scholarly journals Examining the fan labor of episodic TV podcast hosts

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Savit
Keyword(s):  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Gift Economy ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
Fan Engagement

In podcasting—an understudied site of fan engagement—hosts of episodic TV podcasts, who are self-professed fans of a particular television series, engage in their fandom through a particular form of fan labor: producing and hosting a weekly podcast. Hosting an episodic TV podcast is a form of digital fan labor situated within the online fan gift economy. The resulting subcultural celebrity status that the hosts attain is ultimately what drives them to continue podcasting, regardless of any financial incentives that may arise from hosting a successful podcast. Through interviews with the hosts of the Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) podcast Best of Friends (2015–), Erin Mallory Long and Jamie Woodham, it becomes clear that by closely examining the different modes of fandoms that emerge from episodic TV podcasts, we can expand legible fan studies methodologies and apply them in the study of new and emerging fan practices and behaviors.

Play moods across the life course in SKAM fandom

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Line Nybro Petersen ◽  
Vilde Schanke Sundet
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Target Audience ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
The Life Course

This article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-constructed in online fan communities. We analyse how these play moods are negotiated across the life course for participating fans. Play moods are closely tied to the playful modes of fan practices, and by gaining a greater understanding of the moods that fans engage in at different stages of their life course we gain new insights into fan play as it relates to issues of age-related norms in fan communities. Specifically, this article analyses the Norwegian teenage streaming drama SKAM (Shame) (NRK, 2015‐17), which was produced for a target audience of 16-year-old Norwegian girls but ended up capturing the hearts of people of all ages across Scandinavia and internationally. This study is based on interviews with 43 Scandinavian fans aged between 13 and 70. The participants were all active on social media (Facebook, Instagram, the show’s blog, etc.) while the show was on the air and the interviews offers insights into issues of age-appropriateness as it relates to fan practices. As such, fans ‘police’ both themselves and each other based on perceptions of age, while also engaging in practices that are by nature playful and may be considered subjectively and culturally ‘youthful’ or ‘childish’. The article combines theory of play and fan studies with a focus on the life course and cultural gerontology in order to highlight these tendencies in the SKAM fandom.

scholarly journals The ex-fan's place in fan studies

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Kies
Keyword(s):  
Fan Studies ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Fan Communities

In an examination of how fans end their relationships with the objects of their fandom and related fan communities, I use my own experiences with the television series Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005–) to demonstrate how breaking up with a fandom is emotionally and technologically complicated. Becoming an ex-fan is different from antifandom and is worthy of greater investigation in fan studies.

scholarly journals Theme park as interface to the wizarding (story) world of Harry Potter

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Godwin
Keyword(s):  
Harry Potter ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Theme Park ◽  
Theme Parks ◽  
Material Interfaces ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Taste And Smell

Theme parks such as Universal Orlando's Wizarding World of Harry Potter (WWoHP) offer material interfaces that engage multiple senses (touch, taste, and smell, as well as the sight and sound of more conventional narrative forms) to facilitate immersion in imaginary story worlds. They thus offer new aspects of both fan tourism and material fan practices to explore. Both fan studies and current scholarship on theme parks emphasize active participatory conceptions, countering oversimplifications and misrepresentations of both audiences and theme park visitors as passive spectators or consumers. Corporate-created and -controlled theme parks frame and market fan activities to encourage consumption. Yet fans often use merchandise as additional interfaces to participate actively and to facilitate immersion. For example, in WWoHP, interactive wands use technology to create specific physical "spell" effects in specific locations. Both wands and spells act as a synecdoche for the story world's magic, enabling immersion.

scholarly journals Structural affects of soap opera fan correspondence, 1970s–80s

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Steuer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Affective Engagement ◽  
Analog To Digital ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
Affective Analysis ◽  
Fan Letters

Paper correspondence between fans and creators/producers is a sort of historiographic challenge to the imagined shift from so-called analog to digital fandom. It opens the possibility of applying digital methodologies to archival objects as researchers continue to historicize fan practices, identities, and cultures. Using the archival papers of soap opera showrunners Frank and Doris Hursley, and Bridget and Jerome Dobson as a case study for this structural-affective analysis, I draw data and metadata from approximately three hundred fan letters and responses. Trends of emotion across the letters figure prominently in an analysis of the affective strategies used by both fans and creators to create an intimately collaborative televisual experience. The letters contain layers of valuable metadata, including filing conventions, typography, and collage; these permit identification of negotiations of power over the televisual narrative, and they provide valuable insights into the affective textures of the soap fan's everyday life. Digital fan studies foregrounds the integration of fandom into one's online life, as well as the importance of social media in closing the gulf between fan and creator. This praxis expands on the value of analog tools—pen, paper, scissors, and typewriter—to the predigital television fan's virtual life. Material communication played and continues to play an important role in fomenting fannish identity, exercising industrial literacy, performing affective engagement, and navigating an enduring, affectionate tension between author and audience.

scholarly journals Adolescent Perceptions of Animation Violence as an Indication of Aggressive Attitudes and Behaviors

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Rosemary V. Barnett ◽  
Joshua Hirsch ◽  
Gerald R. Culen ◽  
Joy Jordan ◽  
Heather Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Television Series ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
The Simpsons ◽  
Reported Study ◽  
Adolescent Perceptions ◽  
And Behaviors

