Lecture Slides:

Project Brief:

Readings:

Chun, W. (2006). Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Goggin, J. (2011) “Playbour, farming and labour.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization  11(4): 357-368.

Kücklich, J. (2005) “Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry”  Fibreculture 5

Terranova, T. (2000) “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 63,  vol. 18 no.2, pp. 33-58.

Today’s lecture discusses how participatory audiences engage with texts in a specific fashion and under specific conditions of cultural production. We can call these audiences prosumers in terms of their practices, or fans in terms of their affective engagement. They constitute alternative interpretive and social communities, and their desire to influence textual production makes them poach and create transformative works. Their work can be understood within a gift economy framework, and it needs reading in the context of current copyright legislation.

Lecture slides

Project brief:

As a group, choose a specific fan community, and analyse their cultural practices of textual production and circulation in the digital world. What type of transformative work they engage in? What is its cultural context? How can you understand their culture and work? You should apply the concepts discussed today to understand the ideological, legal and economic factors shaping the cultural practices you are analysing. Make sure you:

• do not confuse a genuine grassroots prosumer community with a corporate initiative.
• focus on the community, the practices and the culture, not on the platform hosting them.

Readings:

Jenkins, H. (2006), Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. (Chapter one) NY: NYUP. pp. 1-36.

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture (Introduction). NY: NYUP. pp.1-24

Lyman, P. et al. (2009) Hanging Out, Messing Around, And Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media. Cambridge: MIT press.

Murray, S. (2004) “‘Celebrating the story the way it is’: cultural studies, corporate media and the contested utility of fandom” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 18 (1): 7-25

Moving across different media influences the way we construct discourse and culture. The introduction of new (media) technologies creates extensions of what we can do and conceive, but it also precludes or amputates some of the ways of being and thinking with which we used to be conversant. We look forward to new media but we also look back nostalgically to old ones, which we recreate and reconfigure in the new context.

When we spread intertextual webs across different media, we create a transmedia narrative. Texts are distributed across media platforms and channels; each text can be read autonomousy, but none of them has the full narrative picture. In order to get all the meanings, we need to move across all the different media involved.

• Lecture Slides
• Seminar Materials

Essential Readings

• Fiske, J. (2011). Television Culture. London: Routledge. Chapters 5 (pp.62-83) and 7 (pp.109-128). (electronic resource in the library)
• Grusin and Bolter (1999) “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation” in Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. pp.21-50.
• Jenkins (2006) “Introduction: Worship at the Altar of Convergence“, ”Searching for the Origami Unicorn”, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars: Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry.”   in Convergence Culture. NY: NY University Press. pp.1-24; 93-130; 131-168.
• McLuhan (1964) “The Medium is the Message” in Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. London: Routledge.

Other Resources

• Sherlock (2010 – ongoing)

Intertextuality is a pervasive and inescapable textual characteristic. Famously discussed by Roland Barthes, intertextuality is the idea that Individual texts always refer to each other; and the web of interlinked references, similarities, echoes, constitute what we call intertext. However, intertextuality paradoxically makes apparent that meaning is not only in the text. Barthes makes this point when he talks about the relationship of connotative vs. denotative meanings. Intertextuality is ideological, and when we look at intertexts, we cannot ignore their social, cultural and political context. An intertext is not just a semiotic structure, but a social and situated one.

Intertextuality is an important concept in audience studies. Meaning is not to be found in the text independently of its readers; audiences use intertextuality to construct ideologically significant meanings. Audiences are active participants in not just decoding the meaning of a text, but actually co-creating it. Audiences actively construct ideological meanings within individual texts, and intertextually produce an overall web of meaning across several texts. Interpretation creates meaning, which in turn create new texts that contribute to the overall intertextual structure.  This process of meaning-making is cumulative, open-ended and inclusive:  texts generate meanings generate texts, connected in an intertextual contruction. A particular way of creating texts/meanings occurs when audiences literally produce new texts, adding their own contribution to the intertextual web.

• Lecture Slides
• Seminar Materials

Essential Readings

• Allen, G. (2003).   Ch.5 “The Death of the Author” and ch. 6 “Textuality” in Roland Barthes. London: Routledge.  pp.63-93.
• Black, S.R. (2012) “The Archontic Holmes: Understanding adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in the context of Jacques Derrida’s ‘Archive‘.” Forum 15: 1-11.
• Jenkins, H. (1988) “Star Trek Rerun Reread Rewritten: Fan Writing as textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5 (2): 85-107.
• Stein, L. and Busse, K. (2009) “Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context.” Popular Communication 7: 192–207.

Other Resources

•  A 3-minutes overview of fan fiction
• Sherlock (2010 – ongoing)