A thesis is like a scientific equation. You need certain elements to come together to create a certain product. I am not entirely sure what the final product is going to be. But I am now going to take this opportunity to lay out my ingredients on the table to see what I have and will likely end up with. This is not my final thesis and venue, but just me thinking through my ideas. Lots of feedback would be welcome.
I want to somehow respond to my ideas on immersion from the midterm. A good secondary term for immersion is engagement. Using the terms more or less interchangeably, I define an individual's engagement or immersion within a fandom as a relationship with a fandom with the end goal of promoting a change change of value within the fandom, either for oneself or for the fan community. Open immersion adheres to the values of the fan community and compromises with them to create value. Closed immersion is only interested in the individual's veiw of how a fandom/fans should exist or behave and seeks to tear them down.
I also want to return to the idea of memes. A fandom is a meme or contagious idea, as are the social morays within them. Cultures have their own distinctive symbols, such as the harpoon or the line to Moby Dick's whalers, or Captain America's shield in the Avengers films. Like these more physical symbols, there are also internal ideas that spread and change within a culture, like a whaling captain's responsibility to his crew or, to use an Avengers example, "COULSON LIVES!" It can be as simple as a joke or a motto, or as complex as a value judgment about a certain topic delivered by a community or an individual. I want to understand how memes spreading within a fan community are a manifestation of people working together to add meaning to a fandom and pass judgment on media. Thus,the people create the fandom and not just the entertainment industry. (hmm, nice ring to that). Memes are a product of fan immersion.
The 19th-century whaling industry depicted in Moby Dick is its own culture and, in a way, a fandom, at least the way Ishmael regards it and the way Ahab works within it. The difference between Ishmael and Ahab, as I pointed out in my midterm, is that one is openly immersed and the other is closed. "Where Ahab errs, it seems clear, is in sacrificing others to his egocentric interpretation of reality[....] Disvaluing speech with other men in his desire for a dialogue with speechless nature, Ahab inevitably experiences the isolation that lack of communication and lack of community entail" (Barnett 148). Ahab closes himself off from all other interpretations of the White Whale than his own--human, natural, and supernatural--and charts his course of revenge accordingly. The closed fan only interprets his fandom his own way and only opens himself to people or media that value his fandom the way he does. Likewise the media producers that ignore the needs and desires of consumers are unable to sell their product or ignore larger opportunities for profit. From my reading of the Star Trek Fan Phenomena, what made the difference between Star Trek being a failed TV show and the vibrant fan community it is today were the fans who incessantly clamored the TV networks for a continuation of the show--and that in the days when the internet itself was still the stuff of science fiction. The digital age has turned fandoms into a force to be reckoned with.
An open fan, however, is a breeding ground for memes, or in other words values other people's ideas about the value of a fandom and adds them to his own. Ishmael is symbolic of this type of fan.
"Ishmael [...] is purged of his antisocial feelings by his commitment to Queequeg and then [...]to humanity in general. Intellectually saved by repudiating the narrowed perspective of Ahab's quest, and then physically saved by the caring of others, he is returned to a society whose common totems [...] he now willingly embraces" (147).
To put it more simply, Ishmael's experience in whaling culture re-fits him for life in human society in general. A fan finds meaning and values within their fandom that they apply to real life and not just their narrow-minded quest for satisfaction. Solidarity with fellow fans produces real-life relationships. Fandom does not exist just for the sake of the entertainment but for the sake of well-being, not just for the individual but for the community.
My guinea pig for this project will be Marvel's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." This is a brand new TV show that is linked to a fandom (ie Marvel's Avengers) that is currently enjoying enormous success, although the show itself is currently received with mixed reviews. I will be examining the success or failure of SHIELD's introduction to fans as a new fandom of its own and within the context of the Avengers fandom, and compare this to fandom evolution in general. I will also trace the fan responses to the show before it premiered, during the first few weeks, and also the last three or more weeks, between which periods there has been an interesting change in fans' reception to the series. In other words, how are we seeing the SHIELD fandom being created and adding to the Marvel fan universe?
I am not sure where I would want to submit my paper as of right now, but I would like to submit it to some conference or journal dealing with media or entertainment studies or pop culture/fan culture studies. I also want this research project to be of benefit to the people who are actually producing the show. I admit, trying to give Joss Whedon a report about himself sounds like preaching to the choir--but I want to demonstrate my engagement with SHIELD by trying to produce something that could represent a unique form of feedback to the industry about how their product is working and why--in other words, to point out that we are perhaps experiencing a unique phenomenon in the history of fandom. Heck, if I wanted to I could present this at LTUE or a comic-con next year.
The results of this survey (in other terms, after doing a lot of thinking):
fandoms (Marvel (SHIELD))+memes+fan immersion=a unique phenomenon
argument: The Marvel fandom has the power to make or break the show's success because (1) the Marvel films and characters have a lot of value to the fans, particularly Coulson, (2) the fans are working together to derive value from watching the show, (3) and at a certain threshold of involvement, they will either express common approval or disapproval of the show that will make or break it.
Then, add something that people in the higher tiers of academia or the industry don't know: Tell you what, I'm going to sleep on that. The fans create the fandom. Give them stuff to build with. How about that? I'll post my final thesis/venue/other main ideas tomorrow or Monday. I have a headache. And the hiccups. Bedtime. zzzzz.
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