Henry Jenkins on the Future of Fandom & Media Consumption

[music] Hello and welcome to the Season 1 finale of "Fandom Made Me," a podcast featuring conversations with activists, leaders, and writers about their fandoms and the pop culture that made them who they are today. I'm your host Sabrina Carton, and I just have to say that I have so deeply enjoyed making this podcast, and I am so grateful that all of you have taken the time to listen and learn about fan activism with me. I started this podcast as a very small indie project with fandom forward in January, and since then it has blossomed into something truly special. I have personally loved every episode that I've recorded, and I've learned so much about how fans can make a social impact, and I hope you have too. I will be taking a little bit of a break so that I can be fresh and ready to return for season 2 this October. I wanted to close out season 1 with something spectacular, so I invited someone who is an absolute rock star in the world of fandom and a pioneer in fan studies. Henry Jenkins is the provost professor of communication, journalism, cinematic arts, and education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Peter de Flores professor of humanities. He's the author and/or editor of 20 books on various aspects of media and pop culture, including textual poachers, television fans, and participatory culture, hop-on-pop, the politics and pleasures of popular culture, from Barbie to Mortal Kombat, gender and computer games, convergence culture, where old and new media collide, spreadable media creating meaning and value in a networked culture, and by any media necessary, the new youth activism. His most recent books are participatory culture, interviews based on material originally published on his blog, popular culture and the civic imagination, case studies of creative social change, and comics and stuff. Henry has written for technology review, computer games, salon, and the Huffington Post. Together, Henry and I do a little bit of a retrospective on one of his most popular books, Convergence Culture, and I learn a lot about what he's up to in the world of academic study of fandom, and he learns about what fandom forward is up to. As a reminder, this podcast is supported by listeners like you, so if you'd like to contribute, you can go to our Patreon at patreon.com/fandomforward and join our community, or you can make a one-time donation at fandomforward.org/donate. Have a great rest of your summer and a wonderful September, and I will see you in October. Now onto the show. Professor Henry Jenkins, welcome to fandom made me. It's so amazing to have you here, it's such an honor. I'm delighted to be here, honored to meet you as well. I really admire what fandom forward does, and I'm glad to see the continuation of it under your leadership. To me, I mean, you're the father of fan studies. You are a leader in this movement, and so much of my work as a media professional, and I'm sure for a lot of people who study fandom is rooted in your writing. And we're here today to talk about your book Convergence Culture, which talk about spreadable media. I mean, it's not that book, that's a different book. This culture has really had a significant impact, not just in fan studies, but in media studies in the US and around the world. So I'd like to talk to you about basically Convergence Culture now and then. And you said you just came off of a trip to China, where you signed a lot of autographs and signed copies of the book. Yes, that and textual poachers, which only came out in China three years ago, even though it's published 30 years ago. So they're feeling the impact of some of these ideas now. That has surprised you most about the impact of your work. Well, let me first of all, let me correct this idea that I'm father of fandom study, because it's really not a comfortable position to be the teacher, which essentially a feminist field, right? So that's that's true for whacking in a way that I don't. And I have to be honest, 1992, which is seen as the year that fandom studies was born effectively. Textual poachers came out, interfacing women by Camille Bacon Smith came out. Lisa Lewis's book, The Adoring Audience came out and Constance Penley's writings about Trek and Slash came out. So there was an explosion of activity in that year, most of it by women. My book ended up being one that people still read today, and I'm very flattered by that. But I don't think it would have created a field if there wasn't a critical mass of other scholars doing this writing. So I want to pay tribute to the founding mothers of fandom studies alongside accepting some recognition for the role that I play. That's very true and a bit ironic, because if you know anything about me, I'm an ardent feminist. I've worked with some leaders of the feminist movement across different waves of feminism. And I just think it's hilarious to be corrected on that, and you're totally right. Big shout out to my friends, Suzanne Scott, who has written about fan girls and is doing a lot of work in that area, but in terms of convergence culture, mass culture versus folk culture, which I think is a very interesting concept. So you've often referred to the push and pull between mass culture, things you're seeing, like media conglomerates and their ownership of stories versus folk culture, which is more of the fan creativity, and that kind of goes back to how we've told stories as humans over generations. How do you think that massive media conglomerates are fairing in 2023 in terms of their ability to trust and understand fan creativity versus when you wrote conversions culture? Well, I think we've made some inroads. I mean, there's nothing else they bought the book, because I see it on bookshelves when I visit corporate headquarters and they either try to get it out or it has had a prominent space all along. Now, I can't always tell if they've read it. I can't look at the copies of the book and see if the pages are crinkled or passages are underlined, but they've at least bought the book and that's made me a little money. So I'm kind of happy. But, you know, I think we're seeing signs of some acceptance. There has been a shift from thinking of fewer ratings as the measure of success toward audience engagement is a measure of success. The problem I think is that they recognize fans, but don't yet recognize fandom. In that most of the industry discourse still assumes autonomous viewers making their own rational decisions about what to watch. When, in fact, our work in fandom studies starts from the collective, starts from the idea there