Notes, Quotes, and a Whole Lotta Theory –
Bits and pieces of citations, quotes, and my notes on research-based sources of information community thus far…
Wilson, T.D. (2000). Human information behavior. Informing Science, 3(2), 49-55.
History and overview of information-related behaviors. Includes definitions of information behavior, information seeking behavior, information searching behavior, and information use behavior. References Dervin and “sense-making” and Ellis’s model which include following characteristics: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, extracting, verifying, ending.
Summers, S. (2010). Twilight is so anti-feminist that I want to cry: Twilight fans and defining feminism on the world wide web. Computers and Composition, 27, 315-323.
“Using literacy practices as a starting point, I hope to extend this argument by suggesting that the agency encouraged by participation in transmedia narratives creates spaces that move beyond the shared text(s) to develop social and political implications, especially for young women.” Addresses the failure of Jenkins et al to address women in his research (2006). Also addresses critical engagement with Twilight. But reaches in assuming the community is primarily young women when there’s little evidence in her own research of that.
Isaksson, M., (2014). Negotiating contemporary romance: Twilight fan fiction. Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 5(3), 351-364.
Introduces fan fic as transmedia narrative. Looks at Carpentier’s model of participation through Access, Interaction, Participation (AIP) and argues that fan fic while situated on the interaction level is a form of participation. Uses Derecho’s archontic text principle (Derrida) to purport that fanfic is part of the archive and thus, related to and having influence on the original text. Jenkins responds to Carpentier that while discussion doesn’t qualify as participation, to the extent that fan creations inform collective opinion within the community, they do qualify as participation. Only considers canon fic in her analysis. I think it’s problematic to suggest authors working in canon are participants while those who aren’t, are not. I think AU AH fic still registers as an archontic text because it’s always already related. Also addresses controversial claim that fan productions are inherently political because they subvert authority of source text. “Given this development, it seems reasonable to think that popular culture consumers more widely become used to transformative ways of thinking, as it were, and come to see it as a natural step to engage, emotionally and critically, with popular fictions by re-writing stories and characters, imaginatively if not in the concrete form of fan fiction.”
Thomas, S., & Holderman, L., (2007). Trivia and social theory in popular communications study: Age reporting in tabloid tales of celebrity romance. Popular Communication, 5(4), 217-222.
Makes argument for studying popular culture. This is important because it pushes back on participatory culture as a space for genre texts which is mostly what’s born out in the research of academics and aca-fans. Also problematizes notion that cult texts are inherently subversive and popular texts are not because it assumes there exists a dominant reading of text which is discordant with idea of participatory culture and fandom. Evidence of concern that for all the noise about how participatory culture is a democratizing economic force, it ignores other institutional biases and their *necessary relationship* to economic power or lack thereof.
Booth, P. (2015). Fans’ list-making: Memory, influence, and argument in the “event” of fandom. Matriz, 9(2), 85-107.
“Many fans love creating and sharing lists: whether it is best-of lists (e.g., most celebrated album), favorites lists (e.g., favorite moments in football), or worsts lists (e.g., Worst plot ever!), the creation of lists seems to be a universal activity across a range of fans and within multiple fan communities.” Hierarchy in fan communities is often established through knowledge competencies. Jenkins’s discussion of fan criticism invokes the fan as expert among those inside and outside the fandom. “Therefore, lists are akin to languages: there is an order made of a dis- order, a narrative formed from a database of information.”Booth argues that in new media, the database and narrative work in tandem and merge structurally. “Making lists is a way of controlling time over one’s life; a way of having power rather than succumbing to the ceaseless flow of time.” Memorializing, p. 94. “What this means for fans’ list-making is that the creation of (artificial) value on a particular item within a series, the hierarchical listing of fans’ personal (or even authorized) opinions about a particular text, actually reinforce the normality of that text. Ranking becomes a type of media ritual that re- minds fans about the singular importance of that text itself. Whether it is “best album of the 90s”, “favorite Doctor”, or “worst baseball catcher in the National League”, simply stating a list in such a manner inscribes the text corpus as a whole as relevant. The event determines the everyday.” –> Flashback Fridays, Top 10 Moments blog posts. By singling out moments in the narrative, you’re implicitly reaffirming the narrative as a narrative. Time-lining/list-making as a way of ordering, actualizing, memorializing, influencing, and reaffirming.
