(upbeat music)
- What's up, guys? Michael here.
The saying, "geek culture is pop culture"
has become a cliche, and with good reason.
Superheroes rule the box office,
video games bring in more money than movies,
and all the cool kids play tabletop RPGs.
It seems the mainstream has shaken off its affected smirk
and dived full-force into unabashed nerd-dom.
What's more, the ways we interact
with pop culture have also changed,
reflecting the behaviors of geek culture
that normies once shunned.
We used to make fun of Trekkies,
and comic book fans were roasted
for obsessing over the finer details of continuity.
Now, you can't even watch a movie where cars go vroom!
without taking on a laundry list
of prior movies and spin-offs.
Wanting to play video games for a living
was once equivalent to wanting to be a Power Ranger.
Now, E-sports stars make a good chunk
of what professional athletes make,
without the concussions.
And going to bat for your favorite franchise
is now standard practice.
- [Male] I wanna talk about "Star Craft II",
in many ways the last hurrah of the single-player RTS
and, if you ask me, the rightful queen of the genre.
- So how did geek culture become ubiquitous?
And does geek culture actually still exist
once it's so mainstream?
Get yourself comfy for this Wisecrack Edition
Is Geek Culture Dead?
Since the beginning, geek subculture was concerned with
and unified primarily by media, especially genre fiction,
which means that geek culture has been inextricably tied
to the concept of fandom.
Important note, geek culture overlaps with fan culture,
but doesn't encompass all fandom.
Basically, all geeks are fans, but not all fans are geeks.
Anyway, modern fandom has really been around since the 1890s
when Sherlock Holmes captivated
the emerging urban middle class.
Holmes fans even protested when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
killed off the beloved detective, so much so that the author
begrudgingly brought him back to life.
While the term "fandom" was applied to sports
and theater lovers throughout the 19th century,
sci-fi literature lovers appropriated it
as they developed "much of the fannish infrastructure,
jargon and language still used to this day,
according to scholar Francesca Coppa.
Sci-fi fans started communicating
via the letters column of famed magazine, Amazing Stories.
Soon, they began to produce their own zines.
Was this geeky behavior? For sure.
But according to scholar Lars Konzack,
geek dom as we know it today really can be credited
to the culture built by World War II veterans,
especially engineers and intelligence officers.
When veterans returned from war
and began their GI Bill-funded higher education,
they had the time and space to process
what they'd been through.
As Konzack explains, they expressed their reaction
to their unique experience by creating and embracing
science fiction novels, superhero comic books,
and military strategy board games.
"This," Knozack says, "coalesced into its own, distinctive
alternative intellectual milieu around the Cold War era."
But modern geeky fandom was poised to really explode
around 1966, when sci-fi made the jump from books and movies
to the more accessible TV format.
And fans of Star Trek, arguably set the blueprint
for geek fandom as we know it today.
Belittled by the mainstream,
they formed a subculture of their own
to express their passion.
Born in part out of the counterculture movements
to the 1960s, Trekkies were super grassroots
and self-organized.
They created dedicated conventions,
popularized fan-fic and cosplay,
and, some argue, got their show a third season.
As technology progressed,
creators could bring ever more engrossing worlds to life.
And then, of course, Star Wars hit in '77 and spearheaded
the now-ubiquitous approach to merchandise.
By now, fandom had attracted scholarly attention.
Academics initial reactions to fandom stereotyped
these new fans, much like they had sports fans,
as being pathological.
It was even commonly suggested
that fans needed psychiatric help.
But, that didn't stop them.
By the 1990's, dedicated fandoms
had become pretty commonplace for geeky fiction,
all following the grassroots subcultural example
set by Trekkies.
The growth of the internet facilitated greater connection
between fans than the readers of Amazing Stories
could have ever imagined.
By this point, it was possible for people
to have been in a fandom for most of their lives.
And it was around this time that fan studies scholars
started pushing back against prevailing stereotypes.
Most notably, there was Henry Jenkins,
an academic and fellow fan.
Frustrated with the mainstream stereotype of fandoms
as mindless and anti-social consumers
obsessed with immature stories,
Jenkins explored fandoms ethnographically.
He framed them as communities
rooted in creative engagement with a given media text,
creating new meanings
to base the social actions of the subculture on.
Key to this is a conflicting set of emotions.
To Jenkins, fandom is both fascinated with
and frustrated by the media they focus on.
They're emotionally invested in the world of the text,
but that investment also breeds frustration
with the text's inevitable shortcomings.
This fuels acts of creation like fan fiction and art,
also known as Fan Labor.
Through acts of Fan Labor,
fandoms are essentially tailoring the text
to reflect their own tastes, views and experiences.
Although it's not just creative interpretation;
it even extends to acts of evangelism,
like when fandoms organize en masse
to save their favorite shows.
Jenkins labels this "participatory culture",
where the public has more agency in the formation
and definition of their culture.
Participatory culture acts as a sort of
grassroots counterpoint to mindless media consumption.
But, even as smart folks started defending
fans of geek culture,
one thing remained the same,
the mainstream's scorn.
According to scholar Dan Hassler-Forest,
fans had mainly been perceived by Hollywood film studios
as irritants, niche groups of excessively invested consumers
whose limited numbers rendered their voices insignificant.
Films like Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman,
were thus purposely tailored
to attract the largest mainstream audience,
rather than to pay homage to fans.
According to Hassler-Forest,
that was about to change with one big-ass franchise,
"Lord of the Rings".
Director Peter Jackson,
savvily embraced the simmering fan anticipation
for the film.
He gave the blogger behind fan website, "The One Ring",
a private tour of the set, let her take photographs,
and eventually relied on her
as a main source of publicity for the sequels.
