A Brief Guide to Trek-ing Out your Fan experience
"What's the deal with micro-blog fan fiction?"
- @SeinfeldStories
Odds are, you read the above quote in comedian Jerry Seinfeld's familiar voice, even though he never once spoke it. It's because it shares the same form as the often parodied joke "What's the deal with airplane food," or some variation, that Seinfeld became so well known for, especially through his television show (which he co-created with Larry David), Seinfeld. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and television shows like Seinfeld have certainly been the recipients of a lot of flattery throughout the years from fan fiction sources. In the digital age, this ability to imitate for the benefit of the self and other fans becomes easier due to the wide audience available online, a factor of Murray's participatory affordance of digital media (as I will discuss later). Henry Jenkins puts this best when he says, "As fandom diversifies, it move from cult status towards the cultural mainstream, with more Internet users engaged in some sort of fan activity," (161). The author of Seinfeld Stories, a Twitter account that continues to expand the fictional world of Seinfeld beyond the 180 episode, nine season canon that aired in the late 80s and through most of the 90s, is a prime example of one such engaged Internet user. He gracefully utilizes the serial nature of both television programs and Twitter posts in tandem to create a fresh, new experience that accurately continues on the legacy of a fan followed universe. Following in the footsteps of this particular user, other fans have created their own Twitter accounts to expand their own favorite television worlds. One such expanded domain is that the Star Trek universe. My goal for this particular project was to observe several of these Star Trek accounts and see if I could, in turn, create my own universe-expanding fan content; I intent to find out what the deal with micro-blog fan fiction really is.
I decided to begin my fan fiction quest by admiring some of the classics in Star Trek Twitter parodies. Each of these accounts, the only accounts followed by my new Twitter account, follow in the tradition of Seinfeld Stories in that they take the existing structures and standard operations of the various Star Trek series and further them or parody them directly. These fans create these variations on Star Trek themes to express their love for the quirky nature of some aspects of the Star Trek universe (the old days of TOS, or perhaps a few habits of TNG that didn't age well) while simultaneously expressing their playful disdain of other qualities (throw away episodes of VOY, or ENT entirely). This is what fans do in all forms of fan fiction, after all, usually. As I studied several writers' accounts, I reinforced my own opinions and ideas about how to proceed with my own version of fan fiction. Following in the Twitter tradition, I retweeted the best plots I could find and favorited the best of the best in order to create a collection that represented my goal for my successful execution of the creative portion of the project. Beyond this database, I created about 30 of my own scenarios, under the name of Never Seen Star Trek, that placed the crews of the five Star Trek series (The Original Series [TOS], The Next Generation [TNG], Deep Space Nine [DS9], Voyager [VOY], and Enterprise [ENT]) in situations that varied from farcical to events that realistically could have been actual episodes. As I wrote, my motivations were more selfish than I had expected. I wrote what I found funny. I wrote to challenge notions I had picked up after watching, over the years, the various incarnations of Star Trek itself. I wrote without thinking (too much) of the masses or of the database that I had amassed. Since much of fan fiction seems to start from these roots (write what you know), I felt that I was on the right track, creativity wise.
Having grown up with computers, or so I like to claim, this sort of creation came naturally to me. Therefore, I was a part of, rather than aware of, what Jenkins calls the "epistemological turning point in the development of collective intelligence" that was brought about by the introduction of high speed computers (160). I've never had trouble finding fan fiction because it was always available in some form online, usually in a form that outdated zines and multinational chatrooms (Jenkins 162). Am I, then, even able to judge this project a success or a failure if I do not completely have an unbiased mindset to view it from? I was entertained by my hypothetical Trek plots, but I feel that the point of my efforts was to comprehend the nature of fan fiction culture, and I can only assume, rather than say so for sure, that I did achieve this after my various 140 characters settled. I can appreciate what the Twitter medium did for my ideas: it made me focus them into a small amount of word space, it made me aware that literally anyone, hypothetically, could view them and reproduce (retweet) them which aligns with Murray's assessment that "Media now appears to us as something to be cut, pasted, reassembled, and distributed with ease," (Murray 57-58). For this reason, I believe I learned more about the participatory affordance of digital media rather than about fandom, meaning that, to an extent, this project was at least a partial failure.
