FANDOM AND BEYOND: ONLINE COMMUNITY, CULTURE, AND KEVIN SMITH FANDOM Tom Phillips Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia School of Film, Television and Media Studies 2013 ©This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that no quotation from the thesis, nor any information derived therefrom, may be published without the author’s prior, written consent. Abstract Fan studies literature has frequently been pervaded by the prevailing assumptions of what constitutes “fans” and their associated activities: fan art or fantext, cosplay, conjecture, activism – the things that fans supposedly do by definition – are those to which scholarly attention has most been paid. Yet the assumption that fandom can be defined by such explicit practices can be dangerous because of the subjective nature of respective fan cultures. Presenting a fan culture that questions the “assumed” nature of fandom and fan practices, this thesis is an examination of the fans of filmmaker and comedian Kevin Smith, investigating the ways in which community members negotiate and categorise their fandom and relationships with both each other and a communicative, media-literate producer. Since 1995, the View Askew Message Board has provided a dialogical, communicative platform for fans of Kevin Smith to define themselves as a collective group – or more frequently – a community. Through autoethnographic discussion, as well as qualitative research conducted both online and in person, this examination of users of the Board considers the nature of audience-producer relations, the intersection between on- and offline fannish and communal practices, and the extent to which the identity of “Kevin Smith fan” can be attributed within alternate contexts of fan productivity and (non) communal practice. Contextualised by ongoing scholar-fan debate (Hills 2002; Gray et al. 2011), this thesis interrogates notions of fan practice, community, and classification, proposing further methodological and ethical considerations of the research of both explicit and implicit “fannish” practices. Through a netnographic framework (Kozinets 2010), this thesis is able to present a participatory approach to the study of online cultures, looking at how producer and fans simultaneously inhabit and inform the same cultural sphere, and how such practices help to inform a community’s perception of their own fan culture. Table of Contents i List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgements Introduction 7 Fans and Fan Practice 9 (Online) Interaction and Community 15 Methodology 22 Research Ethics 28 Scholar-fandom 39 Methodological Process 52 Thesis Outline Section One: Experiential Contexts of Practice 60 Chapter One: Mutual Affirmation 61 Smith and Board Functionality 70 “Personal” Interaction 73 Fandom Between Friends? 83 Chapter Two: History as Semiotic Resource 84 “Historical” Cultural Capital 91 Academic Influence, Acafan Entrée, and Fan Response 96 “History”, Subjectivity, and Cumulative Knowledge 105 Chapter Three: Regularity and Computer-Mediated-Communication 106 The Normalisation of CMC 111 Social Enunciativity 115 Social Network Sites: Public/Private 121 Chapter Four: Acquiescence to Producorial Power 122 Producorial Authority and Ownership 127 Constraining Textual Productivity 131 “Official” Fan Space, Emotion and Entitlement 137 Conclusion Section Two: Offline Backchannelling 144 Chapter Five: Offline Activities 145 Research and Sociality 148 Cult Geographies 154 Offline Activities as Semiotic Productivity 159 Offline Activities as Textual Productivity 163 Offline Sociality and Communal Cultural Commodity 173 Chapter Six: Social “Community”/Social “Family” 174 Conceptions of Community 179 Fan “Family” 184 Extension of Networks 191 Conclusion Section Three: Fan Taxonomies 198 Chapter Seven: Binaries and Hierarchies of Fan Activity 205 Feelings of Inclusion and Exclusion 211 Anti-Social Fandom 215 “Casual” Fandom 221 Boardies, Consumers, and “Kevin Smith Fans” 227 Conclusion Conclusion: An Askew View? 233 Feedback: Ethical and Methodological Considerations 243 The Emergency Backup Board: Penitence 254 The Emergency Backup Board: Resistance 260 Beyond Fandom? 263 Appendices 270 Bibliography i List of Illustrations Figure 1: ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Figure 2: The stages of netnography. Figure 3: The “Askew Auteur” webpage logo. Figure 4: Weekly responses to the survey. Figure 5: Age of survey respondents. Figure 6: Year of respondent Board registration. Figure 7: The ViewAskew.com homepage, c.1995. Figure 8: The White Board. Figure 9: Funployee109’s ‘favorite Board moment of all time’. Figure 10: Mutual affirmation between Boardies as Fans and Smith as the Fan Object. Figure 11: The View Askew Board logo Figure 12: Explicit celebration of Board history and “drama”. Figure 13: Photo opportunities at Jack’s Music Shoppe. Figure 14: Outside the Marina Diner. Figure 15: Ignoring passing traffic from the car park of Spirits Unlimited. Figure 16: Arriving in Red