🏡 Return home
🍃 Branches (key topics): Fandom Digital Media, Identity, Transmedia, Mass Media
🍂 Roots (Status): #seed
🌰 Source: Booth P. Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification. Critical studies in media communication. 2008;25(5):514-536. doi:10.1080/15295030802468073

Notes

"as media fandom has moved online, fans have started to use a variety of different means to interact with, and to create, texts" (Booth, 2008: 515)

"I re-examine de Certaeu's (1984) twinned notions of tactical reading and textual poaching by exploring the interaction relationship between identity construction and narrative texts on fan-created MySpace character profiles" (Booth, 2008: 515)

"transmediation, the concept that media texts no longer encompass individual texts, but rather a convergence of texts across different mediation, has led to a more complex understanding of the fluid nature of media" (Booth, 2008: 515)

"through the reconstruction of distributed fragments of narrative across a transmediated narrative text, a MySpace fan can use narrative to help create identity online. This identity creation is how, in traditional fanfiction studies, the fan both differentiates herself from the media text and how she identifies her own personal appreciation for the text" (Booth, 2008: 515)

"the interconnected relations between self/identity, community and fandom on MySpace, however, further complicated Hills' conception of fan attachment" (Booth, 2008: 515–6)

"Further, in an era when the mass media saturate our lives, fandom is a way of creating organized meaning out of texts." (Booth, 2008: 516)

"New fans use digital technology not only to create, to change, to appropriate, to poach, or to write, but also to share, to experience together, to become alive with one's fan community" (Booth, 2008: 516)

"new digital web technology, however, shifts the analysis of audiences away from political economy and towards instead a critique of shared cultural content." (Booth, 2008: 517)

• Rather than viewing a media text as something belonging to the creator that is then poached by the audience, the text is sort of removed from its initial instantiation (the creator's original 'canon'). The text exists as a concept, outside the physical/digital manifestation of it, which can then be access by audiences and reshaped, changed, modified, shared, etc. — more like a folktale.

"we have been — and continue to be — tethered to an economic model of analysis: the modes of production and the modes of consumption, however passive or active, are still tied to this economic binary. Today, in the electronic age, 'goods' are shared data, intangible and fleeting 'practices' of collective content. MySpace allows fans to explore their own identity formation — their own personal 'goods' — in a public, conceptual space of their own creation" (Booth, 2008: 517)

"Fans use MySpace to create personas of fictional television characters, and through role-play with these characters, identity with, and insert themselves into, the narrative of that show. In doing so, fans integrate themselves not only into the text itself, but also into a community of other fans." (Booth, 2008: 517)

"thus, instead of tactically poaching the source text, as fan scholars such as Jenkins (1992) have asserted, these new fans articulate another way to create meaning: through the cultural, communal relationships of members of a fan community. Meaning is not 'taken', it is 'formed' by the fan community" (Booth, 2008: 517)

"we present multiple identities and personalities" (Booth, 2008: 518)

• Specifically for the Rutgers MCM capstone, this suggests that one way for fanfic authors to explore gender and sexuality is to present online and creatively inhabit that identity, and test it out within a larger community, as well

"with this identity/narrative melding, fans sidestep the intensions of the media producers by deliberately inserting their identities into those of the characters, and thus into the media text itself. By creating their own place of identity construction, their own digital space, fans shift their personas to a conceptual space between real and simulated, a space of their own construction" (Booth, 2008: 519)

• In conversation with de Certeau (1984) and Jenkins (1992), with respect to the relationship between audience and media

"Importantly, de Certeau (1984) conceptualizes the production of a text spatially, using the metaphor of the city: created with certain routes laid out, the city allows pedestrians to walk their own path, to define their own 'rhetoric of walking' (p.100). In this way, city planners may intend on path to travel, but pedestrians can tactically traverse another. Pedestrians cannot create a new path, but can reappropriate a city path for their own use" (Booth, 2008: 519)

• What this leaves out the notion of desire paths, where pedestrians can create their own routes, it is nonetheless an interesting metaphor.

"Networked digital technology, alternately, indicates a need to reread de Certeau: in short, the creation of new digital spaces, imbued with characteristics of both reader and" producer, where identity is both internalized and externalized, create new avenues of identity-making, where the dynamic of tactic and strategy breaks down" (Booth, 2008: 520)

• Very good quote for Rutgers MCM capstone

"a distributed narrative is a conception of serialized narrative form experienced in discrete units, separated by time and space (Walker, 2005)" (Booth, 2008: 520)

"to envisage narrative as fragmented is to grant salience to an understanding of narrative not just as an activity or process, but also as a space, as an environment upon which meaning can be inlayed" (Booth, 2008: 520)

"The response of the fan to the source text is no longer tactical or strategic. MySpace denizens do not treat the text as canon, but rather as fodder" (Booth, 2008: 521)

"Yet, in creating an identity that bridges the divide between person and role, the poster also enables a way of tying narrative and identity together through the changing of a narrative" (Booth, 2008: 527)

"By deliberately altering the narrative, and displaying this alteration in a public profile, zackandstaceforever decribes her online identity through the fictionalization of an already fictional narrative: she doesn't so much build on the narrative as branch from it" (Booth, 2008: 528–9)

"The desire for a unique identity is shaped and structured by a tension between communal expectations and individual desires" (Booth, 2008: 529)

"Individuals willingly alter their identity to mach a group morality, and then negotiate identities within an online environment between the individual identity of the user, the group identity of the community, and the social identity constructed from the interaction of the two" (Booth, 2008: 529)

• Key quote for Rutgers MCM capstone

"Social identity forms from the networks within digital communities that foster a deliberate growth of cultural norms. Within each community a specific presentation of what is accepted as proper and normal functions to define the boundaries of that community" (Booth, 2008: 529)

In response to Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins, "identity and narrative are becoming more fluid and more dynamic in digital environments, and as this fluidity continues, the line between 'what is production' and 'what is consumption' becomes even more blurred. Fans articulate this obfuscation by underscoring a disparity between the creation of cultural capital and the creation of cultural content" (Booth, 2008: 533)