The first Media lecture after the long Easter break (also the first lecture I attended), start with week 7’s topic: Textual Attention, a video of an iguana getting away from snakes’ hunting, showing us how to draw one’s attention by only video editing and storytelling skill, again, the powerfulness of media.
As being one of the media students, media operators, we are also being one of the audiences, of ads we have seen or TV programs that we watched in everyday life. I think noticing the changes of this world and how it would change in the nearly future would be quite an important matter to us, that noticing the changes in our own behaviors, our habits and aesthetic way of thinking, could be the first step of it, as known as digital ethnography (learnt from New Media, New Asia).
The topic this week would be Fandom, as known its history in class, I was quite surprised that it was a negative term when this word had first been well known, that describing who was freakishly obsessed with something, and it was harmful to the mass culture. Luckily, the word ‘Fan’ nowadays had become a pretty common word that talks about who was simply very interested in certain things or pay attention in certain celebrities. As well as the Harry Potter event – The Night of Thousand Wizards that Henry Jenkins had mentioned in his blog post, no matter how it cost (or totally free), a several thousand or fans celebrating the end of Harry Potter movie series at the same place, the Universal park. Any store or attraction of this fake ‘Hogsmeade’ town and ‘Hogwarts’ could always bring fan’s memories of the film or book series back to this place, all together with surrounding by peoples that have the same passion for it as you were. Even one of the drinks in this book, the Butterbeer (I had tried it before in LA, pretty nice but also expensive) could still make you desire for it.
cr. Wikipedia
Regarding on what I interested in, I am currently a fan of quite an amount of stuff, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the Japanese anime Dragonball, Digimon and Fullmetal Alchemist, K-pop (Korean-pop music), etc. My craziest action on being a fan, would be spending a several days for only revising my favourite anime and TV dramas (called KO One), with only eat and sleep besides watching them, which could let me be as happy as travelling somewhere by only spending hours on them with just a laptop. For being a K-pop fan, I had once been immersed in a k-pop idol group 4 years ago, following their news day by day on Facebook and certain forums, and spending money on their newest albums and concert been held in Hong Kong. However, I had been ‘escape’ from it as some issues had occurred within the idol group’s member themselves. And now, I am still being a fan of k-pop, but not an that enthusiastic one, with only noticing newest k-pop songs from YouTube channel that I had subscribed, and surfing a Taiwanese forum called PTT for news related to k-pop every few days.
By the way, I think it’s pretty difficult for us to fully ‘escaped’ from what we had been obsessed with once (such as your previous girl/boyfriends), including your favourite cartoons and games in Childhood, or the movie series you pay attention in teenage although we had all grown up as being an adult, otherwise, why would movies that recreated by fairy tales or cartoons (e.g. Beauty and the Beast, Ghost in the Shell) could always got hit in box office? We are all being in Fandom, isn’t it?