about creating new plots for exisitng characters to satisfy one's own desires, some fans try to pick up where the authors left off, infringing on the authors rights.

Earlier this year, J.K. Rowling sued librarian, Steven Jan Vander Ark in order to stop the publication of a ready reference book for Harry Potter fans. Rowling claims this would interfere with her existing plans to release a dictionary of sorts in the future. 

Mr. Vander Ark testified that he was a former "Star Trek" fan for whom reading the first Harry Potter Book in 1998 was love at first sight. Ironic that he is a Trekkie, right?

Rowling claimed that Vander Ark's books copied material from her own books while adding little or no new information and insight. She was quoted with saying "A fan's affectionate enthusiasm should not obscure acts of plagiarism."

What do the creators of Star Trek think about slash. I would assume they are not pleased by the extreme changes of the characters that viewer create. 

Jennifer's Response-Textual Poachers

In Textual Poachers Henry Jenkins points out the complexity of media subcultures. Fans of these subcultures are obsessive and fanatic. They religiously follow every plot line and find aspects of a show or character that will give them meaning to their lives. For my response I have created a collage that depicts the crazy culture that surrounds these fanatics. I have included images that are associated with different cult subcultures. Surrounding these images are speech bubbles that have quotes from the book and the bubbles also include stereotypes about fanatics.



Fanatics

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Textual Poachers Response - Mary DelGrande

Textual Poachers Response -Jason Andrews

Henry Jenkins, the author of Textual Poachers, a book about the significance of fan culture in media. He argues that fans—primarily Trekkers—were appropriating various pop culture narratives and using them for their own purposes of self-expression. Based off of Michael de Certeau expression of poaching—“an impertinent raid on literary preserve that takes away only those things that are useful or pleasurable to the reader”—Jenkins examines the role in which textual context plays in the creation and devotion of fans and fanatics (24). Since Jenkins wrote his book, the Internet has enabled an explosion of fandom, now a “permanent culture”, as well as access to fan materials. Episodes of most TV shows are now imbedded, transcribed, abstracted, and tirelessly discussed by a plethora of online fans. For Jenkins fandom is created in the adaptation of context and the expansion of media which fans create based off the initial subject. His theories and observations have transcended the last 30 plus years and in our current media driven society have become an even larger cultural phenomena. Through out this response I will analyze key points of Henry Jenkins and attempt to relate and expand on them occasionally through the use of the television show LOST.

Within his book Jenkins chooses to focus on three central aspects of “a fans’ characteristic mode of reception”, first he relates how lived experiences of a fan drive their interest in texts (53). Jenkins believes that the transition from a viewer of a program to a fan depends on the intensity and emotional involvement with which they watch their program. As is the case now as then, committed viewers will make time for their favorite series blocking out time to sit and watch an episode as it airs. Jenkins soon analyzes the way in which these series are viewed arguing the modern viewer is “able to hold the text at a greater distance and to gain mastery over its meaning” (62). This reading against the grain and analyzing a series plot twists, props, costume, and dialogue while almost seemingly trivial to a writers initial purpose when Jenkins published his book, now has become a goal in modern fan series such as LOST. Small visual clues—book titles, visions, and quotes, beat sticks— all become revisited as the series grows and expands. The intention of the writers and producers is to play into the fandom encompassing the show. Luckily modern technology lends a significant hand to what Jenkins addresses as his second central aspect of fans reception.

“The role played by rereading within fan culture” (53). Jenkins seems to attribute the growth of fandom to a growing culture of VCR recordings and reruns that allow the viewer to replay episodes and develop almost obsessions with dialogue and character development. He would surely be astounded with the aide developments in modern technology have lent to this process. Tivo online video’s—both on the networks websites and video sites such as You Tube— torrent downloader and DVD box sets, have made the process of analyzing a past season or scouring an episode frame by frame a piece of cake. I imagine countless LOST fans along with myself watching seasons 1-3 on DVD before the airing of the fourth season so the continuous plot was fresh on my mind. Even searching through past episodes to find that small mystery that was exposed and developed two seasons later to better understand the relevance to the series as a whole. However as Jenkins examines in his third aspect what good is knowledge of mystery and clues if they cannot be shared with others who hold the series close if not closer to their heart.