is a community and each fan's choices shape other fans choices at the same time. But we mass around shows where there are other fans engaged that we are able to, we're looking for things to talk with each other about and programs are often chosen because they offer a chance to explore a set of issues and an interesting way with other fans. The industry still tends to talk about creating fandoms and I say that what they really need to be thinking about is courting fandoms because fandom has a history of almost a hundred years, depending on which fandom we're talking about, where we can trace it back in some forms in the mid 19th century. And over that time, many fans, like myself, travel from one show to the next, one film to the next, we're fans of multiple things at the same time. We're polyamorous sluts, as some people like to say, right? So that sense of, and the industry always wants to ask me what are you a fan of? And to me, that's a question like, what are you a punk rocker of? You know, we don't assume a punk rocker only likes one punk group. Why should we assume a television fan only likes one show? To me, it's a subculture that we travel through. To me, being a fan means that I'm passionate about what I watch and selective about what I watch, that I have engaged with it in both creative and critical ways and that viewership is social and connected with other fans, not individual. So I think the industry is becoming more tolerant of fans because they see it is generating engagement, which is the currency they're looking for, but they don't at a deep level always understand the dynamics of what they're dealing with. And I think they would be better off if they could think in a collective way about fans. And in fact, you're in the reality that they don't own fans. They're simply barring somewhere around eyeball space and mental space for a short period of time. I just think one of the greatest mistakes of these media companies has been, I know some of the streaming services have blocked screenshots and you can't create desets or screenshots. Hard for me to get into the future, too. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where when I think about my participation in fandom, I think about going on Twitter and Tumblr and all of these social media sites and seeing the gift sets that people have created and I say, oh, what is that? That's really interesting. Like I got into succession because I had seen so many gift sets of Kendall as, you know, a baby girl or, you know, or a fan said, well, definitely get me to turn on a show and watch it the first time if it's well made and shows me interesting things I haven't, I haven't seen before. Yeah. So what I've been out of shape right now is Netflix decision to limit the sharing of passwords, you know, at the moment, my family has scattered in three different locations. I travel often and limit me to one account per TV set is really incredible in position in the way we consume television today. So I do what any rational fan would do. I cancel my Netflix subscription and I'm discovering the virtues of Pirate Bay. You know, I see piracy as not a moral failing on the part of the fan, but as a market failure, a failure to understand how people are using and desiring your product and forcing them into a situation where they only access that rationally can get is through some pirate form. I think that's one of those things where again, thinking of consumption at an individual level loses track of the fact that I'm watching Netflix shows to have conversations and including conversations with my family. And if you limit my ability to do that, then I'm going to seek my pleasure somewhere else. But in this case, I do like Netflix content, but I'm not paying for it anymore, thanks to their decision. I think watch parties have become such a thing that comes out of fandom that personally I've been rooting for platforms to really, really focus on watch parties. I know that Amazon has a watch party function, but it might be limited to only original Amazon series. I actually had my friend John Cabrera on the show. He was a cast member of Gilmore Girls for many years, and he became a media entrepreneur and helped advise on his company Remarkest, which is an app and an ecosystem for fandom to do, you know, host watch parties and game nights and create fan content together. And a lot of these, you know, you see these extensions, these browser extensions and apps and fan created third party apps kind of rising to meet the moment where these streaming services aren't. And it's so fascinating. I think Netflix really screwed the pooch on that one. Yeah, I mean, Netflix is making lots of mistakes. So it's a more actualist that it hasn't hit their bottom line harder than it has. They're bragging that this recent round of draconian restrictions on access has not damaged their bottom line that they've raised enough money by having selling multiple accounts to the same people that it's offset the people like me who broke our boycott in Netflix. But, you know, I'm very proud of the fact that there's an interview out there, maybe 94 or 95 or something aftermath of textural poachers coming out or outline television of the future as being having libraries where we could sit down and watch full runs of seasons at a time where we could access older material that we would have strong layers of commentary from audiences and the capacity to watch together in real time and comment on things by drawing on fandom as lead users to industry term. I was able to predict many of the directions the television has gone. You know, if you put that television fandom in 92, what you would see was people treating episodic TV as if it was serialized. So if you watched our track, you were looking for the continuation of character development from episode, episode. So here again, fans were ahead of the curve today, everything serialized, even the most brainless sitcom still has hints of what came before and what comes after. It's impossible to watch any share today out of sequence and get a lot out of it. You can randomly pick up an element like watching friends in dentist office, but you're not going to really fully experience the series until you watch it serially, which means it's putting in mechanisms that strongly encourage fan-ish style relationships to content. All of this was put in to ensure viewer loyalty, but I'm quite sure some of it reflects what has been learned from fans. I think if you look at, say, Strange New World to continue down the track example, the fans were writing stories about Spock, Pike, Nurse Chapel, and Aura. We now have