Fan Culture is something that has been around for a while, but it the last twenty years, since the introduction of the Internet, it is also something that has changed dramatically. A fan is an enthusiast of something and now the Internet is a good home for fans to gather and build together a community of fans, a ‘Fandom’. The turn Fandom means a community of a group of people who all enjoy them same thing and the Internet has created a place for online communities. Fan Culture has irreversibly changed the media industry because of the ability share information and fan made created content. The creation of these online based communities have meant that people from all over the world can talk about the latest TV shows, movies, books, comics and other forms of content and create groups dedicated to them. The Internet has also become a platform for the creation of a collective community, where individuals who all have shared interests can go. “Fans uses of technologies bring a sense of playfulness to the work of active reading” (2010; 12). Digital Fandoms are user-led forum of content creation, the fans create a number of things; fan fiction, fan blogs, fan made videos, fan art work, wiki leaks. The fans create a whole new life, another side of the TV show, film or book, that is complicity run and used by the fans. These fan made creation do not have to stick to what is canon in the show and can do what they wish with the character and the storylines. However is this an okay thing to do, Henry Jenkins refers to the fans who create these things are ‘Textual Poachers’. Those fans are now active interpreters instead of passive consumers. In this view the fans are poaching the created content of the writer. The fans have power to create t...
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...ke twitter the creator can now talk and address their fans directly rather then having to communicate though the media. It is a direct line of communication that allows the fans to receive and share information quickly. The media has to with these changes.
Works Cited
• Jonathan Bignell, 2004, An Introduction to Television Studies, New York, Routledge.
• Paul Booth, 2010, Digital Fandom, New York, Peter Lang Publishing
• Terry Flow, 2007, Understanding Global Media, New York, Palgrave Macmillian
• Lelia Green, 2010, An Introduction to new Media, New York, Berg.
• Henry Jenkins, 2006, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers, New York, New York University Press.
• Henry Jenkins, 2013, Textual Poachers, New York, Routledge.
• Andy Ruddock, 2001, Understanding Audiences, London, Sage.
• Written and Published by the Open University, 2002, Social Changes, Oxford UK, Blackwell.
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