Abstract:
In Durrance and Fisher’s work on information communities, they enumerate the five characteristics that comprise the community as the exploitation of technology to facilitate information sharing, the encouraged collaboration among participants, the acknowledged information need that catalyzes the community’s information behavior, the elision of geographical boundaries, and the cultivation of investment in connecting with others as a community (Durrance & Fisher, 2003). Within this framework, fandom as a digital participatory culture resonates as a present-day information community. The Robsten fandom is an online information community that focused their fannish attention on the off-screen romantic relationship between Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the actors who played main couple, Bella and Edward, in the film franchise adaptations of the The Twilight Saga novels. Drawing on the work of Henry Jenkins and other fan scholars, I posit that celebrity fandoms, while given less attention in academic studies than media fandoms (Soukup, 2006), exemplify both a participatory culture and Durrance and Fisher’s definition of an information community. Further, I assert that a fandom organized around a celebrity romance presupposes a uniquely transmedia narrative (Jenkins, 2006) because it is entirely constructed via the information community and their use of official media sources and fan productions through practices that necessarily rely upon the format of online platforms and the use of diverse digital information. I explore the fandom’s practices of timelining, anatomizing, and tagging in the context of sense-making, narrative theory, and the archontic principle to determine how the participants’ information behavior exists within an epistemological continuum that necessitates a twenty-first century information community.
Emily Moss - Electronic Portfolio 