a series where those are the central characters, but we could taste the prioritization of those secondary characters back to track fandom in the early sevens. I'm curious to know speaking of the way that fans relate to content, what you think about Barb and Hymer because to me, I've been watching the whole Barbie off and Hymer thing happen. The studio didn't really create that. That was something that fans created as they saw the connection between, oh, both of these films are going to come out on July 21st, and now it's taken on a life of its own to the point that the studios are supporting it and not only supporting it, but trying to turn it into their own thing. I guess the return of the double feature. We definitely, what I love to see was the cast and producers of Barbie showing their tickets to Oppenheimer and Vice versa, that moment seems to me symbolically really rich and important given the polarization and fragmentation of American society. I think that the industry probably initially assumed there was a girl picture and a boy picture, and the same people wouldn't be going to both. My fans demonstrated was that we're smart enough to appreciate things across genders and that Barbie's biting satire and Oppenheimer's forward thinking social critique actually connect to each other in very interesting way. So I think it'll be a killer double feature. I'm probably not going to do it this weekend, but wait until middle of next week and let crowds die down just a little because I'm still a little twitchy about COVID. And I'm excited by the fact this is happening and this may be the best thing to hit the box office in a long, long time, but it turns a competition which could have been disastrous into win-win scenario across the industry and one that they desperately need in the midst of the writers and actors strikes. Somewhere in between mass culture and the folk culture sits influencer culture. Many of the creators that we see who are influencers are supported by corporate sponsorships and many of them are sort of a brand onto themselves. So do you think that the rise of influencer culture is in some sense part of the human urge to return to the folk culture or is it more of part of the mass culture? I think it's a really interesting hybrid of the two impulses, right? My friend and colleague, David Craig writes about the social entertainment industry and sees it as an emerging sector that is as important today as the mainstream mass media industry. My students all seem to know the names of influencers I've certainly never heard of and make nuanced distinctions between different fashion bloggers and different makeup artists and so forth. Which one is right for which brand? So my PR students already have a language that I don't actually have. So that to me it's very interesting, but many influencers attending USC who are still students in which would not be plausible with the old mechanisms of mass media, right? You would have to choose, but the ability at a young age to throw yourself out there and the selectivity of an audience to figure out which ones they want to pay attention to. Yes, as they start to succeed, then they get amplified by media companies, by brands and so forth. But the initial struggle up still looks more like a grassroots mechanism than it does like a mass media mechanism. So I think of influencers as somewhere in that the cost between the two, but probably still more on the folk culture side of folks. So one of your case studies in convergence culture was the matrix. At that point, it was a trilogy and you wrote about how it was supported by a broader universe of what is called transmedia storytelling. So there were websites and Easter eggs and all of these ways for people to really live the story. Now when the matrix four came out in 2021, I'm not sure if you went to see it, but did that seem like an extension of the same type of storytelling? Yes and no, I mean, I happen to know I was consulted about the making of the matrix and was going to be sort of giving insight into the overall transmedia strategies for the matrix. But the matrix was in production when the COVID epidemic hit and the result of that was that they cut back on all of the stuff that required social connectivity that creates layers around the text. But there's a kind of self-reflexivity that made it its way into the text. So in some ways, it's a film about transmedia whether or not it fully meets my criteria of transmedia. It's a film where the characters are fully aware of other mediations of the actions of Neo and Morpheus and the characters and that there are some ways doing cosplay or fan plays on the events of the earlier film. So it's a fascinating film. I need to spend more time with it than I have. I only saw it at the one time, but I spouted away like a score with a nut and said this is something to really drill into more fully because the layering is really interesting in that. Now, if I was arriving in a section about the state of transmedia today, I turned to Marvel and what we used to call the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I think today we probably need to call the Marvel Transmedia Universe. Only on Marvel was adapting comic books, but assuming they were starting from scratch with the audience, which was probably a wise choice for something like Guardians of the Universe, less wise in the case of something like Spider-Man where so many of us had history of it. They were really on experimented with some connections to television, agents of shield, for example. But they discovered that if they didn't control both pieces, then it was hard to make time the connections between the two in a ways that achieve satisfactory payoff. Now they even controlling all the pieces that there were some serious disruption caused by COVID, and we're seeing some episodes of Black Widow, the film is released too late for the timing of everything else that it's working with. But with the launch of control of Disney over everything Marvel, we're now seeing incredible payoffs, I think, from the TV show feeding into the film and that's enabling a much richer layering of text. So if you look at the most recent Dr. Strange movie, it flows directly out of what was-- - One division? - One division, yes, and also the what if episode about Dr. Strange, among other things, so that there's cause to go back and forth. When we get to the Marvels coming out in the fall, we're going to see a show where a character you so far only know from television meets characters we only know from film and or not totally because they they have done a little crossover. But we