#this is a new development in my fandom lifecycle

[karygurl]

Made some Ebon Light memes that I shared on the Discord server, and I’m so proud that I’m gonna show them off here too like a three year old shows off their finger paintings. I MADE DIS.

[eng553s18unessay]

The Digital Development of Fandom - Unessay

Fandom has always existed, whether it's the many published retellings of Dracula by Bram Stoker, directors who get into the film industry as fans of Star Trek and then go on to direct both Star Trek and Star Wars, or every Renaissance painting of mythology or biblical events. The digital evolution has allowed fans around the world to connect and bond through a shared love for an event, celebrity, type of media, etc.

The above photo shows the definition and usage of the term "fandom”.

For my unessay, I'm going to guide everyone through the digital development of fandom. Consider the beginning of this WordPress post as the "introduction" for the project, much like an introduction in a tradition essay. Here, you'll find a brief overview of the project and some thoughts to consider as you click through the project. You'll also find a list of the links for each subsequent post in my unessay. After that, you'll find the conclusion (much like the conclusion in a traditional essay) at the bottom of the post. So bookmark this page and come back to reorient when you get sucked into clicking on multiple tags on the different sites or when you're ready for the conclusion.

As I cited in my proposal for this project, I have continually linked fandom to our readings and discussions throughout the course. I wanted to use my unessay to examine the ways fandom has influenced digital literacy, especially for fans, and the way it intersects with the ideas discussed in class. Initially in my proposal I included the site Deviantart. However, while working through this project, I realized that most of my comments around the site were addressed through the LiveJournal and Tumblr pieces, hence its omission in the final version of my unessay.

We'll start with LiveJournal and discuss the early digital presence of fandom on the platform in the 2000s. The platform gained international recognition and use primarily with the Harry Potter fandom, especially as the films began to premier and the final three books were released. From there, we'll go to a second post hosted on LiveJournal that covers one of the earliest fan fiction websites - FF.net - and its culture, use, and legacy. After that, we'll hop over to Tumblr - the current international platform for all fandoms. If you meet a fan and ask them what platform they use the most, more than three-quarters will answer that they utilize Tumblr. The site has become the integrated solution for all types of creative output - art, videos, GIFs, chats, links, audio, music, writing, and meta discussions. After a look into Tumblr, we'll go to a second Tumblr post that talks about the current fan fiction platform - AO3. We'll look at the interactions on the platform and its prominence in current fandom. After AO3? We'll come back to this blog post to wrap up my unessay. Along the way, I'll be linking each platform to specific readings or ideas we've covered in class and the way it has influenced what it means to be digitally literate as a fan in the twenty-first century.

Ready? Let's dive in!

Intro - You Are Here!

LiveJournal - The Early 2000s Fandom Experience

FF.net - The Early 2000s Fanfic Archive

Tumblr - The Integrated Fandom Experience

AO3 - The Modern Fanfic Archive

Conclusion - Welcome Back!

Well, now you can say you have been thoroughly educated on the digital development of fandom in the last eighteen years! From LiveJournal to Tumblr and FF.net to AO3, fandom has seen some sweeping changes - and platform jumps to boot - since 2000. Each has emphasized an aspect of digital humanities, such as participatory culture, new media interaction, and Gunning's technological lifecycle. Having been a part of fandom since the early 2000s, I have really enjoyed watching the ways that digital fandom has shifted from platform to platform and always looked for new ways to engage, create, and share their passion for their specific fandom(s). Hopefully, I've demonstrated for all of you that fandom isn't just what preteens get up to after class. It's a bright, creative, diverse, beautiful environment that welcomes all and encourages personal and artistic growth. Thanks for coming along with me on this journey through digital fandom. As Spock would say, live long and prosper!

Looking back over the project, I wanted to share some thoughts about my decision to use the platforms I did and my thoughts on my creative process for the project: I think utilizing LiveJournal and Tumblr - the two dominant fandom platforms of the last two decades - helped users visualize and understand the interactions on both sites. I struggled with deciding on how much of fandom lexicon and history to include. I wanted to focus on the digital development of fandom, especially as it relates to this course. Making sure that I didn't get bogged down in helping non-fandom readers to understand the history of fandom was a bit of a struggle, but I think I achieved a nice balance in the end. After all, some history and lexicon is necessary to illustrate the point of digital development and interaction. It's been quite a while since I interacted with LiveJournal, so it was fun to see how the site has evolved and it definitely made me glad for the easy-to-navigate platform of Tumblr. Looking for screencaps of the original homepage for FF.net was a trip back in time and I had way too much fun reminiscing with my girlfriends about the "golden days" of fanfic - while all of us are so grateful and hooked on AO3. Overall, I had a blast putting this project together and being a fangirl about being a fangirl. And if you want a further taste of the fangirl life, I highly recommend Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. It's a love letter to fandom, fangirls, and the unique perspective fangirls have on the world around them.