Bank, March 2004. Figure 17: Alone outside the Quick Stop, March 2004. Figure 18: Boardies together outside the Quick Stop, August 2010. Figure 19: Walt Flanagan as the “Egg man” in Clerks and recreating the moment in the Quick Stop chiller section, August 2010. Figure 20: Jay and Silent Bob outside RST Video in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and KTCV and Silent Bunny pose in a similar fashion. Figure 21: The View Askew Street Hockey League logo. Figure 22: The On- and Offline Sociality Cycle. Figure 23: Meeting Kevin Smith and building fan social capital. Figure 24: Bryan opting to take photographs for others at the Quick Stop, rather than be part of group shots, August 2010. Figure 25: Locked subforums on the Board. Figure 26: The active Board frontpage in 2011. Figure 27: The dormant Board in 2013. ii Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the support and input of members of the View Askew Message Board. I am indebted to all those that participated in my research (and some who didn’t)! Thank you for giving me your time. I owe a great deal to the supportive structure of the School of Film, Television and Media Studies, for the research and teaching culture throughout years of under- and postgraduate study has fuelled my passion for academia. A special mention must go to my thesis supervisors Brett Mills and Keith Johnston: ready to lend a supportive ear or a kick up the backside depending on the circumstance, their advice was always valued and very welcomed. Many thanks to Daithí Mac Síthigh, Mark Rimmer, and John Street for their support and understanding during the final months of writing. Thank you also to my external examiners, Matt Hills and Natasha Whiteman, for a rigorous, thoughtful, and enjoyable examination process. I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their financial support via a Block Grant, as well as the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Graduate School for part-funding my research trip to Red Bank. I am enormously grateful to the friends (and “work colleagues”) who, in putting up with me, have made the time spent studying immensely enjoyable. Thank you to Hannah Ellison, Melanie Kennedy, Richard McCulloch, Liz Powell, Rhys Thomas, and Helen Warner. I’d like to thank my family, in particular my parents Neil and Sue Phillips, for their support (both moral and financial). Finally, thank you to Claire Allerton, iii who has supported me in every way possible. For that, and so much more, I dedicate this thesis to her. 1 Introduction Beyond Fandom and Fan Practice? During the 2012 event “Popular Media Cultures: Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines”,1 Henry Jenkins presented his paper ‘Beyond Poaching: From Resistant Audiences to Fan Activism’, a discussion on how fan activism as participatory practice could draw on older debates on fan cultures’ ability to incite “real change”. During the talk, Jenkins made reference to the “1992 moment” in fandom scholarship, the year when a number of significant works in the field were published that ‘set the stage for more than a decade of fan … studies’ (Busse and Hellekson 2006: 19). Since that time, citing Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women, and/or Lisa Lewis’ collection The Adoring Audience has seemingly been a matter of course in academic practice, as these works have collectively (albeit justly) shaped the nature of fan studies scholarship. The importance of the “1992 moment” means that frequently studies of fandom open with an account of their relation to these texts – Textual Poachers in particular (Hills 2002; Sandvoss 2005; Hellekson and Busse 2006; Booth 2010) – and the irony of doing the same here is not lost. The title of Jenkins’ 2012 work – ‘Beyond Poaching’ – suggests that a re-evaluation, or at the very least a re-contextualisation, of the “1992 moment” is perhaps warranted. Bertha Chin, for example, begins her 2010 PhD thesis with a suggestion that the work of Jenkins and Bacon-Smith is too narrow for 1 Hosted by the Centre for Cultural and Creative Research, University of Portsmouth, and held at Odeon Cinema, Covent Garden, London 19/05/12. 2 the parameters of her study, conceiving of fans as “gifters” rather than “poachers”. Yet what is clear is that studies that place themselves in relation to practices of poachers frequently do so to build, rather than refute, Jenkins’ work, such as Matt Hills’ notion of the “pre-textual poaching” of Doctor Who spoiler fans (2010: 72). Even with cultural changes such as the proliferation of online fandom prompting a shift from a “weekend-only world” (Jenkins 1992: 287) to one of everyday routine (Théberge 2005), the discursive mantras of fan studies appear to place textual poaching – or at least some form of fan practice involving the text – as a default position. For example, Susan Clerc notes: … although [computer-mediated-communication] has increased the amount of contact between fans and producers, it has not changed the essence of fan activities.