THE HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CUL TURE OF FANS STUDIESXI RAO（Department of humanities I I T，Chicago, Illinois 60616 ）[Abstract] this article traces the image, activities, and meaning of fandom. Fans were portrayed as deviant creatures until the late 1980s. This image was clarified when people looked into fans and their creative works. Scholars realized that fans productively generated creative products based on the given materials, which reflected the social experience of the creators. Therefore, fandom was soon understood as a way of fans to resist the dominant culture in the society.【KEYWORDS】TV F ANDOM；F ANDOM; DOMINANT CUL TURE；RESIST作者简介：饶曦（1991—），女，湖北十堰人，美国伊利诺伊理工学院人文学院信息架构理学博士，主要从事信息架构科学研究。

INTRODUCTIONIn 2014, people sent 576,000 tweets, on average, during each episode of The W alking Dead (Nielsen, 2014a). AMC’s show, which is seen by 14 million viewers, reached 4,934,000 people on Twitter (Nielsen, 2014b). Also, 2,491,473 unique users on Facebook made 4,477,454 activities (including posts, comments, likes, shares) related to Breaking Bad around the episode airing on Sept 29, 2013 in total (Facebook for Business, 2014). Audiences are clearly using social media to be involved with television. What we don’t know is (1) what are they doin g, and (2) why does any of it matter? This paper addresses these two questions by situating fans’ current social media practices in the context of fan studies from the late 20th century and examining the impacts fans’ social media behaviors have on television production and on fans themselves.1 A Brief History of TV FandomImages of deviance haunt the literature on TV fandom (see Miller, 1989; Johnson, 1987; Caughey, 1978). Until the late 1980s, researchers consistently characterized fans as fanatics or potential fanatics, meaning that TV fandom was seen as excessive, bordering on deranged, behavior (Jenson, 1992; Jenkins, 1992). As Jenson (1992) summarizes, researchers discuss deviant fandom as two types: the obsessed individual and the hysterical crowd.In the “obsessed individual” characterization, individuals, usually loners, enter into an intense fantasy relationship with a particular celebrity. They then achieve public notoriety by stalking, threatening, or killing the celebrity (e.g., Robert John Bardo, who killed actress Rebecca Schaeffer after stalking her for three years). An article in People W eekly on Schaeffer’s murder blames TV shows in the United States for influencing fan obsession, “This country has been embarking for a long time on a fiel d experiment in the use of violence on TV… W e’ve given the losers in life or sex a rare chance to express their dominance” (Lewis, 1992). Fans were regarded as mindless, immature consumers who don’t have any “important” things to do in daily life except de voting their lives to the useless knowledge of the programs. For instance, William Shatner of Star Trek fame, said, “Get a life!” to fans during an appearance on Saturday Night Live (Jenkins, 1992).The “hysterical crowd” characterization refers to groups such as screaming teens waiting to glimpse a rock star. “Five thousand shrill female voices come in on cue. The screeching reaches the intensity of a jet engine. When Elvis comes striding out on stage with his butchy walk, the screamssuddenly escalate (Le wis, 1992, p. 99).” Mass hysteria is inevitable. It is announced and ratified teen sexuality and amplified teen sexual frustration almost beyond endurance.Whether individually or in groups, fans were seen as being irrational, out of control, deviant, exc essive creatures. Though some literature admits the existence of “normal” fans, researchers express concern that “normal” fans will eventually become obsessed loners or hysteric crowd members (Jenson, 1992). This worry comes from questioning the fans’ abil ities to distinguish appropriate and inappropriate behaviors displayed on the television screen and to separate TV programs from the reality. Hence, even currently normal fans are potentially dangerous.Meanwhile, fans are looked as a group of people who do not have a “real life” because they are spending so much time and money on supporting meaningless TV shows. The negative stereotype portrayed by the media shows fans as mindless consumers, cultural dupes, and social misfits (Jenkins, 1992).Many of these arguments about fandom concentrate on deviant, excessive behaviors by distinguishing fans from “us.” Jenson points out that scholars such as Schickel explains that the “forces” that function in arousing the deranged behavior of fans also affect “us,” bu t in a much milder measure (Lewis, 1992). These statements develop a deviant image of fans, which is a deranged version of “us.” Fandom is conceived as a pathology of the society, as a way to compensate the fan’s incomplete personality. This threatening, n egative image of fandom lasted until early 1990’s when scholars (e.g., Jenkins, 1992; Jenson, 1992; Bacon-Smith, 1992) denied the “other” conception in “fans” vs. “us.”By replacing “fans” with “us,” Jenson (1992) proposed the new assumption: W e are fans. The argument applies the fandom label to “us” or “we” by arguing that as aficionados, professors, and many other roles, we are also fans. Fans are not “others” to be condescended to and maligned, fans are “us.” Under this framing, fans have both lives and are not deviant because they are not just some distant other but rather ourselves. Moreover, Jenkins (1992) points out that by being represented as “others,” fans which amount to a projection of anxieties about the violation of dominant cultural hierarchies, do not pollute a sanctioned culture. This condescension toward fans is a result of classism, misogyny, and other kinds of hostility or aggression in the society (Jenson, 1992). Distinguishing fans from us by giving them an incomplete, fragile personality, enables us to claim that we are not these unstable, vulnerable people. Unlike the deviant, obsessed fans, we are in touch with reality.After Jenkins, and other similar arguments such as Bacon-Smith (1992), the understanding of TV fandom in academic literature has gradually changed. Deviant, obsessed conceptions of fans are replaced by “normal” descriptions as researchers start to accept that irrationality is not a necessary characteristic of fandom. Researchers realize that the misunderstanding of fandom is in part caused by the condescension of people who want to announce their culture “clean” (Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995).This change in image of fandom is regarded as the phase of “fandom is beautiful” (Gray, Sandvoss, & Harrington, 2007). Fandom is re-coded from pathological to creative, thoughtful, and productive (e.g. Fiske, 1992; Jenkins, 1992). At the turn of the century, some scholars started to emphasize the political meaning of fandom: fandom is a way of resisting the “power bloc” (the term most notably mentioned in Fiske, 1989) in the society (Hills, 2002). However, some theory emphasizes the productive practice of fans too much while rarely mentioning those fans who merely watch the show and do not engage in their own textual production (e.g., fanvids, fan fictions). Therefore this statement runs the risk of isolating the active “fans” from “us.” Also, the political meaning of fans’ participation is questioned because fans themselves probably are not aware of the political meaning within their activities (Hills, 2002).Moreover, from the development of the Internet, fans can approach the discussion about the fan object almost everywhere through cell phones, laptops, blackberries, etc. Hence, the specific forms ofsocial interaction that take place between fans have became an ever more integral part of everyday life in modern societies (Gray, Sandvoss, & Harrington, 2007).To summarize, the image of fans has changed from deviant creatures to normal people. Additionally, fandom is regarded as resistance to the mainstream culture. With the Internet, fans can approach texts by convenient and immediate ways in different situations, which makes fandom emerge as an integral aspect of our daily lives. These changes vary as people look into fans activities such as creating fan fictions and making fanvids.2 what Do tv fans do?Fans create and share fan fiction. At the very beginning, fans share knowledge or make new meanings collectively by passing textual products such as letters through mail or ordering individual stories on loan from a central library (Jenkins, 1992), or passing hand to hand at conventions (Jenkins, 2006). In this way, some of the fans write stories and then others only need to pay the cost of postage to approach those texts, and it is encouraged that readers have their own copies by this means. Fans also make fanzines to convey their fan fictions, reviews of shows, letters from the subscribers, interviews from conventions with writers or artists, etc (Bacon-Smith, 1992). The first science fiction fanzine, The Comet (see figure 1), was published in 1930 by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago and edited by Raymond A. Palmer and W alter Dennis (Danesi, 2013), which is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest. Through this medium, many fans turn to write for zines to support their zine-buying habits (Jenkins, 1992). As a result, writers, editors, and readers interact with each other directly and perpetuate the fandom.Figure 1. The cover of the first science fanzine: The CometFans orga nize and/or attend conventions (also known as “cons”). A convention is a prearranged gathering of fans at a specific place and time. A convention can be used to share knowledge of the show, exchange the fan fictions or fanzines, or create texts together. It can focus on a specific topic or fandom, e.g., Vividcon, a 125-person convention devoted specifically to fannish vidding1, or a general convention for all fandoms of their type (media, slash, etc.: e.g., Escapade2, a general slash con, open to all slash fans [Fanlore, 2013].1/2/43584.htmlAs the popularization of computers and the development