Fan Culture and Media Technology Shift

This year is my fourth year as an international student in Canada, so I’m already familiar with Canadian culture in general. Halloween is a fun holiday in my opinion because in my country we don’t have Halloween. So it is especially kind of interesting experience. This semester, after learning Chapter 8 “Media Fandom and Audience Subcultures” of audience study, I think Halloween can be related to fan culture from my point of view.

Sullivan (2013) states that “the popular culture materials that fans tend to spend their time thinking carefully about are seen by many to be culturally worthless or simply there for entertainment purpose”. For example, during Halloween this year I specifically looked at people who dressed up. I saw some people dress up as classic characters that are in movies and some little children dressed up as fairytale characters. So I guess them dressing up as what they are makes them part of a fandom? One of my friends took almost three days to think of what she should dress up as for Halloween. The reason why I know she took three days to think about is because she asked me almost every day. During Halloween, she finally decided she wanted to dress up like Harley Quinn, which is the movie character from the Suicide Squad movie. Because this year when the movie trailer for Suicide Squad came out, my friend just could not wait to see it and dragged me to accompany her when the movie was finally released. After the movie ended, she told me she liked Harley Quinn so much. I asked her why and she said “she’s so cool, look at her hairstyle one side is pink and another side is blue, also her clothing style is kind of like my ideal clothing style in mind, but I can’t dress up like that in daily life, however, Halloween gives me the chance to dressed up like her”. So I said, “oh, okay then, it’s interesting though”. After Halloween ended, I thought the meaning of Halloween had been shifted. It shifted like becoming more of a fandom thing that people want to represent. Because Halloween is a tradition originated from Celtic harvest festivals that may have pagan roots, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain, and that this festival was Christianized as Halloween, but now it is more towards people dressing up like what fandom they are interested in.

Sullivan (2013) points out “the fan fiction is short stories often feature existing characters from media texts, or are written in the creative universe of the original text”. For example, my friend always likes to write some backstories of characters, or describing encounters between characters that were not seen on the screen. One of the stories that I know she wrote about is a Thailand movie. The name of this movie is The Love of Siam; it’s a romantic movie. In this movie, the two main characters didn’t stay together although they loved each other. So my friend was kind of sad about it, so she wrote a different end for them and posted online in a web fan club. So this leads to my next point, which is media technology shifts.

Sullivan (2013) states “digitalization refers to the standards by which media images and sounds are recorded and transmitted”. In the recent decade, the concept of digitalization has become clearer and is being noticed by audiences. For example, smartphones, tablets, laptops are being used more in the recent decade and replace paper newspapers, paper magazines in gradually because we can see online newspapers, online magazines now. Sullivan (2013) states “ convergence allows media content to be displayed on any number of different devices, but it has also enabled the simple reproduction of these media into computer file formats that can be easily distributed via the Internet, leading to widespread piracy of copyrighted material”. For example, when I work on my assignment with groups, we often use Google doc to edit it, because Google doc allows viewers assess and edit documents at the same time, and you can see the changes literally, also I can access to Google doc on my iPhone or iPad because I don’t bring my laptop everywhere.

Another term that Sullivan addresses is blogs. Sullivan (2013) addresses “blogs are daily or regularly updated online websites that appear in journal format”. But now, it evolves more branches, like Vlogs (Video blogs), Flogs (Fake blogs), Splogs (Spam blogs). For example, one of my friends Steven, he is the food culture club leader at Brock University. He posts Vlogs regularly updated in Chinese social media Wechat.

In conclusion, we are now living in a post-network era. This is an argument from Lotz (2009). I agree with this argument because we are now as active audiences are no longer constrained by network television schedules.