“The process by which program information gets inserted into ongoing social interaction” (53). This one is easy for me, because similar to the story Jenkins’ recounts of a first time viewer exposed by a veteran to Beauty and the Beast, my interest with LOST was developed on a road trip down to Florida, when my best friend played me the first season in its entirety on his laptop. Almost instantly I was hooked (yes, his enthusiasm did help spark an initial interest). Interaction like this and on a much more massive scale I believe is the driving force of Jenkins argument. Fandom survives on its ability to gossip and share. Jenkins momentarily mentions the web when he states, “the computer net only intensified this process, letting fans compare notes, allowing theories to become progressively more elaborate…. (and so on)” (79). Today the internet is ground zero for fans of any and all texts. Fan newsletters have become fan pages (http://lostpedia.com/wiki/Main_Page), and gossip and conversation once locally isolated can spread across the world with blog sites and twitters. Fans can post artwork and mash-ups on a variety of host sites and share theories and questions with anyone willing to listen. The internet has revolutionized the fan and the juxtaposition of media that is “poaching” has indeed become a culture of its own. The accuracy and detail in which Henry Jenkins explores the culture of fans was astonishing and even more so was its continued relevance in today’s society. As he predicted media fandom has established itself as a permanent culture, and its Mecca is San Diego’s own Comic Con.

Meg Luby's TP response

  Meaghan Luby

            Fans and fanatics are the big discussion within the book “Textual Poachers” and it is still a very large issue within our decade. While Trekkies almost trade marked the phenomenon in the 80’s of stereotypical freaked out fans, the focus of this trend setting fan base was collectibles and conventions. Now a days, the modern spin on things is perhaps even more consuming though, more often then not, less tangible as a good amount of being a fan exists on the web.

            Oddly relevant, this week is the premier of “Twilight” the movie which is sure to be a big thrill for a majority of girls ages 11 and up. The popular tween book is essentially Harry Potter for the female populace and the vampire movie is a guaranteed smash. However, the way in which these girls and fans have blurred the line between reality and the Twilight universe is slightly worrisome.  Actor Rob Patterson plays Edward, the tragic vampire hero in the romantic plot line, and the way he has been treated since filming has been overwhelming to the English actor. He described it “almost like The Beatles in the level of ridiculous”. Females ripping at his clothing, screaming his name and yelling so loudly during interviews and conventions that he simply could not get a word in. He asked “Would you like me to answer questions or just sit here while you yell?” at a latest convention (mirroring the Will S comment of “Get a life” in terms of fan etiquette) and had no response when a woman yelled back “We’re fine just looking at you!”.

            His most scary fan moment though was when a small girl around age 7 asked him to bite her, forcing the actor to get more then slightly squeamish at the new role of his life as vampire Edward Cullen. “She had no idea what she was saying, it’s just wrong”.

            The web has been buzzing about this movie for months. The books themselves created a stir in blogging sites, fan sites, even spilling into general sites such as Facebook with bumper stickers, flair, and quizzes or Youtube with fan made movies portraying the book and piano songs performed and written as fan’s imagined Edward Cullen’s love songs would sound. When the movie began filming and the fans had more concrete love to fixiate on, things got ridiculous.

            “If the Jonas Brothers ever had roles in a Twilight moive, Facebook would literally explode” joked one bumper sticker on the common FB application. The recently popular Disney tween pop/rock band has it’s own share of obsessed fans but, Twilight obsession overwhelms these days. Fan clips, pictures, and newer web sites seem to follow a step by step day in the life of filming and moments since then. Stalker entries such as having discarded items from the trailer of Rob or other actors in the Twilight cast crop up with alarming regularity. Fan’s use youtube to splice images to songs, post bootleg clips of the movie, remix trailers in order to “better highlight Edward”.  The internet has become a safe haven for unhealthy obsessions, linking the communities of people who have blurred the lines of fact and fiction at alarming rates.

