Ranma ½ Fan Fiction Writers: New Narrative Themes or the Same Old Story?

We have a new public sphere. It is everywhere and nowhere. It includes everyone, yet it holds no clear identity for anyone. It is both terrifying and exhilarating. It is new media: a jumble of contradictions and desire, all nervous predictions and all shining potential. It is the latest thing, and it is the same old story. Looking at media studies and communication research, we can see conflicting perceptions of new technology such as blogs, Web rings, live journals, and ensuing human-media interactions.

Scholars such as Charles H. Cooley have warned against homogenization through globalization as they watched the world modernize into a mass society following industrialization and urbanization.¹ The changes to society led many to denounce media technology from fear, ignorance, or anecdotal evidence. We can occasionally find evidence that such "technophobia" remains a concern today. With the possibility of the loss of individual or group identity to mass culture, is it any wonder that many scholars have previously treated media audiences as homogenized groups and occasionally continue to do so?

These fears are completely valid in light of the fact that media, to a certain extent, do homogenize, if only by treating us all the same way. At the very least, media hope for an idealized audience, which for commercial purposes is a homogenized one. For mass media to be usable, they must, by nature, be somewhat universal. A television commercial, for example, must be accessible to all viewers in the range of its broadcast in order to have any significant economic impact. This commercial pressure necessitates a certain amount of oversimplification of media messages, a sort of appeal to the lowest common denominator, if you will. However, simply because a medium demands simple, unified messages and constructs such messages with generalized audiences in mind is no reason for us to believe (as scholars once did) that audiences treat messages identically. Indeed, such a practice is seen less and less as we look at communication research throughout its history.

Over time, "hypodermic needle" theories of homogenous media effects upon passive, easily influenced audiences have given way to theories of selective attention, modeling factors, opinion leaders, social networks, and spirals of silence, all of which suggest that audiences are composed of individuals who perceive and respond to media in different ways depending upon social cues and environment, past and present.

Rather than focus wholly on the media and their messages, researchers in the recent past began looking at the consumers of media and the psychological, sociological, cognitive, relational, and contextual influences on media effects. Audiences were seen as having unique perspectives that caused them to act in unique ways, or perhaps not to act at all. Shearon A. Lowery and Melvin L. DeFleur refer to this phenomenon as "the theory of selective influence based on individual differences."²

The primary similarity among all of these theories is their practice of rejecting earlier media effects theories. The dominant theories of the last few decades have moved toward a view of audiences as active, socially bound individuals who vary in their uses and treatments of media messages. These discoveries were important and useful, but they still did not go far enough. Viewers were still seen as either aware or passive, but not truly active. More recently, scholars have taken that next step. Whereas we once saw audiences as passive absorbers of mediated messages and later as selective interpreters of media, we now see them as active participants in meaning formation.

Raymond A. Bauer, for example, stated that previous works did not give audiences enough credit as thinking human beings but instead dehumanized them into robots or animals guided only by instincts and reflexive responses. He believed, however, that although it was rational and had self-control, "the audience [was] not wholly a free agent; it must select from what is offered."³ Today we know that audiences can not only choose not to choose (they do not have to select from what is offered), but beyond that they can create new choices for themselves that better...