Henry Jenkins's Fandom Theory and Participatory Culture

Consumers - people who sees the particular text as a disposable commodity

Fans - devoted followers of media texts who actively engage with the products to construct their own meanings and interpretations beyond the original message.

Stereotypical fan behaviors: cosplay their favorite characters, write fan fiction, post their own theories online, and form new subcultures based on the product.

Henry Jenkin's Fandom Theory

Suggests that fans play a key role in the media (production, distribution and consumption process)

- Production: fans send or post their feedbacks or suggestions regarding the media text to the producer

- Distribution: fans comment, retweet and share posts about their favorite media texts to increase engagement and encourage other people to consume the text. 

- Consumption/Exhibition: fans consume media text and construct & share their own interpretation of the meaning of the product to other fans.

Productivity in Fandom: 

- Semiotic productivity - Refers to the ability of fans to generate new meanings and interpretations from existing media texts. Fans actively engage with the signs and symbols present in the media they consume and creatively reinterpret them to construct new understandings. 

- Enunciative Productivity - Sharing meanings and ways of talking about the text - ‘fanspeak’ and wearing clothing, hair styling or make-up in a particular way.  

- Textual Productivity (textual poaching) - Fan made texts as sense of ownership of source text. Involves audience taking a media product and remaking it to create their own meaning.

Participatory Culture - a culture in which private individuals (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). Prosumers actively engage with media texts to and produce their own media to share ideas among themselves. 

[ Folk Culture -> Media is produced not to make money but be shared with each other ]

Example: Many YouTubers make YouTube videos not because they want to get in the industry/make money but because they love to make videos and they have stories to tell

Essay (Case Study)

According to Henry Jenkins’s Fandom Theory, fans enjoy media texts so much that they create content based upon the text and form communities around it, which has been made even more possible with the help of technological convergence. The Boys Planet fandom actively participates in the promotion of the show by posting screenshots or clips from the show on social media to attract other fans. Their fans act as textual poachers that can offer new interpretations of the show by creating their own media such as fanfictions of the contestants and fanmade music videos.

Boys Planet created prosumers by involving their audience in the process of choosing the winners. They opened weekly online votings that can be accessed through mobile phones to let viewers choose their favorite contestants.