Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification

TLDR

Media convergence and transmediation across technologies are reshaping narrative study, making single‑text analysis insufficient. This study examines how fans create character personas on social networking sites to engage in transmediation. Fans’ persona creation on social networking sites generates a community‑driven textual assemblage that challenges traditional binary readings and redefines fandom.

Abstract

In an age of media convergence, researchers can no longer solely study a single media text. As Henry Jenkins (2006) points out, the transmediation of a textual narrative across media technologies is becoming a more common practice. In this paper, I examine how fans are participating in this transmediation by creating personal profiles, or personas, for extant media characters. My paper shows that the fans' creative and resourceful practice of textual creation in social networking sites finds meaning through the creative assemblage of members of the fan community. Using their own fan-created texts as material with which to create this community, fans shakeup the traditional de Certeauan binary of strategic and tactical readings (and poachings) of texts. By creating a ''space of their own,'' fans not only rewrite the media text, but also rewrite traditional notions of fandom itself.