In my look at my information community, the Robsten fandom, I explore how the behaviors of the community resonate as transmedia narrative and evidence the archontic principle through theories of sense-making, narrative, phenomenology, and epistemology. In my work, I focus on the practices of timelining, anatomizing, and tagging within fan productions to demonstrate how the community constructs a uniquely transmedia narrative in the absence of an official media source text. Here, I want to also look at the use of GIFs in the fandom as furthering the practices of timelining and anatomizing, contributing to the transmedia narrative, and adhering to the archontic principle. I’ll include my earlier work on how phenomenology informs critical ideas on sense-making and celebrity bodies (in space) and also briefly consider Jenkins’s work on textual poaching as it relates to the production, use, and semiotic power of GIFs for the fandom.
Dervin’s theory of Sense-making as community-driven information behavior:
Brenda Dervin’s conception of sense-making relies on a phenomenological approach to information behavior. Dervin’s theory derives from the phenomenon of discontinuity as always already present and as such, information behavior is ordered through “gap-defining” (as acknowledgement of the discontinuity) and “gap-bridging”. These attempts are recognized as “sense-made” or relational knowledge and inform how the searcher moves forward toward infinite defining and bridging (Dervin, 2003). Dervin’s theory is particularly useful in consideration of my community as a transmedia narrative because it frames information behavior as driven by these paradoxical phenomena; there will always be new bridges and yet, there will always be new gaps.
Transmedia gap-bridging through the practice of timelining:
Within the community, timelining serves as analogous to Booth’s work on list-making in that “fans create and read [lists] because they bring order to a corpus and community to a subject” (Booth, 2015, p. 90). Additionally, the practice of list-making is seen as “an order made of a disorder, a narrative formed from a database of information” (Booth, 2015, p. 90). The language of order and disorder evokes Dervin’s theory of sense-making and thus, list-making or timelining is recognized as a method of gap-bridging as well[1]. Akin to the purposes of list-making, Robsten fans engage in timelining as a means of memorializing, influencing, and reaffirming their narrative. The aforementioned relationship between database and narrative is critical to both fandom as information community and the practices of the Robsten fandom specifically. As it relates to this specific post, GIFs merge database as a physical moment in space and narrative as a contextualized moment in time.
Transmedia gap-bridging through the practice of anatomizing:
The term archontic derives from Jacques Derrida’s conception of the archive as ever expanding and never closed and is explored by Abigail Derecho (2006) in her consideration of fan fiction as archontic text. Derrida’s archontic principle is read as mimetic of Dervin’s theory of sense-making. That is, how we use information exists in the same structure we construct through information use and as such, ontological and epistemological perspectives are always incomplete, knowledge is the archive that always expands, never closes. Given that, bodily experiences are given primacy in sense-making and gap-bridging and for my information community, the visual of two bodies is more phenomenologically meaningful than text describing two bodies. In his work on celebrity fandom, Redmond frames the relationship the fan has to the body of a celebrity (as informed by her own experience as a body) within a phenomenological discourse (Redmond, 2016) and Soukup addresses how fans focus on bodies as a means of controlling iconographic representation of the celebrity (Soukup, 2006).
In my paper, I looked at how fan videos serve as an example of fan production that favors timelining, evidences the archontic principle, and privileges the body but GIFs also serve as a phenomonological representation of sense-making and narrative affirmation and their use by the information community is specific and frequent. Additionally, the hyper-focus on bodies and physical contact between the actors which can be discerned in most fan videos is actually gleaned as the throughline in GIFs, fan videos, and in fact, all fan production that serves as a visual discourse within the community precisely because of the affect the images have on fans within the phenomenological framework of sense-making.
In 1992, fan scholar Henry Jenkins published his seminal work, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. In that text, Jenkins looks at the “poaching” behavior of fans through the lens of Bahktin’s conception of heteroglossia [somewhat relatedly, the namesake of this blog] as “a poached culture requires a conception of aesthetics emphasizing borrowing and recombination as much or more as original creation and artistic innovation” (Jenkins, 1992, p. 229). Bahktin privileges context over text as a language semiotician but his philosophy applies to visual semiotics as well in that it is because context > text that a signs system is required in meaning-making or sense-making. Jenkins via Bahktin maintains that no text has inherent meaning; meaning is ascribed through the consideration of the text’s relationship to other texts — in many ways, this idea is prescient of how Web 2.0 will function and that’s why it’s especially useful in a look at the transmedia behaviors of a fan community in a Web 2.0 environment.
In her work on the social semiotics of GIFs in fan communities, Gursimsek provides the following definition for GIF as a form of multimodal content: “Animated GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) are web-based graphics that contain a series of frames. These frames can be used to create graphics in the form of looped moving images. This digital format is suitable for so-called micro-blogs; internet-based applications like Twitter or Tumblr…” (Gursimsek, 2016, p. 330). Further she frames her analysis of GIFs as one which “prioritizes multimodal meaning-making practices and follows the social semiotic perspective on the multimodal analysis of transmedia sign systems” (Gursimsek, 2016, p. 332). Social semioticians view the production of meaning as a social practice so the focus on how fandoms use GIFs as sign systems toward the production of meaning is particularly appropriate in the context of this discourse. For my information community, the Robsten fandom, the actors’ bodies serve as sign systems in the fan production of GIFs and thus GIFs are used as a method of gap-bridging, narrative affirmation, event memorializing, and archontic text as they serve to facilitate and perpetuate the transmedia narrative of the Robsten romance.
Booth, P. (2015). Fans’ list-making: Memory, influence, and argument in the “event” of fandom. Matriz, 9(2), 85-107.
Derecho, A. (2006). Archontic literature: A definition, a history, and several theories of fan fiction. In K. Hellekson & K. Busse (Eds.,) Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the Internet: New essays. [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com.
Dervin, B. (2003). From the mind’s eye of the user: The sense-making qualitative-quantitative methodology. In B. Dervin & L. Foreman-Wernet (Eds.,) Sense-making methodology reader, (pp. 269-292). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc.
Gursimsek, O.A. (2016). Animated GIFs as vernacular graphic design: Producing Tumblr blogs. Visual Communication, 15(3), 329-349.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers. [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Redmond, S. (2016). The passion plays of celebrity culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(3), 234-249.
Soukup, C. (2006). Hitching a ride on a star: Celebrity, fandom, and identification on the World Wide Web. Southern Communication Journal, 71(4), 319-337.
[Originally published 05/14/17 @ SJSU iSchool blog, Heteroglossia]
Emily Moss - Electronic Portfolio 