This reported study was designed to examine the beliefs and perceptions of adolescents on whether or not viewing violence on television contributes to an increase in adolescents’ abilities to learn aggressive attitudes and behaviors. It also explored the effects humor and satire used in the animated television series The Simpsons has on adolescents’ abilities to learn aggressive attitudes and behaviors. Finally, it examined to what extent the violence portrayed in The Simpsons was believed to be realistic and justified by adolescents viewing the show. Results indicate that adolescents were not affected by the violence they observed in The Simpsons animation: Further, they did not feel that it was acceptable for their favorite characters to use violence to solve problems. Youth did not have reactions to viewing the series that were violent, nor did they report becoming aggressive in response to viewing the violence on the The Simpsons. While the majority of the youth also reported that they did not use violence to solve a problem, 3.3% reported that they did. Overall, the study concluded that adolescents’ exposure to violent content by viewing it in animation in The Simpsons did not affect adolescents’ perceptions of their abilities to learn aggressive attitudes and behaviors. Youth did not perceive that the violence portrayed was realistic.

Finding the child fan: A case for studying children in fandom studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyra Hunting
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Media Consumption ◽  
Children's Media ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
As If

As fan studies increasingly explores understudied fan communities this article calls for the inclusion of children as a crucial overlooked group of fans. Drawing upon research that considers fandom throughout the life course, it argues that fandom is an important part of childhood and one that may look different than it does for adult fans. I argue, the extent to which children’s media consumption practices resemble fan practices has obscured the fact that children can be fans. In this article I consider the impediments to considering the fandom of children, the ways in which children may be acting as ‐ if not labelling themselves as ‐ fans, what doing so can offer both fandom studies and children’s media studies and I lay out some suggestions for beginning the process of examining the practices and sites of children’s fandom.

scholarly journals Affirmational canons and transformative literature: Notes on teaching with fandom

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zygutis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
Mainstream Culture ◽  
Authorial Voice ◽  
The Way

Instructors who use fan studies in the classroom are likely to make use of transformative works and theories. The remix classroom offers a way to read against popular interpretations of mainstream texts. In the process, teaching with fandom—not to mention fandom itself—is often presented specifically as a salve to prescriptive readings of texts. Yet fan practices are often imagined by mainstream culture as being uniquely affirmational—a particularly enthusiastic form of close reading that emphasizes and rewards deference to an authorial voice. In this sense, the way media and popular culture understand fandom is as an extension of how students are often taught to read texts: via a formalistic, New Critical approach that centers authoritative criticism. Students who interact with fan texts but do not see themselves as fans feel this way, just as students often fail to recognize themselves as critical readers because expertise has been made into a form of gatekeeping.

scholarly journals "The florals": Female fans over 50 in the Sherlock fandom

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Line Nybro Petersen
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Subjective Age ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
E Mail ◽  
The Way

This article uses e-mail interviews with nine female fans to explore what it means to be a fan over the age of 50 of the popular BBC drama Sherlock (2010–). The research aims to better understand the role of fandom in later life, in particular how the participants in this study negotiate their perceptions of their subjective age in relation to being a fan in this part of their life course. This study combines theory on cultural gerontology with fan studies and mediatization theory in order to understand the dynamics and processes that guide fans' negotiations of subjective age as well as the role of fan practices and the affordances of social media in these processes. I argue that fandom, as a manifestation of a mediatized culture, augments the relevance of subjective age and informs the way in which participants in middle and later life perceive and negotiate their own subjective age specifically in relation to fandom as youth culture, women's passion, and creativity.

scholarly journals Click here to buy. Click here to vote.

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Ingram-Waters
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Engagement Strategies ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
Fan Engagement

Taylor Swift's October 7, 2018 Instagram post marked her first public foray into politics, and indeed, media accounts credited her with inspiring 65,000 people to register to vote. However, Swift's social media posts reveal deliberate fan engagement strategies deployed for sustaining her celebrity status. These fan engagement strategies, like those of many other celebrities, present an illusion of fans' collective power while actually reinforcing a dynamic that privileges the celebrity over the fan.

scholarly journals From Dalek half balls to Daft Punk helmets: Mimetic fandom and the crafting of replicas

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Hills
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Oscillatory Activity ◽  
Collaborative Creativity ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
Material Artifacts

Mimetic fandom is a surprisingly understudied mode of (culturally masculinized) fan activity in which fans research and craft replica props. Mimetic fandom can be considered as (in)authentic and (im)material, combining noncommercial status with grassroots marketing or brand reinforcement as well as fusing an emphasis on material artifacts with Web 2.0 collective intelligence. Simply analyzing mimetic fandom as part of fannish material culture fails to adequately assess the nonmaterial aspects of this collaborative creativity. Two fan cultures are taken as case studies: Dalek building groups and Daft Punk helmet constructors. These diverse cases indicate that mimetic fandom has a presence and significance that moves across media fandoms and is not restricted to the science fiction, fantasy, and horror followings with which it is most often associated. Mimetic fandom may be theorized as an oscillatory activity that confuses binaries and constructions of (academic/fan) authenticity. This fan practice desires and pursues a kind of ontological bridging or unity—from text to reality—that is either absent or less dominant in many other fan activities such as cosplay, screen-used prop collecting, and geographical pilgrimage. Fan studies may benefit from reassessing the place of mimesis, especially in order to theorize fan practices that are less clearly transformative in character.

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