of the Internet, new tools including blogs, forums, fan discussion groups, mailing lists, and social networks enable TV fans to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content (Jenkins, 2004).With the rise of video editing software such as iMovie3, or After Effects4, fans contribute to create various artworks, e.g. vidding (also known as vid). Vidding is a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows are set to music. Viddings use music in order to comment on or analyze a set of preexisting visuals to tell new stories, in which music is used as an interpretive lens to help the viewer to see the source text differently(Coppa, 2008). The first vidding appeared in 1975; a fan named Kandy Fong showed a slide5called “What Do Y ou Do With a Drunken Vulcan?” at a Star Trek convention that used a recording of Leonard Nimoy singing a Joni Mitchell song (Ulaby, 2009; Coppa, 2008).Besides all the creative works, fans also start movements and try to directly intervene with TV production. For instance, in 1967, and again in the 1967-68 season, fans of the TV program Star Trek produced over a million letters (see figure 2) to NBC to protest the threatened cancellation, resulting in the renewal of the show (Brower, 1992). In the digital age, fans can quickly start a grassroots movement to save a program or protest unpopular developments (Jenkins, 2006). As case in point, fans found the finale of How I Met Y our Mother unacceptable when it aired on March 30, 2014, and viewers took to social media to trash the polarizing ending (Romano, 2014). Some even created their own endings in which dad T ed and mom T racy got married and lived a happy life together (O’Brien, 2014). Facing the harsh comments, creator Carter Bays took to T witter to explain the reasoning (see figure 3) behind the ending and released an alternate finale five months later (Desta, 2014).Figure 2. Letter samples from Star Trek fansFigure 2. Fans show disappointment3iMovie is a video editing software application sold by Apple Inc4Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Systems and used inthe post-production process of filmmaking and television production.5/Members/fcoppa/clips/kandy-fongs-first-slideslow/viewFigure 3. Carter Bays explains the finaleTo conclude, there are three common kinds of things that fans do. The most basic one is collecting knowledge of the program, including reading fan fictions, reading fanzines, and searching the program related news online. The second one is sharing, or say propagating knowledge of the program, such as retweeting an event of the program. The last and the most influential one is making meaning of the program. This includes any kinds of compositions, such as writing fan fictions, viddings, or making meaningful comments online. From these activities, the actual TV production is often affected.3 WHY DO FANS MA TTER?Now we know what TV fans do. But why would all these behaviors matter? What can we achieve by analyzing the fans’ activities? This section explains why fans matter and what we can lea rn from understanding fandom. The two main reasons fans and their behavior matter are that they (1) champion the disadvantaged as a manifestation of the social hierarchies and (2) influence television production.3.1 Fan CommunityW e know that fans are participatory in poaching the materials on TV shows. During the process of redressing the deviant image of fandom, scholars took their particular inspiration from de Certeau’s (1984) distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the disempowered. Fans, as vulnerable groups, are using guerrilla-style tactics (Fiske, 1989) to resist the mainstream culture (Gray, Sandvoss, & Harrington, 2007). Highfield and his colleagues (2013) find that people address social issues by using the event’s topic as a vehicle to catch the attention of a wider audience. In this case, fandom is regarded as resistance to the dominant culture. Therefore, fandom matters because it represents and champions those disadvantaged, particularly those disempowered by a combination of gender, age, class, and race, within society.In addition, Jenkins’s (1992) canonical T extual Poachers considers fandom more than a mere act of being a fan, but a collective strategy, to form communities that evades the intended meaning of the “power bloc” (Fiske, 1989) represented by popular media. Subsequent works including Baym (1999), Bacon-Smith (1992), and Jenkins (2006) have illustrated that fandom is one of those spaces where people collaborate within a knowledge community. A knowledge community, also called a community of practice, is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly (Wenger, 1998). This group can evolve naturally with the members’ comm on interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally (Lave & W enger, 1991). As a community of practice, fans share their knowledge of the program, sometimes with a thought of “showing off for one another” (Fiske, 1992), in order to expand a community’s productive