Henry Jenkins: Fandom

Fanatic: a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal - shortened to fan.

·         Hard core fan: identify themselves as the ‘insiders’ within any given fandom and consider themselves to be aficionados of their chosen media text. They spend a lot of time and often money in becoming hard core fans. They take pride in how long they have been a fan and also the quantity and quality of the knowledge they have amassed whilst being a fan.

·         Newbies: new fans of any given text and do not have the longevity of devotion or depth of knowledge that hard core fans have and are initially viewed as the ‘outgroup’ within fandoms.

·         Anti-fans: those which identify themselves with media texts but negatively so; they loathe or hate the text but unlike ‘true’ fans they do not form their relationship with a text through close readings, they develop their emotional attachment ‘at a distance’ (Gray) through marketing publicity such as trailers. Hills argues that the ‘anti-fan’ seems to be a negative stereotype of a text or genre such as ‘all people who watch chick flicks are dim’ or ‘people who watch horror must be sick in the head’.

Fandoms exhibit a ‘passion that binds enthusiasts in the manner of people who share a secret — this secret just happens to be shared with millions of others.’ Fandoms are subcultures within which fans experience and share a sense of camaraderie with each other and engage in particular practices of their given fandom. Fandoms can be narrowly defined and can focus on something like an individual celebrity, or be more widely defined, encompassing entire hobbies, genres or fashions.


Bordieu argues a kind of ‘cultural capital’ which confers a symbolic power and status for the fan, especially within the realm of their fandom.

Fans use the original media texts and get creative and innovative with the material. Crawford suggests that it is this which distinguishes fans from ordinary consumers. They engage in diverse activities such as ‘the production of websites, mods and hacks, private servers, game guides, walkthroughs and FAQs, fan fiction and forms of fan art, fan vids’ all of which have been aided by digital technology. Digital fandoms use technology in multiple ways and Fiske sees this as the ‘cultural economy’ of fandoms, one that is focused not on making money but on expressing the complex ideas and value systems behind fandoms.