Fancommunities in general
Fan communities aren’t a phenomena that came with the emergence of the internet. They existed all along but through the internet it has been a lot easier for fans to share information, pictures, files etc. concerning their idol or TV-show or whatever. Especially with p2p-programs as KaZaA, E-mule and Gnutella it is very easy to exchange files. In his article Interactive audiences? The collective intelligence of media fans Henry Jenkins says that the new participatory culture is taking shape at the intersection between three trends:
” (1) new tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content
(2) a range of subcultures promote Do-it Yourself (DIY) media production, a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies
(3) economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates encourage the flow of images, ideas and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship.”[1]
Good examples of the first trend are the p2p-programs mentioned above. Those fancommunities encourage one and another to use these programs, this is the discourse that Jenkins mentions.
Fan communities gain a much bigger freedom than they used too. Fan fiction for example; fans turn the content of their favorite TV-show into the version they would like to see, furthermore it’s easy for them to spread this through the internet. The internet created a great distribution system with it’s peer-to-peer programs. It doesn’t stop with the rewriting of episodes, fans have the tools and knowledge of the new technology to actually remaster the episodes, mix it up and in some way manipulate some images but nevertheless in the way the fans would have liked to see it. They can actually participate in the process.
There are several reasons why we participate. An interesting one is mentioned on the website www.hypergenic.net “ The abundance and proliferation of virtual communities and collaboration environments provide the opportunity for anyone to play just about any role in the journalistic process”.[2] Another reason why fans might participate is maybe because they simply would like to see their fantasy actually come through. Bring the producers to other thoughts, because they can easily reach them now. There is a good example of this, in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There was this plotline about Tara and Willow, two witches who we’re having a relationship, which was one of the first openly lesbian relationships on a regular TV-show. There are a lot of young homosexual fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer who will especially like this plotline and would like to see more of the Tara-Willow-saga but since it I just a part of the TV-show, it isn’t really possible. Fans have made a lot of music videos only concerning bits of fragment of Tara and Willow. By the time the producers of Buffy The Vampire Slayer decided to let Tara die, they had the whole Tara-Willow community on a riot. Josh Whedon, the producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has admitted in an interview that he was well aware of the dissatisfaction of the fans. They decided to give Willow another girlfriend (Kennedy). Willow who had relationships with men as well in the past, would stay gay as a sort of compensation for the death of Tara.