Lizy's Project Proposal about S.H.I.E.L.D.

Title: (Currently) Marvel's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." as an Emerging Fandom: A Study in Fan Culture.

Thesis: Marvel's new television series "Agents of SHIELD" will succeed based on how it is projected through online media by digital fan communities.  Digital fan communities help fans navigate their immersion in a fandom to find meanings within their entertainment through online discussion and remixed content.  Fandoms grow better when their fans share content with their friends.  Dr. Wickman suggested I look at the scholarship on immersion and see how it compares to what I am seeing in fan culture.

Relevance:  Marvel's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is only in its first season.  In terms of both its episodes and its relationship with the fans, it has been dynamic.  It is part of the larger Avengers and Marvel fandom and one of the show's main producers is cult favorite Joss Whedon.  If there was any time to examine a possible fandom in the act of forming, this is the moment.  There is a lot of potential for the show and a lot of tension in the fan community.

Format:  I am thinking a formal essay, except maybe with picture snapshots of twitter and facebook posts.  Maybe I could go multimedia--not for the formal paper but the final blog post or something.

Curation of Content:  I started snipping pictures of Facebook and Twitter posts over break.  It will keep up.  I am also accumulating reviews of the show and fandom articles on Zotero.

Curation of Secondary Sources: I have read/am reading books about the Star Trek and Dr. Who fandoms.  I also have a few scholarly articles which I have curated via Google Docs and Zotero (I got it for Dr. Burton's Shakespeare Class--it's awesome!)

Curation of Community: I am following SHIELD fan sites on Twitter, the Helicarrier podcast and Agent Coulson's Army, and they in return are following me.  I am being followed by PhantasticGeek on Twitter. I follow the official SHIELD sites on Twitter and Facebook and most of the show's actors on Twitter.

Social Proof:  I normally watch SHIELD with my roommates and one or two friends, so I can talk to them about it.  I also have a guy friend CJ in the medieval club who likes the show (I mean, a lot of clubbies like the show, but CJ especially).  And then I am in contact with Jason Hamilton who is an expert on fandoms in general.
People I don't know directly:  I exchanged emails with I also tweeted the author of a Buzzfeed article about the Marvel Cinematic Universe's big impact on Hollywood.

Venue:  
So I just found this huge blog page about scholarly blogs and journals devoted to fandom studies.  Here is the link if my classmates or other interested parties want it: http://fanstudies.wordpress.com/fan-studies-journals/

Of the ones listed above, I want to submit to Participations, which is a journal of audience reception studies. Their organization exists because (quote from website) "we recognise that these fields are not at present well-supported within the broad academic communities. There are few undergraduate courses and even fewer postgraduate courses which emphasise this work. Only a small number of research students work in this area, compared to other kinds of work on all the many forms of cultural and media expression. Yet we believe that the findings of audience and reception work are of crucial importance to all our fields – not least because claims about the audience are so frequently embedded within other kinds of work, and within public discourses about media and culture."  

So it sounds like mine is the kind of paper they are looking for.
I would also like to submit to Transformative Works and Cultures, since it deals more specifically with fandoms.
The real challenge I am setting for myself is The Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television, which is published by Liverpool University Press IN THE UK!!!!!!!  More likely than not, if I got accepted to a conference they put on I'd have to do a video conference, but hey, it would still be cool.  The guidelines say I have to use UK grammar and spelling and also use specific citations for TV shows and actors.  My response:

self-generated meme.

What I need to do next:

Go through the Dr. Who fandom book I read over the break and comb for quotes.
Create an orderly history of FB comments and twitter quotes (also block out names).
Listen to the Helicarrier podcast
Post link to this blog and "Tweethis" statement to social media sites.  Ask fans about their views of fandom and S.H.I.E.L.D.
Start writing out the paper
Curate fan art and memes specifically related to SHIELD.
FIND SCHOLARLY ARTICLES ABOUT:
humor
fandoms and immersion
FIND SCHOLARLY ARTICLES BY:
Henry Jenkins
Cheryl Harris
get fandom books renewed at library
Find more recent SHIELD reviews

Copyright Infringement Hits Close to Home

This is going to get very personal. 

So, around thirteen years ago, right after Pixar's Toy Story 2 came out,  Disney and Pixar came out with a 2D animated television show called Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. It showed on ABC's One Saturday Morning alongside Recess  and Fillmore.  It followed the adventures of a version of Buzz Lightyear that the toy in the Toy Story films is supposedly based on. I wasn't much of a Toy Story fan, I'll admit, but I fell in love with the show.  Deeply.  It was funny and cool to watch. My brothers loved it, and I remember my mother telling me about how she came home from work late one night and stayed up late with my babysitter just to watch it Buzz Lightyear.

But, like all good TV shows of my childhood, Buzz Lightyear eventually stopped airing.  All my family had left were the direct-to-video premire and a few tapes of the Saturday morning show, but gradually we forgot about them and lost interest.  The only show that got remotely close was Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but then Disney bought Lucasfilm and canceled that too--and rumor on the street is it ended on a cliffhanger.

self-generated meme

Then last year, feeling a need to reconnect with my childhood (another long story),  I looked up the show on YouTube.  The best resource I found was a YouTube channel called Radio Free Planet Z (reference to Zurg's headquarters in the TV show), which featured the entire series premire and whole episodes in single youtube blocks, mostly recorded off the British Disney channel Cinemagic.  Let me tell you, that was a glorious, albeit indulgent, summer.  And not only did I find episodes I was familiar with but also episodes and plots that I had never been aware of. (And my mom was very excited)

This past summer, I wanted to introduce my roommate to the show because, for crying out loud, it's awesome, and this is what I found:

 YouTube account RadioFreePlanetZ has been terminated because we received multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement from claimants including:

• Disney

I swallowed it.  Sure, I knew the episodes had been ripped off of old television recordings, I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but it stank that I had lost access to a precious resource that gave me access to childhood memories and that I was able to share with friends and family.

But as we have begun talking about copyright in our Digital Culture class, I have realized something.  Disney has not come out with the episodes on DVD.  If they did not make Buzz Lightyear available for fans publicly--in fact, there are a lot of classic TV shows that aren't available publicly--what did they expect us to do if we wanted to watch it?

I think this brings up an interesting point about copyright.  If people care enough about something that isn't available to them, they will make it available for themselves and for other people who want it.  And for free.  If Disney doesn't care about its old animated TV shows anymore, why doesn't it release them for sale, or for free even, instead of blocking people on YouTube who are trying to do the world a favor.  On Radio Free Planet Z's site,  there were a lot of comments from people like me who watched this show growing up and loved it.  They appreciated the poster's efforts to make this available. I posted pictures from the show from my facebook profile, and people told me--former roommates, cousins, less-than-intimate-acquaintances--how much they'd loved that show growing up.  If Disney cares so much about making childhood memories, why must it dictate what we ought to cherish and how?  It wasn't earning money from that channel but it wasn't losing money, either?  I am sure the company had good reasons to take it down, but it was a big letdown for people who, like myself, gradually came to depend on it for a small, 20 min+ dose of happiness. 

That's my beef on copyright.  Having finished composing this, I feel more angry than sad. And if you don't understand my angst, here is a video of the lyrics to "Those Were the Days" sung by Mary Hopkins.