            For example, the website Fanpop.com. You can set up an account and then you simply add yourself into groups of “what you’re a fan of”. I admit to being a member of the website and, while I consider myself a solid fan, some of the material one comes across is veering off into the strange levels of appreciation people have formed for a particular television show, movie, or piece of culture. Within each category of what you’re a fan of, there are several sub groupings in which members contribute to the home page. For example, the popular television show “The Office” fanpop profile page has 6,146 fans in the main group alone (with several subgroups such as “Jim Halpert Makes my life worth living” or “JAM 4 Ever”). The page has tabs at the top of the profile reading “Home, Video, Images, Links, Articles, News, Forum, Picks, Quiz” and under each tag is are more sub categories such as under images, Fan Art, Icons, Photo Shoots, Fan pics, and Pics from the show.

            Fan addictions are simply fueled and supported on the web these days rather then looked down upon or even displayed as predominantly as Trekkies. Rather then having to done vampire teeth to prove how commited you are to Edward Cullen, you can simply join 40 groups and splice together a youtube video with your stalkerish pics of Rob’s trailer.

Textual Poachers (Megan Skelton)

Throughout the course of time, technology has affected the way that we interact with culture, people and places. The gap of time between Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers and now is no exception. Although, I couldn’t help but read the book as though it were written much more recently, I was still able to compare and contrast certain elements of his book and the way things are now. Fandom is an interesting concept to discuss especially in terms of television series because people are really relating to the characters and situations as opposed to the actors like in movies.

As Jenkins points out, those characters become real in the minds of the fans. They are able to predict the way that the character would react in a certain situation, or create their own scenarios for the character.

There are so many modern day examples of fan culture similar that of the Trekkies. There are online forums and fan sites for just about every show out there, but some shows tend to rake in more “fanatics” than others. The first thing that comes to my mind when conjuring up an example is “Sex & The City”. Although the show may not have gotten a glowing initial response when it aired on HBO, the show exploded when re-released on TBS with a little less racy version of the episodes. Women latched on the Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha’s characters relating every situation to a personal life experience or one that they hope never happens. After the show’s final season and a significant hiatus, the four women reappeared on the big screen for a final time. Anticipating the movie’s release date, there was talk among fans everywhere. I couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing callers taking a Sex & the City quiz to prove how knowledgeable they were about the show, or callers spilling the beans about how they had just as many sexual partners as Samantha. My roommate can relate every relationship problem to a specific episode and truly believes that we can all solve our problems by doing what one of the characters on the show did.

While I have many shows that I am a regular viewer of, I can’t consider myself a true fanatic or “poacher” of any. Jenkins talks about the type of people to have the television on for the sole purpose of having it on, not to scrutinize every detail. I fit myself more into that category of viewers. Jenkins also refers to the phenomenon of reruns or taped shows for the life of the fanatic. This really creates a whole other realm of viewing power. Today this power has been exponentially expanded with the introduction of Tivo and DVR. Fans can now record their favorite show and then skip over all of the commercials so as not to miss one detail. Then they can hop online and blog about the whole thing with others in the fan community. Right on their very own blog they can have an RSS feed to any and all sites related to their show. All rumors and spoilers can be revealed and all predictions can be shared within seconds. Many TV stations have now made it possible to catch the new episodes of all of their shows to be caught on their website just in case you missed the first 30 seconds after commercial when you were on your bathroom break. This way you can also replay your favorite moments over and over again

Social networking has existed for a long time, but now with Web 2.0, fans can network on such a broader level leading towards the whole idea of common knowledge. Just about anything you can think can be found with one keyword search on YouTube. And in case you didn’t get enough from an original video…there are also 5 remakes right along side it. Fans of particular shows can recreate their favorite moments in their own homes and then post it for the world to see. The emphasis has now shifted toward tailoring and customization.

From here, technology will only continue to advance, making it faster and easier and cheaper for fans to experience their favorite show, create their own spin-off, or form their own opinion.