[life2strange]

It’s never too late to make the big bucks.

“I want to be a superhero” was a line you’d probably expect coming from young children, but as the case with a large portion of society I didn’t really grow out of my superhero phase and here I was 22 years old still lining up at comic book stores waiting to get a new Batman comic. Today’s social society being receptive to anything that is a result of mainstream media production is said to be acceptable in social circles, such as if Marvel came out with a ‘Spiderman’ movie, it would be acceptable to go see it regardless of your Age or gender as it’s a ‘popular narrative’ providing content to the masses and is easily accessible. I feel if one tends to go further into this narrative like I did with superhero’s and try to get their means of entertainment through more unconventional means like comic books, video games, and animated cartoons, would lead people to have a negative perception about being overly attached or interested in content that might not be regarded as acceptable by mainstream media at this particular point in time. I do however feel like this is becoming more lax and people are becoming more acceptable of ‘geek’ or ‘nerd culture’ as the rise in popularity of ‘Marvel’ and ‘DC’ movies has led to superhero’s and superhero culture being a more common topic of conversation in society and the rise in mainstream actors playing superhero roles such as Robert Downy Junior Playing ‘Iron Man’ and Ben Affleck playing ‘Batman’ tends to help audiences feel more at ease and accept superhero’s as being more common place as acceptable medium in story telling. Boothe talks about the ‘Spime’ of a fandom which is ‘the lifecycle of an object from initial design through physical substantiation to final digital trace. It changes the ‘object’ from a purely physical entity into a lifecycle of technological transformation, and uses time as another dimension upon which an object can be measured’. Booth, P. (2105). Fandoms like Batman which started off with the comics in 1940 and has amassed success over a wide stream of media platforms such as comics, graphic novels, television shows, movies, video games and now even virtual reality immersion technology that allows you to become ‘Batman’. Transmedia therefore allows the franchise to develop a larger following across the world and allows people to find out information regarding the fandom at the touch of a button. This would have led Batman to develop a large fan following across many countries and fans of many generations that come together to enjoy it no matter the means how the do so. The spime of Batman helps it remain relevant across time and helps retain its popularity. I remember getting my first glimpse of Batman from my father showing me an old Batman movie staring George Clooney. My father exposed me to a fragment of the fandom thus including me in the ‘spimatic wave’ associated with the Batman fandom. When the voice actor who played batman for a little over ten years went to twitter to put up an idea to bring back the classic animated show for a reunion episode I was up in arms for the idea. He and the other members from the cast of the show used the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to try and obtain financial means from their most loyal fanbase in order to provide funding to create the content that would-be tailor made to the fanbase paying every dollar to make it happen. The success of the Kickstarter campaign is dependant on successfully utilizing the fan nostalgia and acknowledging the presence of a group of like minded people forming the batman fandom and supporting the project at multiple nodes in the production process. With such experiences I can add ground to Boothe’s views that Fandoms by applying certain theories of the Spime towards fandom through the appropriate mode of crowdfunding would lead to a more emotional and effective process of media creation.” Fandom is traditionally participation after-the-fact; the Spime allows us to see fandom as generative of meaning throughout the entire participatory process” Booth, P. (2105).

