Booth (2008) relates the way fans use MySpace and other social networks to express their fandom to de Certeau’s (1984) concept of reading as poaching. He proposes that the fan can create new narratives from existing texts by creating a new type of identity on MySpace. This is achieved by blending the fans offline identity along with their favourite TV or movie character creating a whole new persona (Booth, 2008, p. 516). The idea behind social networking is that it encourages people with the same interests to become connected through an online medium (eg. MySpace, Facebook).
The Social Network (2010) drew attention to the way people like to interact online by creating their own identities. It is the story of Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard university student who creates the social networking site Facebook. Initially he creates the network only for Harvard students, with the intention of allowing users to talk about college life, see who is single, and express themselves in an online capacity. This network gains so much popularity that he expands it to include more colleges, then more… and more, until eventually anyone (college or no college) at all can join. This shows how much power a single network can have. Today, Facebook boasts more than 500 million active users (Facebook, 2011), cementing its place in today’s modern world.
Large fan communities exist online, collaborating and creating entirely new narratives from the poached source text. For example, Dr Who (2011) is a television series that first aired in 1963 but gained such popularity in the sci-fi community that it now has an enormous world-wide cult following. Fan-Fiction websites cropped up all over the internet which allowed fans to share their own Dr Who stories (A Teaspoon and an Open Mind: A Doctor Who Fan Fiction Archive, 2010). The producers of Dr Who found this fan community a refreshing and untapped resource for writing new episodes, and decided they would produce what some of the fans wrote.
Another form of networking is transmedia - this is when one media text flows into another and may continue doing so endlessly. Disney often does this to appeal to children from every angle possible. Shrek (2001) was originally a motion picture, which has since become available in many different forms such as video games, toys, food, musicals, clothes and comic books (Shrek, 2011), just to name a few.
With high volumes of online participants, the possibilities of networking our own identities, and indeed media networking appear to be infinite. Who knows if we might all become writers of our favourite television series one day?
References
A Teaspoon and an Open Mind: A Doctor Who Fan Fiction Archive, 2010, ‘Stories Updated in the Last 7 Days’, eFiction, viewed 10 May 2011, <http://www.whofic.com/search.php?action=recent>.
Booth, P., 2008, ‘Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification’ in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 25, No. 5, pp. 514-536.
de Certeau, M., 1984, ‘Reading as Poaching’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, University of California Press, Berkley, pp. 165-176.
Dr Who, 2011, television series, BBC, Cardiff, Wales.
Facebook, 2011, ‘Press Room’, viewed 10 May 2011, <http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>.
Shrek, 2001, motion picture, A. Adamson, & V. Jenson, USA.
Shrek, 2011, ‘The Whole Story’, DreamWorks Animation LLC., viewed 10 May 2011, <http://www.shrek.com/>.
The Social Network, 2010, motion picture, D. Fincher, Massachusetts, USA.
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