Scott Turner's Textual Poachers Response

Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers was a fascinating read on the world and merits of fandom as they exist in the world today. Or more as in the day of 1992, when it was published—right around the same time that the first edition of George Gilder’s Life After Television was published. But while Gilder was looking ahead to the future, Jenkin’s ethnography of fandom was very much in the present—and even spent a significant amount of time looking to the past for examples of fandom, for example fans of Beauty and the Beast or Star Trek. In this response I will look at Jenkin’s thesis and see how fandom has changed with the advent of the internet and video games.

                Jenkin’s main argument—and inspiration for the title—centers around Michel de Certeau’s theories from 8 years prior, who argued that the active reading of text, as opposed to the strict memorization and regurgitation of material that is expected of grade school students, and the engagement with the themes and characters is similar to nomads who are “poaching their way across fields.” Through deconstructing Certeau’s assertions and using examples of modern fan culture, Jenkins makes a compelling case for the legitimacy of fandom as a complex subculture and one that “challenges producers’ attempts to regulate textual meaning.” But as he explains in the conclusion, ethnography cannot provide any new theories to help critique the media; Henry Jenkins can only challenge the notions of fans—especially those of them being antisocial, simple-minded, and obsessive—and I think he does a great job of it. But since there is no theory here to critique, I will try and add to his ethnography an account of fandom today.

                There is still the world of fandom Jenkins’ describes that stems from television, in the same way that Trekkies gather at conventions and have watching parties, create their own fiction and costumes, and I think shows today are potentially more likely to promote of this behavior. The internet has allowed massive groups of fans to get in touch with one another with the click of a mouse, and I would argue this has allowed fanatics to become even more fanatical by giving them a constant outlet for their productions of fan media—be it fanfiction or music videos—and discussion on such a wide range of topics. Internet forums, my first example, allow this type of discussion in such a fluid manner because so many topics to be conversed on at once. Also, advances in technology have allowed fans to even expand the ways the express fandom.

                The example I will use of this is that of Battlestar Galactica. Like Star Trek (in theme though not in sheer size), there has been a large amount of fans and fan material that spans across all mediums. But one way that this current iteration of sci-fi fandom extends beyond what Star Trek did before this technology came about is through the video game modding community. One video game that I play—Sins of a Solar Empire, a real time strategy game in space—has an active community that is seeking to represent the ships and create a new storyline of Battlestar Galactica to allow players to immerse themselves in this strategy universe with their familiar characters. So the ability to mod is the second example of a new way that the fandom has proliferated with the improvements of technology.

                The third example, which is more of a meta example because it sort of ties these other two examples together and is sort of my bigger point on how technology has changed fandom, relates back to Jenkins’ statement on page 40, that “The exclusion of those voices at the moment of reception simply mirrors their exclusion at the moment of production; their cultural interests are delegitimized in favor of the commercial interests of authorized authors.” My belief here is that the internet has fundamentally changed the way producers have to view the fans, and more than anything now they encourage fans to participate in their media by creating and hosting these discussion forums and creating the modding tools for fans to create their own content. To extend the example beyond video games, my favorite band, Coheed and Cambria, pays for their fansite—called Cobalt and Calcium—so that users can speculate, discuss, create and disseminate their own interpretations of the Coheed and Cambria storyline and foster discussion and involvement with the band.

                So whether it’s the networks of the shows who host internet forums related to the programs, or the video game company who releases modding programs, or the band who pays for the fansite and forums, technology has allowed fans to become even more engaged with the material and the producers now realize they have to encourage this engagement to keep consumers interested in their media, rather than trying to control so strictly their own message.

