canarytrap.net

This was originally going to be a globalization/delight post, but then I realized that the thing I was going to write about was in fact a great example of a key point from my recent post on Youtube Vloggers as brand ambassadors about how fans are your best intermediaries and translators.

Take, for instance, this amazing post doing side-by-side screencap comparisons of the Japanese drama Hana Yori Dango and the popular US show Gossip Girl:

Title image from Mojo Kingdom's Hana Yori Dango/Gossip Girl post

The entire post consists of dozen of these comparisons (by my rough estimate, totaling some 200+ meticulously captured stills), paired with incisive, witty commentary explaining just how these shows are similar.

What is striking is that the basic plotting, structures, themes, and characterizations in the two shows are not really that similar at all, once you get past the fact that both are about a troupe of obscenely wealthy, good-looking young people doing a lot of improbable things and sometimes attending — but not so much actually learning anything at — their elite private schools. But a fan of both shows is able to pick out the minute (and totally absurd) specifics — like the mean girls’ headband proclivities, shoe-related food drama, the fact that both shows have a psycho girl who likes to roofie people  — to the deeper discourses that resonate between both shows that wouldn’t been picked up by casual viewing. Not only that, this particular fan engaged in an incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive feat in order to share of of this in an effort to recruit more fans.

There’s a good chance that Gossip Girl producers would never have known about Hana Yori Dango fans, let alone anticipated them as potential fans for their own show. The same goes for the producers of Hana Yori Dango. But a quick glance at the comments show a number fans of one show vowing to start watching the other. In other words, because this particular fan understood both the shows and their audiences and the nature of how they engaged as fans, she was able to scaffold interest across the two groups by appropriating and reframing content from the shows.

The lesson learned here is a fairly simple one: give you fans the tools — access to content to remix and reuse — and they will help grow and spread your property into communities and audiences that you had never anticipated.

I’ve been a somewhat inconsistent updater since I started this blog and this is due almost entirely to the research vortex that has consumed my life, which is more commonly known as my MIT master’s thesis. As some of you may (or may not) know, a significant portion of my energies right now are devoted to project that looks at the circulation of Japanese and Korean dramas through fan-organized (and frequently unauthorized) channels as a way to talk about trends in globalization, the transnational movement of media, and emergent forms of audienceship and participatory practice.

I will be presenting some of the work very soon, both at a CMS internal review, and at Media in Transition 6. While a lot of the work may be a little too involved and theoretical to be of immediate use to most, I’m putting the abstract here in case anyone is interested.

It is commonly accepted that media and communication technologies play one of the most pivotal roles in the complex system of practices and developments broadly termed “globalization.” Similarly, the increasing speed, volume, and scale of transnational circulation has been one of the most dramatic shifts in the media landscape, creating what Appadurai has dubbed global “mediascapes” that are reshaping the way we understand audiences and cultural formation. While the rise of massive global commercial media enterprises lead to renewed vigor around discussions of the dominance of the “West” upon the “Rest,” the increasing portability, transmitability, and reproducibility of media has helped to generate a grassroots globalization often discussed in terms of diasporic media audiences and all the ways, formal and informal, authorized and unauthorized, that migrant populations circulate and engage with media from the “homeland,” create deterritorialized social imaginaries that transcend national boundaries and form complex hybrid cultural identities.
However, with the emergence of internet technologies and increasing participatory audience practices online, these mediascapes have now become networked. Increasingly, individuals are radically participating and collaborating in the selection, (re)production, and circulation of texts and images that shape the very social imaginaries they inhabit, making them not only collective, but collaborative, and opening the space up to greater range of motivations and practice that can no longer be sufficiently described using old models of diaspora or imperialism. How the increased visibility and complexity of transnational media flows and the audience practices around them complicate the models of diaspora and globalism. What new (hybrid) models emerge when we take into consideration the interplay between diasporic communities and fan communities and how do the circulation and consumption practices afforded by new media technologies inform, and can in turn be informed by, the conditions of diasporic media audienceship?

In examining the flourishing online fandom around the circulation of East Asian television drama, we may begin to address some of these questions. While more traditional channels of distribution targeting diasporic audiences are floundering, the popularity of these dramas through unauthorized fan networks has grown exponentially. Rather than filtering content based on a strictly diasporic audience target, these communities are formed around the content itself rather than a pre-determined motivation and are involved in every step of the distribution process, from subtitling and selecting content to the speed or torrent downloads and promotion. Within this space, a diverse range of audience conditions and practice — diasporic populations, fans, pop cosmopolitans — come into contact with one another simultaneously shape the types of content available which, in turn, shape the “community of sentiment” they inhabit. What results is a mash of hybrids that, rather than signaling a sort of unproblematic fusion, maintains the productive tensions and contentions, creating more amorphous, conflicted, complex systems of identity and community formation.

My purpose is not to undermine the significance of historical conditions in relation to media and cultural consumption, nor to replace discourses of diaspora and media globalization, but rather to ask how other models of participation and fandom might intervene and aid in describing audience practices that do not so neatly fit within any pregiven category or single axis of identity. From there we may begin to map some of complex social, technological, and textual entanglements of cultural negotiation in an increasingly global media age.