Core Response #3 - Laura Broman

 

I wonder if Marc Andrejevic noticed a bit of the “savvy viewer” in himself, as someone implicitly claiming to be less duped than the people who say they aren’t duped, but actually are. And of course I’m being duped by pointing out how Andrejevic’s been duped, all of us claiming superiority through savvy over perceived lower levels of duped-ness like infinite levels of Plato’s cave.

I think Andrejevic makes an important point about the need to understand fan activity as distinct from fan activism, that “the binary opposition between complicit passivity and subversive participation needs to be revisited and revised” (43). He is not the first person I’ve seen question Jenkins’ somewhat utopian view of fandom, and with good reason, though I thought Jenkins’ piece was great and I’m very happy to have it in the world. To this argument about the exploitation of free labor in interactive fan spaces I will add the continued problem of toxicity in fan spaces, ranging from general entitlement (that remake-Season-8-of-Game-of-Thrones petition) to racism and misogyny (the abuse of Kelly Marie Tran).

However, I also think Andrejevic could be a bit more generous in his evaluation of the “TWoPpers” (ugh), which I find a bit deterministic. Andrejevic seems to view every statement of the TWoPpers, however different they are, as confirmation that they are fooling themselves despite every attempt to be above it all. While I definitely see shades of that toxic entitlement in some of the responses he shared, it is clear that many of them have a level of self-awareness about what they’re engaging in. Clearly many of his respondents have a sense of ambivalence about TWoP and the television they watch and are finding value where they can. In Hall’s terms I suppose we would call their readings negotiated while Andrejevic seems to prefer that they be fully oppositional. Is that how he goes about his life? It must be exhausting.

On a slightly different note, I wonder how we might apply a Bourdieu-type frame to the TWoPpers’ responses. Andrejevic argues that the practice of noting continuity errors or examining behind-the-scenes content points not towards “[imagining] how things might be done differently” but towards “[taking] pleasure in identifying with the insiders” (40). Is it worth applying the different forms of capital to this naive viewer/savvy viewer/producer hierarchy? I also wonder how the relationship of fandom to the forms of capital might have shifted in the past couple decades as certain types of geek content have grown increasingly mainstream. Have certain fans acquired a level of symbolic capital that wasn’t there at the time Newsweek came out with that trash story about Trekkies?