Hills, M. (2015). The expertise of digital fandom as a ‘community of practice’: Exploring the narrative universe of Doctor Who. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 21(3), 360-374.
Collective intelligence vs. community of practice and expert knowledge. Looks at fandom as performing expertise in an epistemological economy. Booth and narractivity (2010). pg. 363. Hills pushes Booth to argue that different fans engage in different levels of narractivity with different skill/knowledge bases. “But what seems an objective basis for the expert paradigm/collective intelligence binary becomes less secure when we consider fan narractivity.” Wenger posits communities of practice as expert knowledge that can shift over time. “Communities of practice are formed socially through exclusionary practices, i.e. they discount rival knowledges as improper.” (364) Boundary crossing and the unpopular opinion. Fan expertise as archontic practice/knowledge or the fusion of narrative and database (Booth), p. 370). “Fans’ list-generating expertise assumes an expertise to follow, that is not yet present; it presumes that the reordering (both linearizing and non-linearizing) of accreting narrative information will be of value to future readers. Fan expertise thus promises meaning to other (imagined) devoted audiences, without necessarily instantiating it.” Does expert archontic ordering eliminate narrative dynamism? p. 371.
Pearson, R. (2010) Fandom in the digital era. Popular Communication, 8(1), 84-95, DOI: 10.1080/15405700903502346
Looks at the relationship between fandom and community and cites Jenkins’s blog. Also explores the spectrum of capitalism and gift economies in fandom and uses example of BSG producers asking for fan-generated ancillary content. Authorized fan content as problematic? Fans as early adopters and move from rebellion to pleasure in the study of fan activities.
Paris, L., (2016). Fifty shades of fandom: The intergenerational permeability of Twilight fan culture. Feminist Media Studies, 16(4), 678-692.
A look at how infrequently there is generational overlap in Twilight fandom, how adult women reconcile their own space as fans and use their perspective as women to explore questions and interests that were specifically adult (via fanfic) but how that gets coded as “girlish” behavior. Evidences the use of online spaces to foster community and discourse through sites devoted to fanfic and fan sites in which fanfic is discussed. Uses Fifty to introduce popularity of AU AH Twi fic. Notably– incorrectly identifies James as not shying away from her fandom roots and doesn’t acknowledge the violation of gift culture or the problematic representation by James of a woman who wrote fanfic but was not a fan.
Hellekson, K. (2015). Making use of: The gift, commerce, and fans. Cinema Journal, 54(3), 125-131. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2015.0017
Charts the evolution of fandom practices with the rise of the Internet and digital culture. In 2014, the move from LJ to tumblr (spreadable/Jenkins). “The impetus that drives fannish activity remains independent of the platform of expression: fan activity remains a search for community, a way to unabashedly love something, a desire to engage critically but also viscerally, and a mode of personal expression unlike any other, as it permits engage- ment through manipulation of mass culture.” The flattening of geography via the Internet allows fans to find each other easily. Gift culture remains -> “Embedded within this (mostly female) community are complex patterns of authority, reciprocity, and exchange that can usefully be described as an expression of a gift culture.” and ““Online media fandom is a gift culture in the symbolic realm in which fan gift exchange is performed in complex, even exclusion- ary symbolic ways that create a stable nexus of giving, receiving, and reciprocity that results in a community occupied with theorizing its own genderedness.”” (Hellekson, 2009) Argues that re-positioning fan culture into capitalist model in recent years is a move to legitimize fan activity in the dominant economic paradigm (and a gendered move at that). Talks about AO3 as a fan-built site for fanfic over fanfiction.net which (still in my opinion) reigns as dominant online fic archive. “Fan creations have social meaning. This is true regardless of platform or means of exchange. What unites all fan activity is building community.”