will see the total merging of the streams between television and film with the Marvels. And I think that's going to be an interesting case to look at in all of this. But I don't think when I wrote about trends, media, I envision anything on the scope and scale of what Marvel has been doing. It's sure a number of films it connects together, the number of different TV shows is juggling, the number of different characters taken from the Marvel universe. Even the degree to which Disney buys 20th Century Fox just so it can reunite Spider-Man and Fantastic Four with the rest of the Marvel characters. And largely discards everything else from 20th Century Fox in the process. So that there's just a kind of drive and push the Marvel cinematic universe represents. That shows the deepening of what a franchise based version of Transmedia could look like. And when you wrote Conversion's culture, you wrote about the increasing burden placed on Hollywood writers, particularly when it came to marketing and Transmedia storytelling. Because they would have to create, you know, not just the content itself, but these diagetic websites and they were asked to kind of take on extra work that their predecessors never had to deal with. How has this issue evolved since then and how does that intersect with what's going on with the WGA strike and other issues pertaining to AI, experiential pop up marketing and other trends we're seeing in marketing? Yeah, well, I would start by saying that Conversion's culture came out right in the middle of the last writer's strike. And the stories I've heard from various friends in the industry is it was literally being passed around up and down the picket lines because the chapter on Transmedia had so much to say with the struggles they were having over ancillary content and web based content and so forth. So the language of the gills was picked up from the book just as I was picking up language that I was hearing from the industry. And I've since been asked to speak multiple times to the writers guild about those issues. There's no question that those ideas are part of the frame that they're drawing on going into this strike. The strike suggests it's still not resolved, right? Writers do not perceive themselves and I think justly don't perceive themselves as having gotten sufficient revenue and support for the extra labor they've taken on. And they're struggling with the fear, I think, largely ungrounded at this point that AI might take over their jobs, but it's going to get on on that conversation early. And it's an important conversation to be having. First of all, I'm not impressed with, you know, the chat-based technologies, right? The text-based generative AI seems so far away from posing any threat to a script writer, right? I mean, even the worst network sitcom is better written as more personality than anything I've seen yet come out of those technology. I'm personally more interested in the implications of mid-journey and visual other visual generative AI projects than the fan community, right? Because I think they expand the opportunity for everyday people to use visualization as a tool to express themselves. I'm watching my son who has gone from having zero ability to produce images, to producing very sophisticated images using mid-journey. I also see that he is better at it than I am. And to me, anything that one person can put in more time into, you want to acquire better skills and better express themselves over another, says that it's an art form. There's some kind of grassroots creativity at work there. And maybe if I worked as hard to generate good prompts, I'd get to where he is. But nine times out of ten, if we try to do the same thing, I end up using his for my presentation because it's much richer. I think it's going to enhance fan literacies. But it poses the same question to the fan artist as it does the industry artists. If you take the covers of textural poachers, the first one is hand drawn and a work that already existed in the fan community for the second edition, the 25th anniversary edition, I hired a fan who did photo manops and took her roughly ten hours to do a hundred different manipulations digitally of the image to yield what's on the book cover, which was done on commission. The neck, if we did a 35th anniversary edition, it's already past the 30th anniversary. No one's talked about it, but imagine I did. And I almost certainly would just do it myself on mid-jury because I think I could do it quicker. I could do something more polished. I might do something even bolder than was achievable with photo manipulations a decade ago. But it could put fan artists, devalue the skills these fan artists have developed, right? That their ability, stuff they've taken a lot of time to develop and hone now becomes assigned to the technology and as a different skill set required to produce this new new fan art. And so far people are saying, well, this is not really human art, it's machine art. But I will remind you that photography was once seen as a machine art, that they were said it was purely a scientific process, light comes in the camera, it touches the film, you develop it, your photochemical process, where is human agency and expression and photography. Yet today, I don't think we have any trouble looking photography and recognizing the personality of the artist. So I'm predicting that we're going to have fan artists to emerge from mid-journey with distinct personalities and styles using what is a mechanical or computer based process, algorithmic process to generate art that they could not have made otherwise. And to me, that's liberation. But I understand, if I made my money off of the art, it would be a threat as well. I think it's challenging. I think it's impossible to stop the train from going where it's going on one hand, but on the other hand, you see all of, you hear all these questions about, well, copyright. And, you know, who owns the original content that the machines are basing their learning on. And I don't know that much about mid-journey. I haven't used it. I'm curious to know, you know, where does this content come from as it just scraped from the internet. That's where the machine of Hollywood and, you know, traditional IP ownership of media dovetails with more indie creator concerns about these questions. So. Well, best I understand, I give it prompts for things that I know that you don't exist anywhere. Right. For example, for the talks I was doing in China, I wanted to show how it worked. And so I created what would game of thrones, which is very popular in China, look like if it had been made by