Tenth reading

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture

By: Henry Jenkins

I got a hold of this book through SH library, it’s an electronic resource.

Ch.6 - Interactive audience? The “collective intelligence” of media age

This chapter describes the development of how consumers through fan culture communities interact with media and its producers. The focus in this chapter is on fans of movies, series and games.

In the time before Internet fans of different kinds communicated through meetings, paper mail, phones and such. Fan communities at this time where rather closed up and only the dedicated where engaged in these kind of communications because of its nature.

When Internet entered the society fans could finally interact with each other through web-based communication. Big online community’s started to appear and fans had an easier time gathering together to communicate their passion. These community’s served as a collective nest of information about particular movies, series and games where fans could post information, have discussions or distribute their fan material such as novels, pictures, home made movies, music and so on.

When these platforms started to bloom more and more participants gathered to contribute and engage in their own way. By this time the producers opened their eyes to fan culture and started to engage them to se what people thought of their work and to get influences on how to further develop their productions, and meet the expectations and wishes of the fans. This resulted in a to way communication where fans finally where able to influence the outcome of productions.

Nowadays I think this can be easily seen in examples such as game-mods where players can play around with the designs of games and reshape them into new content or ad something new themselves. TV-shows where people can vote to decide the outcome. I’m sure there are a lot more examples I just cant think of any right now when I am writing.

In my own thoughts I think that this is a very good progression into letting people decide of what the get through media, that there is no longer a one-way decisive power.