Fan culture

From MarxWiki

Henry Jenkins discusses fan culture in his work Textual Poachers. He notes that fans are often conceived as people who are inappropriately zealous in their appreciation, perhaps psychotic, less intelligent than non-fans, devote their lives to their fanaticism, socially awkward, emotionally immature, and so on. He describes the stereotypical idea of the fan as one that is not grounded in actual fact but rather `amounts to a projection of anxieties about the violation of dominant cultural hierarchies` (17). Fans are marginalized by society because fan culture blurs the line between popular and culturally valuable texts.

Jenkins argues that fans are actually `active producers and manipulators of meaning` (25). They appropriate their favorite popular texts and consume them in ways that serve their interests or needs. Fans are artists in their own right, constructing their own cultures using bits and pieces from mass culture. This flies in the face of the idea that fans simply consume mass media texts without any thought. An example of this is the site www.crashdown.com, which sucessfully spearheaded a campaign to save the television show `Roswell`, twice. There is a section of the site, which allows fans to create their own Fan Fiction.