Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins's pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and socially connected consumers of popular culture and that they represent the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though marginal and largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, media producers and advertisers, not to mention researchers and fans, take for granted the idea that the success of a media franchise depends on fan investment and participation.
Bringing together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumers, fans, bloggers, and gamers takes readers from Jenkins's early work defending fan culture against those who would marginalize or stigmatize it, through to his more recent writing, combating moral panic and defending Goths and gamers in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Starting with an interview on the current state of fan studies, this volume maps the core theoretical and methodological issues in fan studies. It goes on to chart the growth of participatory culture on the web, take up blogging as perhaps the most powerful illustration of how consumer participation impacts mainstream media, and debate the public policy implications surrounding participation and intellectual property.
American popular culture, consumer, fan culture, mass media, media producer
Title: Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture
Author: Henry Jenkins
Publication: New York: New York University Press, cop. 2006
Subjects: Mass media - Influence, Mass media and culture media, Mass media - Target
ISBN: 0-8147-4284-X
Introduction: Confessions of an Aca/Fan
I Inside Fandom
1. Excerpts from "Matt Hills Interviews Henry Jenkins"
2. Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching
3. "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking": Selections from the Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows
4. "Out of the Closet and into the Universe": Queers and Star Trek
II Going Digital
5. "Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?": alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery
6. Interactive Audiences? The "Collective Intelligence" of Media Fans
7. Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence
8. Love Online
9. Blog This!
10. A Safety Net
III Columbine and Beyond
11. Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington
12. Coming Up Next! Ambushed on Donahue
13. The War between Effects and Meanings: Rethinking the Video Game Violence Debate
14. The Chinese Columbine: How One Tragedy Ignited the Chinese Government's Simmering Fears of Youth Culture and the Internet
15. "The Monsters Next Door": A Father-Son Dialogue about Buffy, Moral Panic, and
Generational Differences
Notes
Index
About the Author