a Chinese production company. And so I put Michelle Yo on the Iron Throne. Now, there's no pictures that I've been able to find in Michelle Yo on the Iron Throne. It probably though took pictures of the Iron Throne to a picture of Michelle Yo's face, put it on a body, not unlikeers with a costume that's period appropriate. It made a series of combinations, which for me, it would more than qualify from our understanding of transforming to works as fandom has been thinking about it. It works not unlike genre works, right, where there's no question we quote other films. We draw parallels to other films were inspired by other films as artists. But if we combine them in a new way, it's seen as a new work. So I would argue that a mid journey image functions in exactly that way. And there's probably not a single screenwriter out there who hasn't done a process that it's more or less parallels that process, quoting homage, remixing of elements from other genre films and so forth. So I'm reasonably convinced that when the dust settles, this will be understood as transformative works. But the moment I'm being hauled up for the two, the journal editors are debating what to do with some images I generated using mid journey paper that I have coming up because I'm finding it a really powerful tool to give me the images, provocative images to use to teach. And so we did a series of images of what Shanghai looks like in different science fiction universes, solar punk, cyberpunk, steampunk, you know, after a futurism. And I want to publish those images along with the transcript of the talk. And we're trying to figure out whether the press is going to do that or not. It's destabilizing copy right at the moment. And I'm not quite sure I fully understand why, even if we think it is sampling small snippets of lots of people's work, you know, it fits fair use definitions. It's a portion of the whole, you know, I won't go through all the legal tests for fair use, but it seems to me not as a non-lawyer, but someone who has a pretty street understanding of law as it affects fandom that this is precisely what the concept of transformative work was set up to defend. Well, now it's funny because I wasn't planning on covering this, but now this is like a separate podcast episode in and of itself. It's something I want to kind of read more into because it is such an interesting question about copyright. But I do want to talk with you a little bit more about a discussion you had with Andrew McLuhan, the grandson of Marshall McLuhan in a podcast episode. You discussed the concept that violence is the pursuit of identity. And that made me think about MMO RPGs and particularly military first-person shooters as a way of mimicking violence symbolically. So if that is in a way symbolic violence, what do you make of white supremacist groups that target these communities for recruitment, essentially? That is a really important challenge to what I was saying in that interview. To me, violence is a way we represent power and agency and popular culture. It is also a way we represent power and agency and popular culture. But the violence itself is rarely the point of the media, of the stories that are being told. It's the heroic individualism, it's the community and art arms coming together. It's some notion of the social shapes the way violence is represented in film. Now when critics get excited or upset by violence, they invariably turn to good films as examples and not bad, right? When I was testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee after Columbine, the examples then were Tarantino, Scorsese, directors on that level who are actually very thoughtful of a violence. We're inviants to question the role of violence. And instead of questioning it, it made people uncomfortable in that unstabilizing of kind of generic formulaic violence led to those films being attacked. So I think that's the debate I was responding to. But you're absolutely right. There is a certain number of people who, for a variety of reasons, may already be drawn toward violence who are recruitable through their attachment to this. I don't think it's not a causality. Oh, yeah. And I'm not trying to say, oh, you know, video games cause gun violence. No, but it made people, they may attract people who already have a proclivity toward violence as a small subset of the population. And these groups are reaching out through those channels to try to get them. By the way, they also reached out and stirred up debates and fan that we can point to the last Jedi debate as one that was being shaped dramatically by two forces. One we now know Russian hackers were using that debate to test strategies they would deploy in the election cycle that year that support they gave to Trump was tested through Star Wars fandom. And so they were trying to use robotic figures agents to stir up fans and get them more divided. And they succeeded in doing that. The other though was that these right supremacist groups were using, recruiting the angry fanboys, particularly angry white fanboys, who were taking the side opposing last Jedi and giving them jobs at Breitbart and other right wing publications. And we can now trace that pretty definitively that that was part of what was going on. So it's not just video games, but also fandom itself has become a recruiting ground for a certain number of white supremacists. Now, I don't know what your experience is, but I see fandom as a whole more supportive of diversity and inclusion more thoughtful about race and racial representation than the general population that to me, the white fanboys who are angry over black mermaids is such a small subset that it does fandom a great disservice when the media keeps picking up on that. And not covering race-bending competitions and archive of our own or fan casting that uses racial and tries to share how films could be recasted with racial minorities or black cosplay month or any number of other things that's going on at fandom is actually very racially progressive. Yeah, I mean, I'm an interesting person to ask because I mean, I'm at the center of a very progressive leaning fan activist movement, but my experience in fandom as a whole has been such that I get to see things like I hosted a panel at Net Roots Nation last week. And one of the panelists on fan activism was the creator of Hermione Granger and the quarter-life crisis. And it was a show that was lauded for the black Hermione idea. And basically, this woman, Eliana Yistrael was able to imagine Hermione is a black woman living in LA in her 20s. And what does that story look like through that lens when