Being a media and communications student, my passion has always been to get involved in the journalism stream and eventually turn that into a career in sports writing. Basketball in particular had always been an area of interest for me and the opportunity to try and work in a career related to my passion was too hard to pass on and therefore I had been looking into what it took to become a sports writer in todays world. New means of media has led to the evolution of transmission of news and information regarding a player or a team in the National Basketball Association and writers have been quick to adapt. While most of the main story pieces that provide in depth analysis and detail regarding a situation, team or player are done via websites such as ESPN, Bleacher Report and Yahoo Sports, applications have also been developed so access on various devices becomes easier as migration to accessible devices had been a key goal of sports media to become commonplace among new technology. Breaking news on the other hand needs to be reported at a moment’s notice to the public which has led to the large-scale use of Twitter as a platform amongst sports media content creators. Twitter as a platform allows instant transmission of ‘viral sports news’ such as an immediate player trade between teams, a sudden injury or altercation or even a player spotted in public. It allows the content to be received and reacted to at the touch of a button. Live-tweeting updates during games has become popular via twitter and writers would tweet from arenas thereby relaying tiny details they pick up from team personnel, player huddles, in arena altercations that might not be seen or heard on TV. This unique information available almost instantaneously allows these content creators to have an advantage over traditional media broadcasts in terms of specificity of information they would be providing.  Lets take the example of ESPN’s senior sports writer Arash Markazi, Markazi has been providing quality content through his stories and coverage of Los Angeles based sports teams for over a decade and had built a rapport amongst avid sports fans as being a reputable source of information. When the twitter revolution happening in the sports coverage world. Markazi began posting snippets of interesting information along with his regular stories on twitter, these included some off the court content that sports fan started to get accustomed to. He once posted a video on his twitter of a then unknown blonde girl doing a ‘dougie’ which was the popular dance move of the year live at a basketball game and as you would expect the video quickly turned viral and led to media companies picking up the video and then fame and fortune hit. That blonde girl is now married to World series winner Justin Verlander and is named Kate Upton who became internet famous which further led to her mainstream popularity in the past couple of years all due to this little snippet on twitter by a sports writer. The power of media in whatever form is astounding. As a social media content creator in this scenario Markazi exercised his power over his followers by sharing content that was good enough to be mass distributed leading to it going viral and therefore creating a buzz over information that if created and distributed by someone without such a platform or standing might not have stood out. In Wasike’s study he talks about the usage of twitter by social media editors in order to entertain a particular audience, he describes Twitter as a form of media that is built for personalization of people’s messages since it allows individuals to create a list of loyal and committed followers who share a common interest in a certain social media editor. Therefore, leading to Social media editors reciprocating and accepting this connection by tweeting information relating about their personal life, humorous content, memes, in-transit activities, etc. Finally, most of the Social Media Editors would go ahead and specifically start to use personalized themes in their Twitter bio sections to gain a sense of identity amongst the clutter. Apart from providing personal information such as native home town, spouses and hobbies, it was common to encounter phrases such as; music junkie, foodie, hobby enthusiast and other quirky titles that would lead to the audience being able to relate to the editor and make them seem almost like a regular everyday person thus helping them garner that nativity amongst their audience. (Wasike, B. (2013).)

A long time ago in a land far far away, a lazy teenager who shared a name and a birthday with me once thought of a plan to get rich quick with minimal effort along with him friends and scoured the internet in hopes of figuring out how to achieve this masterful plan. After google highest paid internet jobs and doing diligent research we wound up on Felix Kjellberg who goes by the internet nickname of pewdiepie who annuals earns 12 million dollars a year by creating videos on YouTube that amass millions of viewers every day. Now what did ‘Pewdiepie’ do you may ask, does he create his own music or do stand up comedy or tell stories, well no its not what one might assume. He garners millions of dollars every year playing video games from home and people are inherently very interested to see someone else play a video game, sounds easy enough right? Wrong again, after going through a lot of his videos we figured out that it takes a special someone to be able to obtain such an audience and maintain it over a period of years. People log on everyday to see this man play games of different genres while using a webcam to show his reactions to various thing that happen within the game. Suspense and intensity during horror games, humor and quick-witted jokes during funny scenarios and all out just an uncensored commentary is what Felix delivers during his gameplay segments that turned from a hobby to more income than most corporate millionaires. The world is changing, and people like to be entertained without really putting in much effort and Felix allows them to enjoy videogames that they really might not have enjoyed quite as much with his unique style and humor and thus game me my idea for internet millions. Till today my total YouTube earnings amount to 12 dollars and 27 cents as compared to Felix making 12 million in 2016. He wins …. for Now. Aggire and Young refer to user generated content in there work where it is said even though the historical novelty of the active behaviour of an audience is unpredictable at the least, and the use of of participation terms with respect to  activities that pertain to the audience usually are open for interpretation, the ineractive possibilities offered by new forms of media are what is seen as interesting here, These are usually  facilitators of interaction amongst users in the onlie world that have endless possibilities with the content. (Astigarraga, I., Pavon, A., & Zuberogoitia, A. (2016)).

 References

Astigarraga, I., Pavon, A., & Zuberogoitia, A. (2016). Active audience?: Interaction of young people with television and online video content. Communication and Society, 29(3), 133-147.

Booth, P. (2105). Crowdfunding: A spimatic application of digital fandom. New Media and Society, 17(2), 149-166.

Wasike, B. (2013). Framing news in 140 Characters: How social media editors frame the news and interact with audiences via Twitter. Global Media Journal - Canadian Edition, 6(1), 5-23.