Completely Uncultured

Bio

Paul Booth is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Technology at DePaul University. In 2009, he received his PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, rooting his dissertation in studies on fandom. His research interests focus on “the intersection of New Media, Technology, Popular Culture, and Cultural Studies” (“Paul Booth”). Booth has published in numerous journals including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Visual Literacy, Narrative Inquiry, Games and Culture, and American Communication Journal.

Summary

In “Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification”, Booth calls for the revision of the traditional understanding of fan culture. Conventionally, researchers have employed a gastronomic metaphor to describe fans’ interaction with texts. Fans consume a text and then respond to it. However, the rise of social media has created the necessity for a new metaphor that sees new media texts as practices rather than as objects (Booth 515). Viewing these texts as such problematizes the economic models previously used when examining fandom and reveals the need for new models that account for variables such as self/identity and relationships in fan communities.

In previous classes, we have talked about de Certeau’s tactical action in which producers of texts strategize ways in which they can guide fans to consume texts. Fans, in turn, can digest a text in this manner and appropriate it to serve functions perhaps unintended by producers. De Certeau refers to this appropriation as fans’ tactical action. Booth argues, though, that social media requires a more complicated theory than de Certeau’s tactical action theory because online communities not only adapt or appropriate a text but they also share, experience, or extend the text together.

Online communities complicate previous conceptions of fandom because social networking allows users to represent themselves in new ways and enables them to collaborate and distribute content in new ways. Before social media, our public display of identity was the visual sense of who we are. Online, Booth says, we are not tied to these restrictions. We can create a mosaic identity made up of fragments of ideals that we hold or messages we want to convey. Social media allows these identities to collect and form communities where they can interact with texts and each other to create new content. These new creations, Booth asserts, fall outside previous conceptions of textual poaching.

Booth continues by showing how MySpace profiles afford users the ability to create a distributed narrative, “a conception of serialized narrative form experienced in discrete units, separated by time and space” (Wheeler qtd. in Booth, 520). Distributed narratives are particularly interesting for Booth because they are fragmented. Such fragmentations encourage an understanding of these narratives as spaces or environments where meanings can be made and new content can be constructed (520).

In dissolving the de Certeauan concept of tactical reading and action, Booth suggests that fans show a new type of textual poaching through narrativized dialogue, through branched narratives, and through fan-created dialogue. Narrativized dialogue requires users to respond to other users thereby creating new relationships and identities (522). Branched narratives occur when fans extend texts outside of traditionally canonical works and allow fans to create new content and tie their own online identities in with that new content (527). Finally, fan-created dialogue combines the two, allowing fans to create communal relationships and a transmediated narrative (529). He uses instances of MySpace to illustrate each.

Analysis

Though I find Booth’s observations to be interesting, I’m not sure what I think about some of his supporting claims. I was confused when, citing Jenkins, Booth claims that youth culture sees online spaces as distinctly separate from other spaces and as spaces where people can have their own identities, but then he follows that by asserting that MySpace can complement real spaces. I understand that online spaces are online and real spaces aren’t but so much of the subject matter for both overlaps. Furthermore, Booth claims that “it is online identity that matters: all virtual personas have equal status” (521), which I cannot agree with.

Discussion Questions

1. How do you view the relationship between online spaces and real spaces? Are they distinct from one another? Are they related? Both?

2. What are your thoughts on Booth’s assertion that online identities have equal status?

Works Cited

Booth, Paul. (2010). Paul Booth. Academia.edu.

Booth, P. (2008). “Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification”. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25, 514-536.