it's a very, very white story coming from the creator from JK Rowling? And we have black nerds create as an organization that focuses on critical fandom and they're part of the new fan activist coalition, which fandom forward is a part of. You have Latinx geeks, you have a tribe called geek, which focuses on indigenous fandom interpretations. So yeah, I mean, my experience has been largely lots of queer, trans, bands of color, very diverse. I'm a fan of color myself. I'm half, I'm half South Asian and half white. So I've been able to see representations of mixed race, young Americans. Like myself in media through fandom. So definitely more of that than the angry white gamer guys. No. And so I think even in the gaming community, you know, because we talk about white supremacists who create in gamers, it makes you think where they're all secretly that way. And reality is not, you know, it's wonderful work being done on woke gaming right now. And different kinds of reconfiguration and race through gaming that a lot of people players are invested in expanding the categories, getting rid of the stereotypes of racial representation and games right now. So if they're recruiting white supremacy and far right activist recruiting from fandom and gaming cultures, it's largely because they're so diverse that there's bound to be some strata there that has that set of values. But I'm not sure that it's representative of either of those populations. And I know that as Hollywood struggles with how to transform the existing genres, all of which have a history back to an era of white supremacism and settler mythology and colonization and therefore carry traces of that in their DNA. As we work those genres, I think the shared volume of the fan fiction writing community is going to get us to solutions faster than a small trickle of writers rooms, a professional writers working in Hollywood. So I would say that, you know, if you've got hundreds of thousands of people writing stories on archive over on and calling each other out and critiquing them as inevitably is going to happen as white folks try to write, write stories about people of color. But they're learning from each other. And through that process, I think we're doing a deeper dive into genre that is going to help us think through issues of race. Then the industry is doing because it's doing it timidly and cynically and in small, small enough scale, it can't make real progress very fast, except in those cases where it really does invite people of color into the writing room and into the production process. So if you look at films like Joyride or polite society or TV shows like Beef, we're seeing real progress, but none of those simply follow the contours of a popular genre. They're all mixing and matching elements of genre and rethinking them. So they're trying to do what fandom is doing, they're doing it well. But I think fandom on a larger scale will get there a lot faster. And it's not just a conversation about race or sexual identity or gender or identity generally through the US context. You're seeing this coming from fans internationally and you're seeing a global conversation between fans. You recently returned from Shanghai where you taught a six week course on fandom. Generally, I'd love to know more about what the coursework was and what did you learn that was interesting about cross-cultural fandom during that time? Well, I've been very interested in trans-cultural fandom as some of the fan studies community has been calling it, which is bigger than transnational fandom and that it could involve diasporic communities that are connected with each other. But then in any case, it's a complicated thing. So I had 40 students that I worked with on an ongoing basis and formed close relations with. And I walked up gradually from sort of what is fandom, you know, how does the industry understand fandom, what is participatory culture, how are fans agents of globalization and globalization? And then we get into the really dicey stuff on identity, race and gender and end with the civic and the educational dimensions of fandom. So I was trying to put them really sensitive stuff toward the end once we built up trust with each other and it worked very, very well. But beyond that, I did talks at 10 different universities while I was there in Shanghai and Wuhan and a number of other cities in China. Some of the talks I had 1000 to 2000 people in the audience if we count the digital audience alongside the physical audience. There was an intensity in the eyes of this generation who really wanted to hear what I was telling them about fandom. Another which was not new to them, what was new was having the experience of an adult in that culture, validate their participation in fandom. Because they're given so much discouragement by their parents and educators, they should spend their time preparing for tests, not waste their time on fandom. And then by the government, which is on a campaign to really crack down on fandom, particularly fan practices like fan fiction writing that's cut across borders or honors, like a draw genus boy bands and television structures like boys love television or reality band competition television, all of which have come under attack by the Chinese government in recent years. So on every book that I signed and I saw in probably a thousand or more, I wrote study hard and play harder as my culture line, which seemed to be well received there, right? I saw my goal in part is validating what they were already doing and showing an awareness of it, listening, hearing what they were doing and mirroring back as I became more adept at it from city to city, mirroring back so that it was heard by adults. So for example, almost every woman under 30 that I met there liked this group, G Idol, which is a K-pop group predominantly, but has two Chinese members, which is doing now what Madonna did in the 80s, using music videos to question norms of gender. And they have a song called Tom Boy, which sort of advocate has a weird contradictory state because they're not Tom Boy's by any stretch of the imagination. They've been manufactured by the Korea K-pop industry. And so there are certain kind of cute and a certain kind of beautiful that we might see as normative, but they're singing about being a Tom Boy as a way of escaping male control and escaping the constraints of gender. And that really speaks to the women in China. It's the Korean feminism creeping in to media they have access to. And it's worse than a lot of thinking precisely because of that contradiction of the beautiful woman, femme woman talking about