Lyndsay Ehrmann's Textual Poachers Response

Audience participation within the media in the form of “fans” has always been around; However, a lot has changed recently with how they express themselves. Technology has opened the door for countless new ways for them to express themselves-with the phenomenon of the world wide web-in ways much more open to the general public, and also a lot easier to participate in economically.
In Henry Jenkins’ “Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture,” he explores how the boundary between media and the viewer is broken down in the form of a fan culture. As this book was written in 1992, it is outdated-the internet has added a whole new angle to this idea of “fan culture.” One of the major changes is that many more people can now get involved, since the internet is accessible to almost everyone in our American culture one way or the other. It is no longer a hassle to get together with fellow fans and bond over your shared obsession with certain media forms, such as television series. The idea of “conventions” have decreased-one doesn’t have to make a trip to a certain location to meet others-they can do it right from their living room sofa. This makes it both more economically and practically feasible, leading to more people participating in the fan culture. Also, it is more public to everyone. Now it is not only available to the extremely dedicated fans, but also others as well. Overall, the internet has increased and changed the dynamic of fan culture, making it something much easier to participate in.
Fan web-sites for television shows, with the growing popularity of internet use in the past few years, have dramatically changed the way audiences can participate in the viewing of their favorite television shows. It is becoming more of an interactive experience, rather than strictly viewing the show. Usually, every popular television series at this time has it’s own web-site, where fans can go to catch the latest episodes with limited commercials, and absorb the serious in other various ways in between viewings-getting their “fix” until the new episode the following week. This is becoming increasingly more popular for shows aimed at our generation. The best example of this is what MTV is doing with their online web-site. Recently, John Murray (the creator and producer of popular reality shows such as Real World, The Challenges, etc.) visited Miami, and I got to go to a dinner with him with a few students to talk about his experience over the years in this line of work. He talked about how Real World has changed from it’s airing several years ago, and the growing fan base. The show has it’s own web site, and recently they started adding additions to it for fans that are only “web exclusive”-something MTV uses to gain fans to the web-sites. They will add never-seen footage from next week episodes daily to preview until the actual new episode is aired the following week, adding more and more daily. That way, fans can interact with their favorite show throughout the week using the internet medium until the new episode is aired. The feature is called “Real World Dailies,” and is a perfect expel of how the internet is changing how fans can interact with television shows beyond the actual weekly episodes.
Overall, the idea of media fans is nothing new, but participation in this culture has been completely uplifted and given a new face with the internet. It is now possible to fully interact with your favorite shows throughout the week, not having to wait until the next episode is aired. New generations are picking this up and running with it, and it will be interesting to see where certain fan cultures are ten years from now!

Cassie Gladden's Textual Poachers Response

The evolution of technology has had major impact on the behaviors of fans. However, the foundations of fandom discussed in Henry Jenkins’s book, Textual Poachers, still exist in the twenty-first century. The following essay discusses how technology has influenced fan behavior, using contemporary examples to demonstrate changes since Jenkins first wrote his book.

 

Jenkins describes how fandom for a certain show becomes an addiction. Since a fan of a series must wait a week before they can feed their addiction by watching the show, previews become their way to get through the week.

 

The series becomes a sort of anticipation: previews are scrutinized in fine detail, each frame stopped and examined for suggestions of potential plot developments; fans race to buy TV Guide as soon as it hits the newsstands so that they may gather new material for speculation from its program descriptions.(58)

 

            In the twenty first century fans now turn to blogs and other fan based websites to feed their addiction to certain television series. At these sites fans discuss theories and make predictions about the future of the series. Below is an example from the lostblog.net, a website focused on the television show, Lost. Here one fan discusses a popular theory and provides a link to the information supporting his theory. The website provides the fans a faster, easier and interactive way to share information about their favorite show.

This interactivity demonstrates another change that technology has given fans. In Textual Poachers, Jenkins explains how fandom creates a unique social network.