Though the participatory affordance that I claim to have learned about is more due to digital media's programming and computational foundations, the fractal nature of digital media allows for this, as well as other affordances, to be granted at the varying levels of interaction with the media (Murray 55). While the "actions of humans and machines" were already made "meaningful to one another" by the back end programmers, my task was to properly create my Star Trek plots in order to facilitate participation outward from the front side of the Twitter platform (Murray 55). I had to be aware that what I wrote had to be something that could in turn be utilized or interacted with by any number of fellow Internet users (or Twitter bots). The universal factor that assisted me in this journey towards precipitating participation within my chosen fandom, despite the somewhat serious nature of this project, was comedy. Though, sadly, after several days, I have received zero retweets and zero followers (minus my personal account's wonderful patronage and fortuitous followings from two #dmcult classmates), I do not feel it would be prudent to label this aspect of the project a failure due to the relatively large size of the Twitter community. My short form fan fiction is but a drop in the ocean of participation, especially since so many parody accounts and fan fiction accounts already exist. Jenkins may call the Internet "a powerful distribution tool," but it is quite apparent to me, due to my account's apparent lack of visibility, that the World Wide Web can only become such a tool when users fully embrace the participatory affordance of the digital medium (163).
On an ironic note (comedy, again), I found it comical that I found myself performing actions that both aligned with and clashed with a "key task" that Murray mentions with regard to the participatory affordance of digital media. She says that "information designers," like myself, the head producer of my own fan fiction Twitter account, desire to "satisfy increasing demand for access to media while preserving the property rights of those who create media artifacts," (Murray 58). Perhaps, then, I do understand fandom a bit more now. In a digital age, fan created fiction is a paradox of participatory culture. It is a delicate balance of give and take, though not in the manner designers of digital media may have wanted it to be, in theory, at the inception of the medium. It's the risk of getting caught by the original creators, perhaps, that drives the fans' creation and expansion of the universe that their fandom calls home. It is clear to me now, more than it was before, that "new technologies [break] down old barriers between media consumption and media production," in order to facilitate the spreading of old culture (the source material for fan fiction) with the vehicle of new culture (the fan fiction itself) (Jenkins 167). Moreover, I feel compelled, as Jenkins (in more academic terms) predicts many fans would, to create more fan fiction, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no fan fiction blogger has gone before (166). Because of this, I gladly declare this project a success on most fronts and hope that suit may not be brought against me. I'm sure even Gene Roddenberry would smirk at a few of my created scenarios, but that may not protect me from copyright lawyers.
Works Cited
Jenkins, Henry. "Interactive Audiences?" The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. Suffolk, England: St Edmundsburry Press, 2002. 157-170.
Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011.
- @SeinfeldStories
Odds are, you read the above quote in comedian Jerry Seinfeld's familiar voice, even though he never once spoke it. It's because it shares the same form as the often parodied joke "What's the deal with airplane food," or some variation, that Seinfeld became so well known for, especially through his television show (which he co-created with Larry David), Seinfeld. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and television shows like Seinfeld have certainly been the recipients of a lot of flattery throughout the years from fan fiction sources. In the digital age, this ability to imitate for the benefit of the self and other fans becomes easier due to the wide audience available online, a factor of Murray's participatory affordance of digital media (as I will discuss later). Henry Jenkins puts this best when he says, "As fandom diversifies, it move from cult status towards the cultural mainstream, with more Internet users engaged in some sort of fan activity," (161). The author of Seinfeld Stories, a Twitter account that continues to expand the fictional world of Seinfeld beyond the 180 episode, nine season canon that aired in the late 80s and through most of the 90s, is a prime example of one such engaged Internet user. He gracefully utilizes the serial nature of both television programs and Twitter posts in tandem to create a fresh, new experience that accurately continues on the legacy of a fan followed universe. Following in the footsteps of this particular user, other fans have created their own Twitter accounts to expand their own favorite television worlds. One such expanded domain is that the Star Trek universe. My goal for this particular project was to observe several of these Star Trek accounts and see if I could, in turn, create my own universe-expanding fan content; I intent to find out what the deal with micro-blog fan fiction really is.
I decided to begin my fan fiction quest by admiring some of the classics in Star Trek Twitter parodies. Each of these accounts, the only accounts followed by my new Twitter account, follow in the tradition of Seinfeld Stories in that they take the existing structures and standard operations of the various Star Trek series and further them or parody them directly. These fans create these variations on Star Trek themes to express their love for the quirky nature of some aspects of the Star Trek universe (the old days of TOS, or perhaps a few habits of TNG that didn't age well) while simultaneously expressing their playful disdain of other qualities (throw away episodes of VOY, or ENT entirely). This is what fans do in all forms of fan fiction, after all, usually. As I studied several writers' accounts, I reinforced my own opinions and ideas about how to proceed with my own version of fan fiction. Following in the Twitter tradition, I retweeted the best plots I could find and favorited the best of the best in order to create a collection that represented my goal for my successful execution of the creative portion of the project. Beyond this database, I created about 30 of my own scenarios, under the name of Never Seen Star Trek, that placed the crews of the five Star Trek series (The Original Series [TOS], The Next Generation [TNG], Deep Space Nine [DS9], Voyager [VOY], and Enterprise [ENT]) in situations that varied from farcical to events that realistically could have been actual episodes. As I wrote, my motivations were more selfish than I had expected. I wrote what I found funny. I wrote to challenge notions I had picked up after watching, over the years, the various incarnations of Star Trek itself. I wrote without thinking (too much) of the masses or of the database that I had amassed. Since much of fan fiction seems to start from these roots (write what you know), I felt that I was on the right track, creativity wise.