being a Tom Boy. So I spoke to this one woman who was a lover of this stuff, and I said, "Do you consider yourself a Tom Boy?" And she's dressed in what I've come to see is a gender ambiguous clothes, which is kind of clothes that most American women are wearing, you know, t-shirts, jeans, shoes, right? Nothing special, but when you compare them to the elaborate display of femininity in the streets of Shanghai where women wear layers and layers of flounces and laces and so forth. I'm never seen in my lifetime the level of feminine display there, but these women are opting out of that, not putting on makeup, wearing simple clothes. So I asked this woman and she said, "No, I'm not a Tom Boy. I'm afraid to be so," but I have an aspiration to be so, right? So there's a sense that these videos represent an aspiration of these young people. Beyond that, we're seeing this aspiration for the global, right? The media they're consuming is Disney, it's K-pop and Hallyu, it's, you know, Japanese anime and manga, it's Terry Potter, right? So they're consuming global media and looking outward to the world while the government is putting pressure toward nationalist fandom. Government really is supporting fandom in some levels. It's supporting, for example, Hanfu, which is a kind of traditional garb of Chinese culture that had largely been eradicated by history, including pretty active campaigns during the cultural revolution, but now as being promoted actively by the government and particularly their centers available at kind of water towns and other historic sites where you can check out a costume, have makeup applied, have your hairstyle, walk streets, and that is a huge part of fan in the Minchina, but it's shaped by nationally produced historical fictions, something like Empress in the Palace, which I think a lot of people here know, that's shaping a context for Hanfu as a nationalist form of fandom. And they're also funding Comic-Cons, which our government doesn't fund Comic-Cons, it barely funds the arts, but fund the popular arts at all. But they're trying to insinuate themselves into fandom in China as a way of distracting the young people from the fascination they have with pop culture from the real arts in the world. It's a pretty good segue into my next question, so I recently read a book that's pretty relevant to this called Red Carpet, Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Eric Schwarzel, and this book really frames film and pop culture as a form of soft power in the U.S.-China trade war. So to me, when I speak about fan activism at universities and I give talks and at, you know, that roots nation, I really drive home the fact that to me mass media, particularly some of the biggest fandoms that you would see, like Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, these are all the modern mythos, because these are the stories that are so big, like they exist at this scale that whether you live in China or the U.S. or Czech Republic, like you've probably seen these movies, you've heard these stories, they're ties that bind us essentially. So to me, it's the modern mythos, but geopolitically, I think these fandoms can be something else entirely, particularly when governments are funding certain political narratives in franchises or their censoring content, which is what happens when many Hollywood films make it over to China, they have to be censored. For you, where does fandom sit in all of this, and can fan activism ever be a form of digital diplomacy between citizens? I absolutely think it can. I would say that fans are become agents that draw international content into a particular marketplace. Think about history of anime in the U.S. Japan had tried to get shows like Speed Racer and Ultraman successful in the American market, ultimately didn't feel like the pickings there were strong enough to continue down that line. Those are both iconic shows now, but they weren't when they first released. When we see the wave of GIs who were serving in Japan, who got their children hooked on anime to shows in Japan and bring back the chest tapes, which were spread to the neighborhood kids, and they form networks back to Japan to get more of that content. First time I saw anime was at fan conventions where people would show it and there were no subtitles. None of us understood Japanese and they would say, "Well, would the guy you introduced it at the last con I was at said this and give you a plot then when you might get a plot for an opera before you sit down to watch a performance." It was all about the visuals at that point. Then we see the rise of small entrepreneurs who open shops dedicated the Japanese content and Japanese food in various markets, which start to supersede the Japanese grocery stores, which had always done some of the same for the diaspora community, now spreading into white community. From there we start to see the streaming services like Crunchyroll pick up, pick it up as their focus. We start to see big fan conventions. Then we finally are seeing something like HBO by the Studio Ghibli films, which become a staple for most of America during the pandemic. Fandom is crucial at every step along the way, putting pressure on the media industries to import content and also educating people about what content is available and to piracy testing what the market is interested in. They identify the genres and shows that will later be imported by commercial interests, by doing so illegally, but in a way that wouldn't exist in other ones. We see the same things are going on in China, so that in the heart of Shanghai, there is a giant statue, maybe 50-foot tall statue of Vangelin, supposedly in purple and red. It's not subtle. Surrounded by a hall of fame of life-size statues of people like Ultraman and other Japanese anime favorites. Every mall that I've been to had at least one story that focused almost entirely on Japanese media content, and there's a whole mall that's meant to model Aki Harbor, the base of Japanese fandom. So you go there and every shop, which mostly run by major companies, are dedicated exclusively to Japanese content. So this trading, when you think about the history of China's relationship to Japan, China and the United States, all politically charged, yet that culture is widely consumed and publicly consumed, Japan and the face of government crackdown on other aspects of cultural importation. So I think what we're seeing right now is a global mix or sort, where people around the world thinks that entities like Netflix are consuming more international content, becoming fascinating with international content. And in