Bennett, L. (2013). Researching online fandom. Cinema Journal, 52(4), 129-134. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2013.0033
Discusses process of writing dissertation on an online REM fan community and the various theory she employed. Current work focuses on use of social media in celebrity and music fandoms. Useful for discussion of how Twitter facilitates event “attendance” for fans (p.132). Fan Studies Network – http://www.fanstudies.wordpress.com
Parkin, R. H. (2010). Breaking faith: Disrupted expectations and ownership in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2(2), 61-85. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jeu.2010.0034
“The constant scuffling and ensuing stalemate between Meyer and the Twilight fandom encourages us to consider the Twilight saga as a model for thinking about how online media has changed horizons of expectation and equalized textual ownership.” (p. 81) Sets the stage for transformative texts (fan fic) because of a violation of expectations w/in canon and establishes online fan productions as inherently transmedia texts/narratives. Also establishes SM’s insistence on total control as a means of inspiring rebellion within her fandom. Midnight Sun speaks to the eternally-open narrative, literally.
Day, S. K. (2014). Pure passion: The Twilight Saga, “abstinence porn,” and adolescent women’s fan fiction. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 39(1), 28-48. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2014.0014
Useful to introduce how abstinence in the original material invokes sex and how fanfic rushes in to fill the gap. References Driscoll’s work on romance and pornography. Only features fic written by adolescents which, while including sex and not the abstinence of the texts, is very specifically not pornography (under Driscoll’s definition or any other). Highlights the differences between fanfic written by girls and fanfic written by women that Paris picks up. But does situate presence of sex w/in canon which the actors pick up. To the extent one is devoted to the original material, E/B fanfic satisfies the need. To the extent that one is not, the actors are preferable surrogates especially as they drive a kind of semiotics of sex and romance (as the interplay characterized by Driscoll) evidenced by RL quotes.
Fisher, K., & Durrance, J. (2003). Information communities. In K. Christensen, & D. Levinson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of community: From the village to the virtual world. (pp. 658-661). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc
Definitive outline for information community characteristics. Specifically addresses structure, motivation, and functionality of information communities created through digital or online spaces. Includes the five characteristics of information communities.
Savolainen, R. (2006). Information use as gap-bridging: The viewpoint of sense-making methodology. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8), 1116-1125.
“Knowledge versus information are system distinctions of no meaning to lived experience and movement through time–space.” Dervin’s theory of sense-making re: information use is mimetic of Derrida’s archontic principle. “Metaphorically, sense-making can be seen as continuous step-taking in the everyday world which is characterized by ultimate discontinuity. Every step means an act of defining the situation emerging due to the continuous moving ahead. Thus, every sense-making instance is seen as arising from a past in the present and moving toward a future.” How we use information exists in the same structure we construct through the use of information. ->“For example, in the metaphorical expression “Love is a journey,” the mapping is a set of ontological “correspondencies” that characterize epistemic correspondencies by mapping knowledge about journeys onto knowledge about love. By means of these correspondencies, we may reason about love using the knowledge we use to reason about journeys: for example, the lovers correspond to travelers. In itself, each mapping defines an open-ended class of potential correspondencies across inference patterns (Lakoff, 1993, 210).”Dervin – ontology and epistemology are always incomplete. (1999). (As is narrative, the archive that never closes.) Bodily experiences are given primacy in sense-making and gap-bridging. The visual of two bodies interacting will always be more phenomenologically meaningful than text describing two bodies interacting. <- transmedia “The pragmatic approach emphasizes the employment of metaphor as a kind of seeing something as something else, drawing on previous situations and concrete examples rather than abstract rules and fixed categories.” (1120) “A central ontological and epistemological assumption of sense-making concerns the discontinous nature of reality that is always potentially subject to multiple interpretations due to changes in reality across space, changes across time, and differences in how humans construct interpretive bridges over a gappy reality (Dervin 1999b, p. 730)”. Gap-bridging includes two phases- 1)planning the gap-bridging based on previous experiences and “anticipatory assumptions” and 2) bridging the gap and often these phases overlap. Tags as verbing, as the informational bridge toward sense-making. (Absence of RK tag for set period of time obfuscates narrative but reveals community.) Sense-making has moved from “constructing” to “designing” and relies on rigidities and fluidities, or nouns and verbs.
