Henry doesn\u2019t study fans to find out what makes them tick. He knows that. He\u2019s one of them, a participant in fan cons, a player of video games, an explorer of the multimedia sagas like those of Star Trek<\/em> and The Matrix<\/em> that have grown up in the age of franchise culture. He received his doctorate here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where David was his dissertation advisor, and we have followed his career, as they say, with great interest. Straight out of the gate he was hired by MIT, where he is now the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. (Read more about his prolific and wide-ranging activities at his blog<\/a>.)<\/p>\n This year two books by Henry appeared: Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture<\/em> and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide<\/em> (both New York University Press). Given that my The Frodo Franchise<\/em> has chapters on Lord of the Rings<\/em> video games and fan culture on the Internet, I thought I\u2019d start with the first. Henry assured me, however, that Convergence Culture<\/em> represented a more current and probably more relevant overview, so I started with it instead.<\/p>\n This terrific book uses a series of case studies to give an overview of how digital media have expanded the possibilities for participatory fan culture. It also shows how the producers of popular culture have reacted to this new empowerment of the consumers. Only two chapters focus on films: \u201cSearching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix<\/em> and Transmedia Storytelling\u201d and \u201cQuentin Tarantino\u2019s Star Wars<\/em>? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry.\u201d In the modern entertainment industry, however, films are increasingly linked to other media, and no one has a better grasp of the overall relationship among popular media than Henry.<\/p>\n \n Convergence Culture<\/em> is unusual, perhaps unique, in offering an overview of the entertainment industry from the perspective both of the big corporations that control popular media creations and of the fans, who often appropriate those creations for their own purposes. Much of the book depends on interviews with fans and executives alike. Henry is evenhanded in dealing with both points of view\u2014except when the big firms try to stifle fan creativity through intimidation and the invocation of copyright and trademark control.<\/p>\n \n Here Henry is firmly on the side of the fans. The chapter on Star Wars<\/em> mentioned above reviews the love-hate relationship George Lucas has had with fan websites that post innumerable works derived from his saga. Another chapter, \u201cWhy Heather Can Write,\u201d details how Warner Bros. attempted to squelch fan creativity based on the Harry Potter<\/em> series. Henry provides a cogent argument for rewriting fair-use laws to accommodate amateur, not-for-profit activities that utilize characters and situations from copyrighted works.<\/p>\n \n So am I an aca\/fan, too? I wouldn\u2019t exactly describe myself as one, though in this new book I have dabbled in that approach, meeting many fellow Lord of the Rings<\/em> fans in person and in cyberspace. One has to admire members of the various fandoms and the amount of time and effort they are willing to put into keeping themselves and others informed about the objects of their fascination. They also lovingly create their own works (fanfiction, fanart, machinema, RPGs, and so on) derived from their favorite books, games, movies, TV shows, and comics. Most of the results aren\u2019t masterpieces, of course, but that\u2019s true of \u201creal\u201d artworks created by professionals and aspiring professionals as well. If enough of just about anything gets made, some of it is bound to be good. I\u2019ve found some excellent Lord of the Rings<\/em> fanfiction among the many conventional, sometimes nearly unreadable tales I have sampled. And Chocolate Cake City\u2019s Brokeback to the Future<\/em><\/a> demonstrates what David likes to describe as \u201cthe spontaneous genius of the American people\u201d (usually in reference to the speed with which any significant event generates a body of tasteless jokes, or, in this case, parodies).<\/p>\n \n For all the attempts to analyze audiences through questionnaires and interviews and other traditional methods, Henry shows that the best way to understand fans is as an insider. The aca\/fan approach is spreading as the study of popular media and fandoms gains legitimacy within academe, and it is lucky to have an enthusiastic, intelligent pioneer in Henry Jenkins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kristin here– There was a time when studying film fans was something sociologists or film-industry marketing people did. Sociologists wanted to find out why fans behaved the way they did because it was interesting and often strange, and the industry wanted to figure out fan behavior so they could sell movies to them more effectively. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,2,14,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fans-and-fandom","category-film-art","category-film-scholarship","category-the-frodo-franchise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9061,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/9061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Convergence](\"\/img\/cover_convergence.gif\" "\\"Convergence")
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