Pop Culture: The Influence Of Fandom Culture

The presence of fandom culture cannot be denied because according to the book Cultural Economy of Fandom, “fandom is a common feature of the popular culture in industrial societies” (Fiske 1992, 30). Scholars have struggled in assigning a general academic description for fandom. Fiske’s study suggested that fandom has something to do with cultural formations. The idea of relating fandom with cultural formations led Fiske to define the fans or the member of the fandom as productive, active, and participatory. Fandom is usually associated with the cultural taste of the subordinate group that are disempowered by the ruling class in the value system. The process involved in a fandom is similar to the process of production of media texts.

These social formations lead to the union of group of people with the same interests, ways of life, beliefs, and values. The sharing of these peoples’ interest, ways of life, beliefs, and values then leads to the idea of the cultural community. In the context of cultural community, fandom involves cultural works that are based on the fan’s performance that are created and shared with others. These performances are constructed by the norms within the fan culture. The cultural works within the fandom are treated as cultural artifacts that asserted the fan’s identity. “Fans of a popular television series [and/or film] may sample dialogue, summarize episodes, debate subtexts, create original fan fiction, record their own soundtracks, and make their own movies” (Jenkins, 2004, 34). The variety of these media and cultural texts produced and may be produced from the participative fandom culture as a new form of cultural artifacts also contributes to the fan’s

It is a community built out of shared understanding of the media texts and their cultural texts. In a dissertation “Participatory Fandom in American Culture: A Qualitative Case Study of DragonCon Attendees,” fandom was defined as “not solely a private process, rather, a social and public one” (Flemming 2007, 17). The process of building the fandom itself is collective. Almost every fan within the fandom has a significant contribution in creating and utilizing both the media and cultural texts. These are perpetuated to the fans’ culture through their interaction within the fandom’s public and social space. The interactions lead to a common sense of understanding of the fans, a sense of collective consciousness. The manifestation of collectivism within the fandom constitute to the shared understanding building the fandom’s unique cultural community. Furthermore, Zillmann, et al. said that there are social benefits that are acquired by the fans that join a fandom where these benefits involve a feeling of belongingness provided by the sense of amity (as cited in Flemming 2007, 10). The feeling of camaraderie within the fandom constituted to the physical closeness of the fans which was later on transmitted into the virtual realm of the fandom. Meanwhile, this sense of belongingness felt by the members of the fandom is acquired in the process of socializing and spending time both with the