capacity. Different from simply sharing knowledge, fans are motivated not solely by a pleasure in knowing but also a pleasure in exchangingknowledge (Jenkins, 2006). Fan communities produce products including letters that fans use to communicate or create together, fan fictions that utilize the same characters in the original show but make different meanings, zines, and other kinds of creative works. These products function both as creative outlets and as tools to propagate the group’s identity (Jenkins, 2006). The new meanings created reflect the existing social issues of this disempowered group or the way things really are in the world in which the writer actually lives (Sandvoss, 2005; Bacon-Smith, 1992). Like Bacon-Smith (1992) points out, women talk about their struggle for dignity in their relationships in their fan fiction, even though few television stories about women seem to postulate institutional dignity or equal status for women. From this perspective, fans matter as resistance that champion the disadvantaged.Though the view that thinking fandom as resistance provides a strong reason to study fandom, it’s necessary to examine two major reasons why thinking fans as communities attract increasing scrutiny. First, it’s too common for fans to be dismissed as “others.” The characteristics of productivity and collectivity in turn appear to set the practices of fans apart from other, less productive audience groups.Y et, this ubiquity of fandom challenges notions of fan dom as exceptional and distinct from “normal audiences” (Fiske, 1992). However, as summarized by Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington (2007), the “other” is always a reflection of ourselves and is imbued with significant desire and longing of us. Hence, fans still matter.Second, the political meaning of fan production may be overstated. Hills (2002) questions that fans may not recognize the political meaning of their production as a part of the popular culture mentioned by Fiske (1989).3.2 Fans and the TV IndustryThe public recognition and evaluation of being a fan has profoundly changed since themid-1990s when we have moved from an era of broadcasting to one of narrowcasting (Gray, Sandvoss, & Harrington, 2007). Fan audiences are wooed by cultural industries with the rise of new media. Treating fans as specialized yet dedicated consumers has become a centerpiece of media industries’marketing strategies. As fans become mainstream consumers and supporters of the TV show, whether a TV program succeeds or not, to a certain extent, depends on the choice of fans.Fans can influence what shows will air. In 1981, Buffy Johnson, a mother and a fan of Hill Street Blues, organized a letter-writing campaign, pleaded with potential sponsors, and urged journalists to cover the show in their columns to support the new Hill Street Blues; fans of Cagney & Lacey were inspired by the producer and saved the show through letter-writing campaign (Brower, 1992); after fan pressure, Netflix makes Daredevil accessible to the blind by providing audio descriptions of the program (NPR, 2015). Besides simply watching the show, fans play an important role in determining the fate of the TV program. The industry takes letters seriously from fans who try to participate in and thus influence the production of the text (Fiske, 1992). These cases indicate that fans, to some extent, are invested in the program’s continuance by directly writing to the network to support their favorite show, or engaging in other activities that can influence the destiny of the show: for instance, fans urge journalists to cover the show in their columns to impact other viewers. As shown in the transcript provided by Robert Sabal (1992) of the first annual Faculty Seminar sponsored by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in November, 1988, those TV industry representatives will be able to give programs a chance because of publicity campaigns. Methods such as starting letter campaigns or talking to people who cover the media, benefit the show by drawing more public attention. This evidence demonstrates that fans play an important role in determining the fate of the TV program.epiloguefans give us a way to understand modern society, and fans can influence TV production. Some scholars think fandom is a kind of resistance against the dominant culture. From this perspective,fandom matters because it champions the disadvantaged. While other scholars take fandom as a manifestation of the modern society which reflects the hierarchy of the society. In both ways, studying fans allow us to effectively explore cultural issues in modern society. Fans also influence the production of a TV program through different ways, such as expressing their love to the network and the producer, or urging journalists to report their belove d show in order to impact others’ views towards the program. All in all, fans matter as they are not spectators but also participants in TV production.关于电视粉丝文化的历史及意义研究饶曦（伊利诺伊理工学院人文学院；芝加哥伊利诺伊60616）【摘要】本文追溯了的粉丝文化形象、活动及意义。