De Kosnik [nee Derecho], A. (2015). Fifty Shades and the archive of women’s culture. Cinema Journal, 54(3), 116-125. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2015.0037
Extends her consideration of the archive and talks about how the archive allows for many (romantic) iterations of the same story and that it is its placement in the archive that gives each story its narrative power. Argues that because Fifty was stripped of fanfic origins, it loses power/meaning. — Except that, it wasn’t. James did a find and replace on E/B and C/A, NOTHING ELSE CHANGED. Edward retains his physical appearance (from canon), his family structure, his socioeconomic privilege, his origin story, and his interests as does Bella. Jacob is present, James is present, etc. While I understand DeKosnik’s issue with James disingenuously positioning her writing as original, it’s a bad example because she didn’t actually re-imagine her text before publishing. Anyone who has read Twilight (and not Twilight fanfic) can recognize Fifty in the Twilight archive. Good example of Miller’s discussion of narrative though and good reference for phenomenon of Twi fic in general.
Gursimsek, O.A. (2016). Animated gifs as vernacular graphic design: Producing Tumblr blogs. Visual Communication, 15(3), 329-349. DOI 10.1177/1470357216645481
“This article aims to understand the role of GIFS in online vernacular communication as a transmedia literacy practice, and analyzes the creation of GIFs by Lost fans on Tumblr within a social semiotic framework.” GIFS serve as a semiotic tool toward and phenomenological representation of sense-making and narrative affirmation and their use by information community is specific and frequent. GIFs both expand and serve as shorthand for narrative itself. GIFs are archontic; they merge database as a physical moment in space and narrative as a contextualized moment in time. “The image is framed both visually by its margins and textually by the tagging and description functions of Tumblr. Tagging is done by attaching keywords and phrases with a hashtag (#) which functions as a means of classifying the content.” GIFs as gifts.
Miller, J. H. (1995). Narrative. In F. Lentricchia & T. McLaughlin (Eds.), Critical Terms for Literary Study, (pp. 66-79). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Useful source for fundamentals of narrative; defines narrative and speaks to need for narrative. “Seen from this structuralist or semiotic perspective, narrative would be a process of ordering or reordering, recounting, telling again what has already happened or is taken to have already happened” (p. 71). Poses 3 crucial questions: why do we need stories at all? why do we need the “same” story over and over? why do we always need more stories? To the last, “Stories, however perfectly conceived and powerfully [written], however moving, do not accomplish successfully their allotted function. Each story and each repetition or variation of it leaves some uncertainty or contains some loose end unraveling in effect, according to an implacable law that is not so much psychological or social as linguistic. This necessary incompletion means that no story fulfills perfectly once and for all, its functions of ordering and confirming. And so we need another story, and then another, and yet another, without ever coming to the end of our need for stories or without ever assuaging the hunger they are meant to satisfy” (p. 72). This is THE WHY of the info community: the community exists to fill in the never-ending gap; the open archive, the ruin of meaning, the informational bridge, the narrative that never completes even while it paradoxically, fundamentally, imagines its own completion (beginning, middle, and end). The open narrative relies on transmedia contribution as all necessary information that will always already never be enough information. As such, “the performative as well as epistemological dimension of narrative may also be at stake. By ‘performative’ I mean the power of a narrative to make something happen, as opposed to its power to give, or to appear to give, knowledge” (p. 78).
