Week 8 Workshop

Week 8’s workshop was mainly led by a discussion on recently visited topics, such as: fandoms, audiences, post broadcasting era, and the Week 7 reading, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ by John Berger.

Our group focused on ‘Fandoms’, and specifically the reading by Henry Jenkins – ‘The Night Of a Thousand Wizards’. We zeroed in on a quote featured in Jenkin’s post that we thought directly expressed what we were trying to grasp in regards to fandoms.

“But just as often the fans are talking about how it “feels right,” how it achieves a kind of emotional integrity, which fits their impressions of the world where one of their favourite stories is set. This is where the postmodernists get it wrong. They start with a basic contempt for the content of the stories represented in the theme park and so they do not invest themselves deeply enough in the experience. For them, it is about surfaces and empty signifiers. There’s nothing empty here — all of the details matter here and are meaningful in relation to the books and the fantasies they inspire.” – Jenkins, 2010

A lot of our discussion was based around the idea of fans’ over-emphasis on trivial aspects of, say, book to movie adaptations, and this quote by Jenkins fittingly puts into words how fans can be extreme critics and the smallest details matter more to them much more than content creators could sometimes imagine.

This theme also connects to the ‘audiences’ topic due to the fact that, these days, audiences are much more active and empowered with the rise of social media, so TV show producers take into account the kinds of reactions fans have to their show. Therefore, if changes are made, it can be used for marketing purposes as a selling point – they are giving the people what they want.