Having grown up with computers, or so I like to claim, this sort of creation came naturally to me. Therefore, I was a part of, rather than aware of, what Jenkins calls the "epistemological turning point in the development of collective intelligence" that was brought about by the introduction of high speed computers (160). I've never had trouble finding fan fiction because it was always available in some form online, usually in a form that outdated zines and multinational chatrooms (Jenkins 162). Am I, then, even able to judge this project a success or a failure if I do not completely have an unbiased mindset to view it from? I was entertained by my hypothetical Trek plots, but I feel that the point of my efforts was to comprehend the nature of fan fiction culture, and I can only assume, rather than say so for sure, that I did achieve this after my various 140 characters settled. I can appreciate what the Twitter medium did for my ideas: it made me focus them into a small amount of word space, it made me aware that literally anyone, hypothetically, could view them and reproduce (retweet) them which aligns with Murray's assessment that "Media now appears to us as something to be cut, pasted, reassembled, and distributed with ease," (Murray 57-58). For this reason, I believe I learned more about the participatory affordance of digital media rather than about fandom, meaning that, to an extent, this project was at least a partial failure.
Though the participatory affordance that I claim to have learned about is more due to digital media's programming and computational foundations, the fractal nature of digital media allows for this, as well as other affordances, to be granted at the varying levels of interaction with the media (Murray 55). While the "actions of humans and machines" were already made "meaningful to one another" by the back end programmers, my task was to properly create my Star Trek plots in order to facilitate participation outward from the front side of the Twitter platform (Murray 55). I had to be aware that what I wrote had to be something that could in turn be utilized or interacted with by any number of fellow Internet users (or Twitter bots). The universal factor that assisted me in this journey towards precipitating participation within my chosen fandom, despite the somewhat serious nature of this project, was comedy. Though, sadly, after several days, I have received zero retweets and zero followers (minus my personal account's wonderful patronage and fortuitous followings from two #dmcult classmates), I do not feel it would be prudent to label this aspect of the project a failure due to the relatively large size of the Twitter community. My short form fan fiction is but a drop in the ocean of participation, especially since so many parody accounts and fan fiction accounts already exist. Jenkins may call the Internet "a powerful distribution tool," but it is quite apparent to me, due to my account's apparent lack of visibility, that the World Wide Web can only become such a tool when users fully embrace the participatory affordance of the digital medium (163).
On an ironic note (comedy, again), I found it comical that I found myself performing actions that both aligned with and clashed with a "key task" that Murray mentions with regard to the participatory affordance of digital media. She says that "information designers," like myself, the head producer of my own fan fiction Twitter account, desire to "satisfy increasing demand for access to media while preserving the property rights of those who create media artifacts," (Murray 58). Perhaps, then, I do understand fandom a bit more now. In a digital age, fan created fiction is a paradox of participatory culture. It is a delicate balance of give and take, though not in the manner designers of digital media may have wanted it to be, in theory, at the inception of the medium. It's the risk of getting caught by the original creators, perhaps, that drives the fans' creation and expansion of the universe that their fandom calls home. It is clear to me now, more than it was before, that "new technologies [break] down old barriers between media consumption and media production," in order to facilitate the spreading of old culture (the source material for fan fiction) with the vehicle of new culture (the fan fiction itself) (Jenkins 167). Moreover, I feel compelled, as Jenkins (in more academic terms) predicts many fans would, to create more fan fiction, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no fan fiction blogger has gone before (166). Because of this, I gladly declare this project a success on most fronts and hope that suit may not be brought against me. I'm sure even Gene Roddenberry would smirk at a few of my created scenarios, but that may not protect me from copyright lawyers.
Works Cited
Jenkins, Henry. "Interactive Audiences?" The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. Suffolk, England: St Edmundsburry Press, 2002. 157-170.
Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011.