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.
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