CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Researching fan communities from a dialogic perspective: Being communicative in how they communicate with each other about being fans.
Among fan scholars, there is a consensus that to be a fan one must participate in a fan community to some degree (Jenkins, 1992) – as commentator, as librarian, as industry spy, as producer, as organizer – and this is true whether the community exists in the real world, such as conventions, and in cyberspace, such as discussion boards. Such communities are emergent, developing only due to the interactions of the fans who seek out others, gather together, recruit others, and define the boundaries and rules of membership for their communities – be this in the real world or online. In a sense, this common conceptualization of fan communities incorporates a basic understanding of community participation as being communicative – if fans were not communicating with one another, then how could such a community form? Fan communities grow around a specific focal point, a point traditionally created by a fan or group of fans. Fans’ appropriation of various media channels, from bound magazines to online archives, are used to spread the word about those media products – from Star Trek to Heroes – that geographically separated people are interested in. Such a flattering conceptualization of empowered fans and their emergent communities is part of the movement among scholars of fans to legitimize their academic interest in what commonly was seen as a popular culture phenomenon populated by social deviants. Celebrating fans as being highly activity and democratic in community creation venerates the reason for studying fans; perhaps if we understand how they do it, then we can make “real” democracy on “important” issues succeed. While venerating human beings and their activities is morally better than ridiculing, a problem arises when fan communities are regarded so accomplishedly. Operating only with this conceptualization can blind the scholar to understand power issues that occur within a community unless dealt with in communicative, dialogic, and deliberative ways. Those who originate the focal point can first delineate the parameters for being considered part of that community – boundaries that may include level of devotion, jargon, specific interpretations, and so forth. Other fans can either accept these requirements to fit-in with the community, perhaps by sublimating some difference in level of devotion or type of interpretation. However, it is expected that divergences are more common than convergences in how people are fans. Researchers have considered the role of lurkers and flamers in online communication, but rarely have communities’ intracommunication processes been studied to understand how different types of fans are brought together and kept together over time. Again, this applies to both real world and cyberspace communities. The structure of the community is detailed – where the community meets, the rules of the community, the roles of the community members, and what the community accomplishes. However, in order to truly understand the emergence, maintenance, and perhaps demise of any fan community, the communicating practices of the members of that community need to be
examined. How do they handle flamers, lurkers, contributors, detractors? How is information spread to create the community, to allow it to flourish, and to define itself from others? Answering these questions is best accomplished by delving into the experiences of the fans that constitute the community. Seeking to understand these processes by no means detracts from the legitimization of fan communities as a field of study. Indeed, it strengthens it by seeing fans as real people communicating with others to develop the structure and feeling of community that is universal among humans. Focusing on the communicative processes would allow comparison of fan communities for different fandoms. Traditionally research has been case studies focusing on one particular fandom at a time. However, by shifting focus onto the communicative processes of the community, different fan communities, representing a variety of fandoms, can be compared to understand more of the commonalities that constitute how people bring themselves together to commune. Briefly, I want to summarize an initial step to understand these underlying processes for participation in fan communities (Reinhard, 2008). This study was not a true application of Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology; instead, it was a trial dialogue to illustrate a more communicative method for researching a fan community. Across all fandoms there exists a specific type of fan activity known as slash. Slash is both a practice and a perception, focusing on turning the heterosexual relationships of established characters into homosexual relationships. This practice traces back to fan stories between Kirk and Spock from Star Trek. Rather than maintain their depicted camaraderie from the show, these fans choose to see, create, and distribute stories and artwork placing these men in romantic, even sexual, relationships. With the advent of the internet, the amount of, access to and devotion to slash has grown exponentially. There are thousands of websites devoted to slash, where slashers can discuss, consume, distribute, and role-play various slashed relationships, from Harry Potter to the Bible. And the majority of slashers are heterosexual women. As a slasher myself, I wanted to develop a new way of engaging with fellow slashers to empower their voice, allowing them to represent themselves and to see connections between each other. A common complaint among fans is that, despite the good intentions of researchers, what is written about them does not fully account for their experience. My preliminary step to address this concern was to initiate a dialogue, similar in conceptualization to the structure done by Dervin, Foreman-Wernet, Jansen, Schaefer, and Shields (2001). Slashers who agreed to participate where given a series of questions to answer. Their answers were collected as Round 1, distributed to all participants with a second set of questions for Round 2 that asked them to make connections with what was said to their own experiences. This preliminary dialogue was not focused on processes of community development, expansion, maintenance, and disintegration. However, the importance of community to slashers was mentioned repeatedly: to help these fans locate, organize and share slash; to create connections with likeminded individuals; to foster identity and sexuality expression; and to improve creative craft through communal criticism. Indeed, when asked how they would explain their love of slash to those who didn’t understand them, a common answer was the importance of emergent communities. Thus, even without asking specifically, slashers discussed the types of processes that occur within a community: using criticism; dealing with negative members; sharing information; negotiating identity. These unprompted discussions occurred because of the dialogue’s focus on the role of the internet as a structure elicited discussion of the structure of communities.
To me this indicates that the structure of online communities is readily available for spontaneous discussion about the importance of community to the fan. For such an interpretation to be brought up, there must exist experiences and/or opinions to inform this discussion. To understand the communicative processes of a community, these experiences can be studied to uncover how communicating occurs within a community’s structure. A more thorough examination of fans’ communities could do any of the following: a) ask about various experiences with a particular community, b) open a dialogue within a community about experience with that community, and/or c) ethnographically examine the communication within the community and bring back the observations to create a dialogue. What I have learned from my experience with this informal dialogue is the willingness of fans to discussion, with zeal, their passion in a deliberate communicative manner. I believe this passion was promoted by my participation and identification as a slasher – I promoted myself as more interested in their interpretive stance than critically theorizing their actions. To truly understand the inner workings of a community that develops around a specific media text, with inherent to it norms and jargon, I believe one must achieve some emic status with that community, or at least be patient and diligent in communicating with the community’s members to understand how they understand their activities. To understand the communicative processes that operate within the structure of a community, the researcher must likewise be communicative – with the structure of the fandom, the members of the community, and his or her own self. To be patient, willingly disempowered, methodical, and self-reflective are needed to be immersed in and objective of what happens within a community. This is particularly true when the community has traditionally been ostracized and ridiculed, as have been many fan communities. To know what occurs in the temple, one must look beyond the architecture of the temple and be respectful of the parishioners and their fidelity to whatever brings joy to their lives. REFERENCES Dervin, B., Foreman-Wernet, L., Jansen, S. C., Schaefer, D., & Shields, P. (2001, May). Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose: On the inextricable necessity of theorizing <----> philosophizing in disciplining communication policy/practice. Paper presented at the meeting of the International Communication Association, Washington, DC. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Reinhard, C.D. (2008). If one is sexy, two is even sexier: Female fans negotiating identities through online slash activities. Paper presented at the 2008 Central States Communication Association Conference, Madison, WI.