This video explains:
*How to find fan communities
*How to connect fan communities to global political issues.
*The importance of considering the role that fan communities play in media economies.
Audio TranscriptAuto-generated
Finally, let's talk about using fans studies methods and researching
fan communities.
How can you do it?
What should you look for to explain this?
I want to return to the question of gender because
studying how fans engage with questions of gender via media
content is an important way in a very valuable way
of connecting media studies to absolutely crucial global political issues.
One of the things that we know today is that
gender and the problem of gender violence is a defining
issue when it comes to discussing the conditions that would
need to be in place to promote global democracy.
So, gender is according to many organizations and many commentators,
the defining political challenge facing the world today and doing
research on fan communities provides a way of explaining how
popular culture can inform or at least relate to these
defining political issues.
So let's talk about and I'm going to talk about
a particular example and we can talk about the free
Brittany Movement.
So, I suppose one of the questions we would ask
is how can you find fan communities and you've got
a few methods for this one is personal networks.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with using your personal networks and
the fan communities that you're a part of as a
place to begin to do research and we're going to
be working on how you can do that in a
responsible way more in the workshops, but it's very common
to do that.
So, will Brooker is a Star Wars fan matt Hills
is who's written a lot of that Doctor Who is
a is a it's Doctor Who fan um there's a
collection of work on Sex and the City and Sex
and the City fans written by a CAS and Mccabe,
which is written from an academic perspective, but also from
the, from the perspective of being both an academic and
a fan of culture of of sex in the City.
So, the idea of studying a form that you are
a fan of um is really not a problem, as
long as there, as long as you manage ways of
doing that and recognize how that influences the work you're
doing and using personal fan networks is actually is a
common, is common practice.
Of course, another way of finding and researching band communities
is to look online and we're going to be developing
how to do that and why you should do that
and what it represents more next week.
But another powerful method of finding fans and finding what
they say about popular culture is to use hashtags and
in that respect we can use the free Britney Army
hashtag. So this is a hashtag that is used in
digital environments to attract the attention of people who feel
that the american singer Britney Spears is being unfairly treated
with regard to the conservatorship that surrounds her fortune.
That is, although Britney Spears has a fortune, which is
estimated at around 60 million, She doesn't really have access
to that because up until very recently that's been controlled
by her father and this is a kind of an
interesting example because people have begun to agitate around it.
Her fans have been been able to uh started to
agitate around it on the argument that Britney Spears is
being denied her human rights.
Now this is an excellent example of how fandom becomes
political, because in essence, what her supporters are saying is
that we shouldn't view Britney Spears as a celebrity or
a famous singer, someone who is unusual, but as someone
who is suffering from a widespread um political economic blight,
which is the phenomenon of gendered slavery.
The the idea essentially is that Britney Spears is systematically
being forced to work for no money and this represents
a form of modern slavery.
We know that modern slavery is a is a considerable
disturbing new phenomenon in the world, which is often based
on gender.
So, one of the things that we could do is
talk about how people use Britney Spears and follow the
hashtag around her to form a community where they claim
for where they can make calls for equal gender rights,
but why would that matter?
Well, it matters for the following reasons.
Um the engagement with gender is really, really important.
So, the influential news magazine, the economist has recently publicized
research to show that you can basically measure the health
of a democracy in relation to the way it treats
women living in that society.
And that is if you look at so called failed
states, states where violence, corruption, economic instability are running out
of control are making those states essentially ungovernable and making
them fail.
There is a direct correlation between that failure and the
way that those states treat their women.
That there's a direct correlation between the absence of equal
gender rights and state failure.
That there's an absolute correlation between the refusal to grant
generate gender rights and practices of violence, corruption, inequality.
And so somewhere in this, we can see that people
who are fans of Britney Spears are being introduced to
the consequences of economic gendered economic marginalization when thinking about
Britney Spears and this kind of gives them a toehold
into a global defining political problem.
So if you're going to do some kind of fan
research, a really good thing to do is to consider
how finding a particular form of fandom and fan community
that can be connected to global political problems such as
this, but it doesn't just have to be connected to
political problems or political problems in terms of electoral politics.
Another important area of fan research relates to media economies,
and this is represented by the pictures on the right
where we see that actually fans aren't just communities of
people who get together and find their own political voice.
They are also important economic drivers in media economies and
the ability to congregate fan groups and has economic consequences
because fan groups can also be put to work by
various, not only media organizations but leisure organizations.
So we can see here that particularly in the world
of sport, we see the way that the ability to
congregate and draw the attention of fan communities becomes an
important part in maintaining the economic vitality of global sport.
So this is kind of another issue that you could
talk about the importance of fan communities, not just as
places where people play around with people, experiment with identities
and in many ways find their freedom through those identities,
but also places where ordinary people become integrated into media
economies. But at any rate, what we have to do
is we need to develop methods for finding fan communities
and then using those communities to find evidence that these
are places that connect people to politics and the politics