Fan reception cannot and does not exists in isolation, but always shaped through input from other fans and motivated, at least partially, by the further interaction with a larger social cultural community. (76)

 

The internet has opened the door to allow fans a space to interact with each other. Before the internet fans were limited to the interest of people located in their specific geographical area. Now fans from around the world can gather and bond over their common interest, whether that be TV show, movie or book. Take for example the obscure 1990s show, Pete and Pete, most people have forgotten about this Nickalodean series, however this fan demonstrates how there are communities of people that still follow the show. This page represents fan response to the series that was updated as recently as September 2008. Here fans share their admiration to the series.  (http://pnp.norecess.org/analysis.html)

One fan, Dan Brow writes, “One more thing that I wanted to comment on was that I thought that it was a great mistake to cancel the show. This show was easy for all ages to relate to and that is very disappointing to hear that it is canceled.” Another fan, Raymond Marateo writes, “What makes Pete & Pete an exceptional series is the way it communicates to all of us.” It is because of the internet that these fans are able to come together and share a unique connection.

 

            YouTube offers another place for fans to come together and share parts of their favorite series. Formally, “the exchange of videotapes [had] become a central ritual of fandom, one of the practices helping to bind it together as a distinctive community.” This has changed. Now fans share videos over the web rather then share VHS tapes that they make off of their home VCR. The following link connects one to a segment of the 1980s show Who’s the Boss. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9PqZkVCUAs) Not only are fans able to watch part of the series, the commentary indicates a community of Who’s the Boss fans.()  One fan, Bigloc1 writes on November 13, 2008, “Love this show watched it Ireland 9pm Wed nights for a few years till earlier this year repeated every episode weekday mornings, have it on my iPod the tune from later series and as a ringtone.”

            YouTube has also changed the face of textual rewrites of fan media. Here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFxhsPNvdI0) one fan engages himself in the  television series, “24”, by remaking a particular scene from season 3. Jenkins explains that “intense interaction eventually leads many fans towards the creation of new texts… fans evaluated the episodes and “rewrote” them,” (52). YouTube offers fans an easier way to share with other fans their personal admiration and relationship with a certain series or media. In addition to remaking video clips, fans create media similar to the Kirk and Spock slash fiction that Jenkins discusses in chapter 6 of his book. Here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y0FK8UZIgU) is a video based off of “Full House” and questions the sexuality of characters Joey and Uncle Jesse. This video demonstrates how the practice of fans making slash fiction is still alive; it has just changed mediums of distribution from magazines to internet video content.

            The internet offers a way for fans to come together, to express their love for a series and to re-write the original works.  The internet has changed the ways fans interact but the basic behavior of the fan that was discussed in Textual Poachers still exists.

 

Nick Engel's Textual Poachers Response

Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins is a look at fanatic communities that follow certain popular cultural objects like film, books, and television. Jenkins argument is that the stereotype of the nerdy Star Trek “trekkie” fan is not an accurate description of this cultural movement. Jenkins tries to view these communities from an insider’s view being a cultural fanatic himself and an academic view point from the research he has done on these communities in an almost anthropological sense. These fan communities have grown in visibility with the widespread use of the internet. When this book was published in 1999 Henry Jenkins probably couldn’t understand how influential the internet would be on these fan communities. Because of the larger visibility of these communities their influence on the creators of cultural objects has increased. As a marketing major I have noticed the influence of these fan communities on product lines in my classes. Also, in my summer internship in the Marketing department of Kings Island, a local amusement park, we used fan communities surrounding our park to influence important decisions we made throughout the year.
One example where a fan community has really influenced the creators of the actual object is with the Fox cancellation of the television show Family Guy. In 2000 Fox cancelled the television show Family Guy, as a result many of the fan communities following the show were very upset. These fan communities created multiple petitions and attempts to get Fox to put Family Guy back into their lineup. Two strategies of these fan communities were to increase viewers of the reruns on Cartoon Network to show a growing interest in the show and to increase DVD sales of Family Guy to show Fox that it was a profitable show. Because of high viewership of Family Guy on reruns and unprecedented DVD sales of Family Guy, Fox decided to bring back Family Guy in 2005. Because of the grassroots campaign on these Family Guy fan communities they were able to convince the network and the creators of the show that the show should continue.
Another example of the influence of these fan communities comes from my personal work experience. As a marketing intern with Kings Island, a large amusement and water park located in Mason, OH I witnessed how a business actually responds to a fan community. A fan community called KICentral has grown tremendously over the last few years to be one of the largest unofficial website communities devoted to an amusement park. When the company Cedar Fair took over the Kings Island amusement park they decided to use this fan community to help determine what needed to be changed about the park. One of the most popular answers we got from this fan community was that they wanted a new exciting steel coaster at the amusement park. So, listening to the fan community Kings Island and Cedar Fair decided to work on developing a new state of the art steel coaster for Kings Island. Because of the responses from the large fan community Kings Island will have a new steel coaster in 2009.
Because of the internet more fan communities are growing in size and importance. Fan communities are riding the wave of interactive media and putting a personal touch on everything. Society is becoming less reliant on mass communication and putting more of an emphasis on segmentation and customization. Some televisions shows are even scanning fan fiction writings to gauge where their audience would like the show to head towards and for plot ideas. With it becoming cheaper to create video we may even see more and more people creating their own shows from their fan fiction writings. I feel that fan communities will continue to grow and continue to become more influential to creators of media.

