Brings together the highlights of a decade and a half of
groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumers
Henry Jenkins's pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea
that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and
socially connected consumers of popular culture and that they represent
the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though marginal and
largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, media
producers and advertisers, not to mention researchers and fans, take for
granted the idea that the success of a media franchise depends on fan
investments and participation.
Bringing together the highlights of a decade and a half of
groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumers,
Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers takes readers from Jenkins's progressive
early work defending fan culture against those who would marginalize or
stigmatize it, through to his more recent work, combating moral panic
and defending Goths and gamers in the wake of the Columbine shootings.
Starting with an interview on the current state of fan studies, this
volume maps the core theoretical and methodological issues in Fan
Studies. It goes on to chart the growth of participatory culture on the
web, take up blogging as perhaps the most powerful illustration of how
consumer participation impacts mainstream media, and debate the public
policy implications surrounding participation and intellectual property.