fandom, continue downward to learn more about the culture, about the language, the food, and so forth. It's an entry point into a deeper appreciation of these different national cultures. I think Chinese culture is one squid game away from having this thing playing the same role. The question here is whether the government, which desperately wants to have the soft power mirroring Japan and Korea by cultural exports, cuts itself in the foot by cutting off by being so restrictive and conservative on what content they allow to be produced. So the irony is a genre like Boise Love in a show like Untamed is a global success, but it's now banned by the Chinese government because of its own homophobia. It's suddenly Untamed may be rehearsal for a squid game like breakout hit, but it isn't going to be that because there's nothing to back it up. That whole genre is closed from reduction. The canceled dozens of shows that were in production after the blow up around the Untamed in 2020. So there's something really interesting going on there that points to the contradictory sides of Chinese politics, and particularly Chinese economics and this idea of one country, two economies. One side of the economy is cutting, trying to cut off the legs of the other side of the economy where fandom and popular cultures can say. You mentioned that you were writing a new book with Professor Robert Kozenets, and I'm really excited to hear about it. Is there anything that you can share about the book and what's exciting to you about this research? Well, this is a book that consolidates the work that both Robert and I have been doing around fandom for almost 30 years. So we're putting in a dialogue between a consumer culture approach and that biography approach, which Robert's work represents, and my fandom studies approach. It's meant to be a textbook in part, but a very readable one that we hope will be enjoyable to casual readers and not just what we fear a textbook would be, in part because we both have distinctive voices. We're sharing original research and so forth, but there's a chapter in there about Chinese fandom and comparing it to Japanese fandom and more generally to this question of cultural imperialism versus localization and how different cultures are crisscrossing the present time. I'm very excited by that. I'm doing more work on race thanks to sort of the beats we've been having in fandom studies that any of my previous work has done, just trying to make sure that we represent the richness and diversity of contemporary fandom culture, whether it's hijab-based cosplay or the blurred movement. There's a lot going on there, and we're trying to capture that, but we're trying to use contemporary examples as much as possible, certain things. You do have to go back to the classics like Star Wars and Star Trek Marvel, but we're trying to do more with Disney. We're trying to do, we have a section on Wednesday, for example, which it's a newer illustration of some of these ideas and there the focus is really on fan selectivity. So how did it happen that so much of Etsy picked up on the stained glass window and the dance as the two iconic elements in the show? And if you look at Etsy, you can see early signs of where the culture has come to fixate on what elements of the show. And we then see the commercialization of those things, which often in a way that it's exported to the original fans, but nevertheless show their influence on the way the mass media comes to think of a particular property. There's so much to say about fandom right now. And so I'm enjoying getting back in taking contemporary soundings of different aspects of fan culture. It grows out of our teaching. Robert and I teach together a fan relations course and the Strategic Communication Program at USC Annenberg, but I also teach a PhD seminar on fandom studies, and I'm coming off teaching this course in China. So all of that together allows us lots of vantage points. And it's almost writing itself because I've lectured on this stuff so much, but have never put it to writing that I think I'm capturing so much of what my thinking of the last decade or two has been about in one place. And there definitely will be a section on fan activism. How could there not be? I'm looking forward to that, especially. Both the positive dimensions to fandom forward represents, and you know, whether we can see QAnon as the mechanisms of fandom gone awry. And I think there's a lot to say about participatory culture mechanisms and something like QAnon, which is horrifying to me, but nevertheless the insurrection could grow out of fandom. Not that that's anything new, the Ku Klux Klan, I'd argue, was a fan activist group. Yeah, and imagery grows out of birth of a nation. Yes, yes. They were galvanized. The first generation of the clan did not burn crosses. The second one did. The difference was birth of a nation. So whenever we see someone have a cross burnt on their lawn, it's a fan ritual turned anti-social, or it probably was always an anti-social, but it's an anti-social fan ritual that we have to take ownership of, even as we celebrate what's really exciting about the capacity of, say, K-pop fans to work for Black Lives Matter or the incredible work you guys have done on so many fronts, right? That this is an important dimension of fandom today, and we will have a whole chapter dedicated to the positive and negative consequences of fandom blurring over into activism. Yeah, and that's why we're really open and honest about on the other side of things, alt-right, white supremacist activists are doing fan activism in these gaming communities. That, to me, is fan activism. It's not a great, but it is what it is. So that, to me, is even more of an imperative to make fan activism mainstream because it is the lens through which people live their lives. It's the thing that we do when we get home from work, we get home from school, we dive right into these communities and these fictional worlds, and I think that that's so important. Professor Henry Jenkins, is there anything else you want to share with us? Oh, I could go on forever, but I know. We've covered enough to give people things that you want and have a great discussion. Well, it's been so wonderful having you on the show. Thank you for joining us today. Happy to do it. fandom made me as an independent production of fandom forward, engineered by Brian Carton, and hosted and produced by me, Sabrina Carton. Special thanks to Claire Tai and of course to all of our Patreon subscribers. To follow us and learn more about supporting fan activism, visit fandomforward.org. Thanks for listening.