Andrea Pelose's Response to Textual Poachers

As long as there is mass media, there will always be junkies of it. While during the time of Jenkins, these psychotically-obsessed fans were considered outcasts, the technological advances behind the internet, seemed to streamline these types of fans into social acceptance.

The best example I have of this, is a personal one. This summer I worked for an independent book-buying company in Cincinnati. One of my main projects was coordinating a book launch party for the last installment of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, Breaking Dawn. In case you are unaware of what this series is (do not feel bad, last May I was right there with you), it a high school love story between a mortal, Bella Swan, and a vampire, Edward Cullen, for primarily girls, ages 9 to 17. Basically, think of how big Harry Potter was and add in material somewhat, sexually-explicit for tweens. On top of the standard excitement for the last installment of any highly-read series, the first novel is being made into a movie which comes out this coming Friday.

As I started my research and reading of the novel, I experienced one of the peaks of mass media fanatics; the Twilighters. At the time of my internship, there were over 1000 fan devotion website, each of which had running discussion boards, live chats, countdowns to the novel and film release. The author released music she listens to as she writes the novel, which has lead to major success on iTunes. MTV and several radio stations have had Twilight weeks recently. YouTube had a plethora of fan-created videos in tribute both to the release of the film, as well as Bella/Edward love tributes. Companies have created shirts based on popular ideas from the book. There was even an array of pretty terrible fan fiction, including one girl’s prayer thanking God for Edward Cullen.

At the actual event, there was not a trivia question that could stump the costume-clad participants who were eager to fight with each other over character rivalries. At midnight when they did receive the novel, several of the girls cried hysterically as they thanked me. Unsurprisingly, the next day the book was a #1 Best-Seller.
Before the internet, most of this phenomenon would not have been possible. While the book could create success and sales at high numbers, the distribution of updates from Stephenie Meyer’s website, the initial underground selling of clothes and the united front of fans would be meek. All the new technology, be it the internet or the capabilities with the iTouch or cell phones, has basically given mass culture one giant steroid pill. Since a television show can now hit books, billboards, websites, advertisements, magazines, shopping, cell phones, and magazines, over-exposure has led more to jump on the bandwagon. (You like what Serena wore on last Monday’s episode of Gossip Girls? Well, now the CW’s website, several fashion magazines, and naturally fansites will be able to tell you just how to get the look.)

Today, it is not so much about good taste and bad taste, like Jenkins discusses. Some of the best selling books, magazines, movies, and television shows are mostly guilty pleasures. These are more often than not the type of works that generate Twilighters and Trekkies. While these readers may poach the text to a new level, the reality-fiction blurred obsession has become acceptable. Markets across the board are seeing increases from the Twilighters, and the internet is serving as their supernatural-loving playground.

More on the Twilight Obsession (Just in case you want to get a glimpse)--

Author Website: http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/
Fansite: http://www.freewebs.com/bellaedward101/index.htm
Clothing now sold at Hot Topic: http://search.hottopic.com/clothing/Twilight
Movie Website: http://www.twilightthemovie.com/
YouTube Videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y-vCA0MWsE