New Media

Fans and Fandom

 Fandom – not all fans are created equal. Fandom has only in the last couple of decades
been perceived as something with positive elements. Before that, some types of fandom
were pathologized and researched as deviant and/or feminized behavior. There were
exceptions – sports fandom had and has positive value, except for the few deviant fans
who go too far, if that’s even possible. With new media, especially the internet and its
ability to bring communities together, fandom is now viewed as productive and
important part of media culture.
 Female fans of pop stars, for example, have long been portrayed as excessive or deviant.
An example is Beatlemania. When girls went crazy for the Beatles in the UK in 1963, and
in the US in 1964, it was seen as a social problem – and the girls as hysterical, deviant,
and out of control. A New York Times writer diagnosed Beatlemania as a psychological
problem. Groups of Beatles fans in Los Angeles started a version of a 12-Step program
to cure Beatlemaniacs, calling the organization Beatlesaniacs.
 Negative depictions of teenage girl fans continue to the present day. For example, Justin
Bieber fans yelling at all cars coming out of parking garage.
 Sports fandom is widely accepted to the point where not being a sports fan may code,
for many, as abnormal, especially if you’re a man. But sports fans sometimes misbehave
and get too hysterical, resulting in violence. This even happens in Canada, as you see in
this clip of rioting in Vancouver when the Boston Bruins beat the Vancouver Canucks in
the Stanley Cup Finals. By anthologizing some fandoms, or implicitly dividing “good”
fandom from “bad” fandom, we can more easily justify our fannish obsessions.
 Fandom as Productive – Fandoms, as configurations of fans around a media text or
celebrity, are not the invention of media producers; nor are they necessarily
manipulated by them. In many ways, modern fans and fandoms epitomize active
audiences.
 Henry Jenkins – was among the first to theorize fandom as an active and productive
activity. “Productive”, as I use it here, is both theoretical and literal. Productive fans
assume some authorship of the fan object. I do not mean authorship in the conventional
sense, but in the ways in which fans take media objects and extend or somehow engage
with them to meet their own needs, on their own terms. Jenkins applied the term
“poaching” to in his study of science fiction fandom, Textual Poachers. According to
Jenkins, poaching blurs the line between producer and consumer. Examples of poaching
include: writing fan fiction; and writing S/lash fiction; stories that imagine romances or
relationships between protagonists in film or television programs. Fan and S/lash fiction
have fandoms of their own. The internet increased fan productivity, with social media
sites like Tumblr serving as platforms for active fandoms and the creations of fan
communities.
  Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform that is now pretty much used only by fandoms.
Tumblr publishes weekly “fandomertircs” so that Tumblr users – and fans – can track
the latest activity in their favorite Tumblr fandoms and fan communities.
 Fan conventions are now an active adjunct to media industries. In general, fandoms
encourage productive fandom and active engagement with media products – often
using them in ways other than intended.
 Fan activism - some fandoms, in turn, have a little bit of power to influence
programming decisions. Fan activism can take several forms, from campaigns to save
cancelled programs to actual social activism. For example, Nashville – campaign to keep
it on the air.
 Fandoms have harnessed the power of the internet to advocate for social change,
human rights, and more. The Harry Potter Alliance is an example of this, with a mission
to “turn fans into heroes” working for human rights, literacy and equality.

New Media
 New Media – within media studies and related fields, the term new media refers to
media in the digital era as well as new media technologies. We could call it digital media
but that’s too limiting.
 All media are new at some point – it takes time for old media practices to adapt to
change. The same is true for our relationship to old and new media. You are part of the
first generation to grow up with the technologies considered to be New Media. The rest
of us lived through enormous changes in how we communicate and what tools we use
to do so.
 New media is disruptive – new media, now or back in the 1800s, disrupts established
ways of doing business, of accessing content, of interacting with other people, or
thinking about the world and the things in it. New media has led to changes into some
media objects are valued.
 For example, the telephone disrupted social relations in a major way.
 Social Construction vs. Technological Determinism: Social construction is the concept
that uses for technologies follows their introduction by what people want to do with
them, not what they can do.
 Convergence (combination of computer information technologies, computer
networks, and content) – when the term was first applied to media, about 20 years ago,
it referred to the interlinking of computing and information technology,
communications networks, and media content facilitated by the popularization of the
internet. At one point, it was predicted that the television set was going to be the point
of convergence and the portal to the internet. That is, it was going to center on a
physical device. This is before flat-screen televisions became inexpensive, so the
television in this scenario was a large boxy thing that took up a lot of space and could
not be moved easily. If there’s any device that now meets that description, it’s the
smartphone. The term convergence also describes the types of products, services, and
 activities that emerged in digital media space. For example, many things have
companion websites. Or, convergence can describe all of the institutional and social
activities that now occur in digital spaces. What we’re doing here, moving education
online while integrating voice, text, and other media is facilitated by the convergence of
many technologies and ways of doing things.
 Convergence is the combination of:
o Computing and Information Technologies
o Communications Networks
o Content and Digitized Media
o *New media has made an enormous impact on business, education, cultural and
social life, and, well, pretty much everything.
 Analog vs. Digital Media
o New media is generally digital media. Digital media replaces analog media.
o Analog media is:
 Linear
 Fixed
 Tangible
 Scarce
 Time-bound
 Producer controlled
o Digital media is:
 Non-linear
 Malleable
 Virtual
 Plentiful
 Always available
 User controlled
 Results of new media and digitalization:
o New devices (e.g. smartphones)
o New technologies (e.g. smart lightbulbs)
o New containers (e.g. MP3 and MP4)
o New forms of distribution (e.g. streaming)
o New forms of media (e.g. bloggings, tweets, social networks)
o New business models

Key Characteristics
 From Broadcast Era to Internet Era
  From Audience Subject to User Subject

 Intersectional

Interactivity
s
sticky website

Smartness
Reduce friction
Participatory culture