This marked what Hassler-Forest calls,
a shifting relationship between fan culture
and media industries,
where fans were addressed not only as the ideal consumers
of a commercial fantastic franchise
but also as valuable contributors to the process.
With the commercial success of Lord of the Rings,
fans started being viewed as influencers,
who could produce hype
that would ideally bring in an even larger audience.
This potential mushroomed as the internet expanded
and media industries started
to rely more and more on networked cultures
and spreadable media, according to Hassler-Forest.
What's more, performing fannish behavior
has become less taboo, which Hassler-Forest argues
is in part due to the radical individualization
that marks our social media environment.
As a result, a lot more people are doing fandom.
And there's every reason to think fans will only continue
to become more important as Hollywood keeps chasing
the most profitable IP.
Some scholars think fandom will become so mainstream
as to render the distinction
between fan and average audience member
virtually insignificant.
Now, mainstream media didn't start embracing fandom
out of the goodness of their hearts.
Stats show that the most dedicated fans of TV and movies
spend around 45% more than the rest,
for gamers, it's 230%.
What's more, fans vastly outnumber casual viewers.
Couple that with fans' zealous dedication
to hyping their favorite franchises,
and you can see why no red-blooded exec
could possibly keep ignoring them.
Over the years, geek fandoms have proven
to be a valuable commodity to media corporations,
Which has meant a fundamental shift in how fandoms form.
Corporations are now actively looking to create fandoms
from day one, with different tactics
for different stages of fandom,
all to stir fans into the most passionate,
and profitable stay.
At the same time, geek culture is becoming
increasingly corporatized.
Conventions like New York Comic Con and Chicago Comic
and Entertainment expo, and so on
are being bought up by ReedPop,
a subsidiary of global events organizer Reed Exhibitions,
which continues to engulf ever more once-grassroots events.
At the same time, film studios and media conglomerates
have increasingly infiltrated these events,
luring fans with exciting exclusive previews
that they'll be sure to tweet about.
And now, media corporations have found ways
to commodify fandom itself by exploiting Fan Labor.
This takes myriad forms,
Like competitions, where the prize
is your fan-art being used as promotional material,
or being featured in the movie,
that's also known as unpaid labor,
Or leveraging IP law against free fan-works,
like short films or game mods,
only to release their own versions soon after.
Even fan-fic, is being exploited.
Take shipping, the practice of creating fan-fic
around theoretical romantic pairings in an IP.
Historically a way for queer fans
to create their own representation,
popular ships are now being incorporated into marketing
and even alluded to in the texts themselves,
just to get fans in the door.
But often, it's a trick,
these ships are largely ignored
in favor of straight romances.
This isn't necessarily the end of the world,
but the iron grip corporations
are starting to have on fandoms arguably creates problems.
When a corporation all but controls a subculture,
can you really call it a subculture anymore?
And what happens when a subculture,
used to operating as outcasts
in opposition to the mainstream,
finds their forum confined by corporate oversight?
Similarly, subcultures like those surrounding indie rock,
punk, and emo music have encountered these same tensions.
Essentially, fandoms used to play in the woods,
but corporations have paved them over
with a high-fenced jungle gym.
The question, then, poses itself,
when fandom is mainstream,
does it even really exist anymore?
Fans may be courted by corporations,
but do they actually have power,
especially when a few media conglomerates
own almost all of popular culture's IP?
It depends who you ask.
From Jenkins' interpretation,
fandom could be seen as an active way
to invert the increased consolidation of IP.
He argued that fan-fic in particular,
is a way of the culture repairing the damage done
in a system where contemporary myths
are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.
This interpretation sees fans as active creators
and consumers of their favorite geek media,
rather than passive receptacles
for whatever corporate media wants them to stan.
This is interesting, because Jenkins acknowledges,
that the media that fandoms form around are essentially,
corporate products.
Regardless of the empowering aspects
of Jenkins' proposed participatory culture,
fandoms are still emotionally invested
in something that corporations make for profit.
Which is why others argue
that the fan autonomy celebrated by Jenkins
is something of an illusion.
Some of this has to do with the power of the mighty IP.
As Simone Murray puts it,
"The ultimate discretion of media conglomerates
to shut down fan creations around corporate-owned properties
renders hollow much cultural studies
champion of fans' contrarian impulse".
That is to say, when Disney ,by way of Marvel,
can sue you for using too many clips
in your reaction video to Ant-Man,
can you actually take culture into your own hands?
According to Hassler-Forest, not really.
He argues that there is a grossly asymmetrical relationship
between fans and media producers,
such that fan autonomy becomes somewhat illusory.
He writes that,
when beloved stories
become highly profitable global entertainment brands,
they no longer make up a form of cultural commons
that can be appropriated, embellished, transformed,
or subverted.
Instead, they become lucrative corporate franchises
made up of a wide range of commodities,
most of which are dependent upon fans
to achieve their desired commercial value.
That is to say, media producers
have both the power to stop fans from circulating their arts
and the resources to produce a gob smacking amount
of content and products.
In both limiting fan production
and aggressively encouraging fan consumption,
media producers are arguably co-opting fan culture
while stymieing its expression.
What this argument really spotlights,
is the tension between the two sides of fandom,
fans as anti-commercial subcultures
organized on a grassroots level,
and fans as rabid consumers and promoters of corporate IP.
And as fandom becomes increasingly mainstream,
that tension might just constitute
one of the most important debates
about how we consume media.
But what do you guys think?
Has corporate involvement changed what it means to be a fan?
Is there still room for geek culture?
Let us know in the comments.
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Later.
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