Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World

26 AfterwordThe Future of Fandom

26 Afterword The Future of Fandom Henry Jenkins By now, reading mass media coverage as symptomatic of the cultural status of fandom has become a central genre in fan studies. Witness the introduction to this collection, which explores some of the contradictions in the ways the mainstream media covers fans—patronizing Harry Potter fans as “Potterheads” even as they court Yankees fans in their sports section. Now it’s my turn to look at another signpost. Newsweek’s April 3, 2006, issue (Levy & Stone 2006: 45–53) has a cover story on “Putting the ‘We’ in Web,” which describes the convergence of factors that is leading to the success of a range of significant new companies, including Flickr, MySpace, Drabble, YouTube, Craigslist, eBay, del.icio.us, and Facebook, among others . Each of these companies is reaching critical mass by “harnessing collective intelligence,” supporting User-Generated Content, and creating a new “architecture of participation,” to use three concepts much beloved by the ever-present industry guru Tim O’Reilly (2005). Newsweek reduces the phenomenon of “social media” or “web 2.0” to the phrase, “it’s not an audience, it’s a community,” arguing that such services transform the relationship between media producers and consumers. As they explain, “MySpace, Flickr, and all the other newcomers aren’t places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons” (Levy & Stone 2006: 53). The article comments extensively on the way average consumers of brands and branded entertainment are playing a more active role in shaping the flow of media throughout our culture, are drawn together by shared passions 357 and investment in specific media properties or platforms, and often create new context by appropriating, remixing, or modifying existing media content in clever and inventive ways. Nowhere in the article do the authors ever use the term “fan.” Indeed, the whole discourse about “web 2.0” has been animated by a hunger to develop a new, more empowered, more socially connected, and more creative image of the consumer. Most of the key figures in the movement agree that the old-style consumer is dead, RIP. Here’s cyber-columnist Clay Shirky on this point: The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media’s long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to mass media’s all-producing Yang. Mass media’s role has been to package consumers and sell their attention to the advertisers, in bulk. The consumers ’ appointed role in this system gives them no way to communicate anything about themselves except their preference between Coke and Pepsi, Bounty and Brawny, Trix and Chex. They have no way to respond to the things they see on television or hear on the radio, and they have no access to any media on their own—media is something that is done to them, and consuming is how they register their response[. . . . ] In the age of the internet , no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet. (1999: n.p.) Shirky, in effect, seems to be traversing the same terrain fan studies traveled several decades ago, reasserting the emergence of the active audience in response to the perceived passivity of mass media consumers. Of course, in this formulation, it is the technology that has liberated the consumer and not their own subcultural practices. If everyone agrees that those people formerly known as consumers will gain a new role in this still-emerging digital culture, there’s not much agreement about what to call that role. Some call such people “loyals,” stressing the value of consumer commitment in an era of channel zapping; some are calling them “media-actives,” suggesting that they are much more likely to demand the right to participate within the media franchise than previous generations; some are calling them “prosumers,” suggesting that as consumers produce and circulate media, they are blurring the line between amateur and professional; some are calling them “inspirational consumers” or “connectors” or “influencers,” suggesting that some people play a more active role than others in shaping media flows and creating new values. 358 Afterword: The Future of Fandom Grant McCracken, the anthropologist and media consultant, calls such people multipliers: [T]he term multiplier may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in...