Jenkins, H., Ford, S., and Green, J. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. (Kindle version). Retrieved from Amazon.com
Giving Gift, Creating Obligations – “When a firm moral economy exists, audiences will often police their own actions, calling out those who they feel damage the integrity of a platform or who undercut informal agreements with commercial producers and distributors.” The difference between value and worth. “Gifts depend on altruistic motivations; they circulate through acts of generosity and reciprocity, and their exchange is governed by social norms rather than contractual relations.” Commodity has value, gift has worth. James/Fifty & AG/WA and the violation of a gift economy.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Intro: “…convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint” (p. 16). ; “Transmedia storytelling is the art of worldmaking” (p. 21).
- The Anatomy of a Knowledge Community – Survivor spoiler thread and collective intelligence (Pierre Levy). “Brain trusts”, locked comms, boundaries, core knowledge, intuition and independent verification v. “proof”, hierarchies — Peter Walsh’s expert paradigm as bounded knowledge that an individual can master next to a community of practice which requires regimes of competence that are unfixed. Community of practice bridges expert paradigm and collective intelligence – both are necessary in information community.
- The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling – “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (p. 96). What of a transmedia narrative without a source text? (Jenkins 2011 blog and Obama) What of a transmedia narrative where every single producer is also a consumer? Not all producers are considered equal, not all producers are constructing cohesive narrative -> whistleblowing, whistleblowing as the conflict between commodified information and information as gift (Jenkins, 2013).
Hellekson, K. & Busse, K. (2006). Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet: New essays. (Kindle version). Retrieved from Amazon.com
- Derecho’s Archontic literature: a definition, a history, and several theories of fan fiction – uses Derrida’s idea of the archive (Archive Fever, 1995), “Derrida names the internal drive of an archive to continually expand: he calls it the ‘archontic principle’…The archontic principle is that drive within an archive that seeks to always produce more archive, to enlarge itself. The archontic principle never allows the archive to remain stable or still, but wills it to add to its own stores”. Deleuze’s repetition with a difference. By highlighting similarities, archontic works are affirming differences and visa versa. Fanfiction is the actualization of the virtual. Related: Ficthropology podcast on this chapter from Archive of Our Own.
- Driscoll’s One true pairing: the romance of pornography and the pornography of romance – “plot sex [is] sexual contact between the central pairing or pairings marks out story development, usually in a sequence of escalating intimacy that maps onto the standard shape of the romance narrative. In romantic fiction, the drama is usually how a given couple come together, not about whether they will, and in fan fiction, developing romance may be substituted or supplemented with sexualized encounters of building intimacy and explicitness, drawing on the pornographic convention of the delayed money shot and the teen romance conventions of bases and scoring.” Porn sex and PWP fic as the alternate. BUT — “porn and plot are thus not opposed in fan fiction, and a single story or scene often includes both plot sex and porn sex.” They can exist simultaneously, not mutually exclusive. “Canon is required to enter a text into a fan fiction community – to provide a means of sharing the story – but fan fiction realism is not an agreed degree of accuracy in representation, but rather a registering of affective power. This is one of the most important ways in which fan fiction locates an intersection of pornography and romance.” All [fan fiction] is implicitly both romance and porn. “Looking at the slip and fit of romance and pornography in fan fiction suggests that pornography is structured in relation to the conventions of romance, and romance fiction is sustained by porn’s ecstatic relationship to exposure.” Porn and romance have the same necessary relationship as reality and fantasy (but they are evocative of each other and are not analogous to each other).
Notes: Experience is constituted through what we know and what we don’t know and significantly, requires that we acknowledge we don’t know and can never know everything; the metatheoretical process of sense-making, the archontic principle, the narrative that can never satisfy and thus never, complete, that necessitates more and more stories. GIFS, blogs, fan productions including vids and fic, media assets act as a kind of social semiotics toward analysis/interpretation/construction of a collective transmedia narrative that is infinite so long as the information community committed to its construction exists. Further, the community exists as a series of relationships [that must be constantly negotiated] – producer/consumer, information/knowledge, database/narrative, past/future, presence/absence, romance/pornography, onscreen/offscreen, Twi fandom/Robsten fandom; these relationships are mimetic of or metatextual to the literal relationship around which the community exists.
Emily Moss - Electronic Portfolio 