Tulloch and Jenkins (1995, P. 23) argues that, given over half of Americans identify as being fans of Star Trek, “we need to move beyond a specific focus on fandom as a subcultural community to a consideration of what it means for these more casual audience members to identify themselves as fans”. They differentiate between what they term ‘fans’, that is “active participants within fandom as a social, cultural and interpretive institution” and what they term ‘followers’, those who enjoy watching a show (or shows) on a regular basis but “claim no larger social identity on the basis of this consumption”(Tulloch and Jenkins, 1995, P. 23). Hills (2002, P. xi – xii) discusses the different terminology used in academic studies and associated implications between the usage of ‘enthusiast’, ‘follower’, ‘fan’ and ‘cult fan’ (cult as in ‘cult movie’). In this
thesis, the differentiation between a ‘fan’ (followers/enthusiasts) and a ‘Fan’ (fans/cult
fans) is assumed to be determined by the level of interest shown by an individual in the minutiae of their chosen area (i.e. consume or analyse) and whether their interaction with that subject and other fans can be categorised as active or passive.
Fandom is a general term used to describe fans as a collective group or groups, the “social, cultural and interpretive institution” envisioned by (Tulloch and Jenkins, 1995), with the emphasis often on ‘Fans’ rather than ‘fans’. While some dictionary definitions tend to
limit fandom to followers of sport (WordNet 2.0, The American Heritage Dictionary of
the English Language, Fourth Edition), an activity (The American Heritage Dictionary)
or a famous person (WordNet 2.0, The American Heritage Dictionary) more common
usage also includes any type of fan and the term is often used to refer to fans of a television show, film, book or other representation of a fictional universe as well as fans of the authors or actors related to that depiction. This usage has its roots in the science fiction community in which many of the current fan activities such as conventions and fanzines (amateur publications created by and for fans) have their origins.
The creation of fan fiction and other fan media items is one of the many possible ‘active’ methods of participation, as is involvement in communities focused on and around this
area. Since it is this specific activity that we are primarily interested in then, for the purpose of this thesis, it is to this group (who take an active, and interactive, interest), that we refer to with the use of the term ‘fan’, unless explicitly specified otherwise.
2.3.1 Fan Studies
In working with this community it is necessary to look at the research that has al- ready been done within this area. Research into the fans, online fans and fan fiction communities has developed into its own area of study within media and social studies. Jenkins identifies himself, (Jenkins, 1992), and Camille Bacon-Smith, (Bacon-Smith, 1992), as being part of the second generation of researchers in fan studies (Jenkins, 2006b, P. 11 – 12). He differentiates this second generation as actually interacting with their chosen subjects rather than analysis through distant observation. It is hardly surprising that this generation is the first to be broadly accepted by fans.
In his introduction (Jenkins, 1992, P. 4 – 5) wrote
“What follows grows not only from conventional forms of field research but also from my own active involvement as a fan within this subcultural community over the past decade and more... When I write about fan culture,
then, I write both as an academic (who has access to certain theories of
popular culture, certain bodies of critical and ethnographic literature) and as a fan (who has access to the particular knowledge and traditions of that community)”.
This second generation also represents the first generation of what are often known as aca/fen. The concept of an Aca/Fen (Jenkins, 2006c) or Fan-Scholars/Scholar-Fans (Hills, 2002) recognises that many of the researchers in this field have an involvement in their subjects which goes beyond the academic and, in some cases, that the academic interest has grown directly out of their initial fan status. The idea that some researchers “have one foot in academia and one foot in fandom” (Jenkins, 2006c) immediately causes problems with the idea of impartial observation.
As well as creating the foundation of fan self-analysis, this work paved the way for further work and a third generation researchers such as Baym (1995, 2000); Hills (2002); Pugh (2005); Hellekson and Busse (2006):
“people who are both academics and fans, for whom those identities are not problematic to mix and combine, and who are able then to write in a more open way about their experience of fandom without the ‘obligation of defensiveness’, without the need to defend the community. Therefore they can take up things like contradictions within
it, disputes within it, re-raise awkward subjects that we papered over in our earlier accounts, and now there’s a freedom to have real debate among ourselves about some of these core issues.” (Jenkins, 2006c)
In many respects this is less of a problem in human-computer interaction research be- cause we are all computer users and so the division between researcher and subject is already blurred. This is even more true when considering interaction research with emergent technology since, in the initial stages, the researcher and subject are often one and the same. However it is important to note that it is within this tradition of academic-fan produced work that this research is situated.
While the initial research in this area ignored the online aspects of fandom, later work such as Baym (1995, 2000); Costello (1999); Cromer (2002); Bury (2005); Jenkins (2006a); Hellekson and Busse (2006) embraced the computer mediated aspects of the community and concentrated on fandom as an online entity. This thesis represents nei- ther a literary, ethnographic nor media study. In the same way that Pugh states “My primary interest in fan fiction is literary rather than socialogical” (Pugh, 2005) so the primary interest in this thesis is interaction. As a human-computer interaction study, the majority of this interaction is within a computer-mediated environment, however it is important to remember that online interaction is only part of the picture. The Internet has created many opportunities for new experiments in multimedia, however this convergence needs to be seen as multi-model as well as multi-media with the effect of offline interaction being acknowledged and accepted as a part of the online structure. It is too easy to see the off- and online worlds as totally separate when, conversely, there is a constant exchange between the two with the user acting as the conduit for the exchange.
MacDonald (1998) believes that “studying media fandom within computer-mediated spaces provides a unique opportunity to explore how CMC may change our popular culture and our pleasure time activities and gain insights into how a particular group in- tegrates the possibilities of CMC”. This thesis takes the opposite approach. By studying active media fandom within computer-mediated spaces we can ask how our popular cul- ture and pleasure time activities may change computer-mediated communication, both in the way it is viewed and how future systems may be design to support the users.