Media Fandom and Audience Subcultures

Firstly, lets define terms surrounding media fandom and audience subcultures

Builds upon the idea of audience interpretation and decoding theories, and explores the ways in which media audiences use their interpretive power to actively subvert, distort, and even reimagine mainstream media content to suit their own needs and desires.

Media Fandom is a broad, poorly-defined term for a segment of fandom which is generally interested in TV shows and movies as its primary focus, and which encourages creative fan works.
exploring how fan communities extend their interactions with media texts logging on to discussion on the internet, collecting artifacts associated with their media interests, and even by participating in fan conventions and other related social activities.

A subculture is a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the larger culture to which it belongs.

Are you a fan ? you might consider yourself a fan of a tv show, a sports team, a particular book or a popular music group.

Fans have been studied over the years, and have been portrayed in movies many times, mostly however fans are visualized in a negative way, and feminized. 

This is because fans were associated were gross distortions of their attitudes and behaviours, for example, media fans are often portrayed as brainless consumers, willing to buy anything with a logo or image of their favourite media program or star.Jenkins (from the textbook) also discovered that media fans were often tragged as social misfits, intellecutally immature and femiinized. 

Think about it you see this,

and everything you read above is true, her behaviours over reacted, she's crazy, and who would do this over "one direction"

however you see this  and you think his actions are justified.

Interestingly enough theorists have looked into this idea of fandom in the social aspect, which is the idea that people may watch shows, so they can fit into social groups, or conversations.

In seminar and in lecture we talked about this in a sense of gaming, how you can online game with a group of people and how this is an example of modern fanning. This is a modern form because its due to technology that its possible for fans to engage with each other and the text in such a way. The text explains that previous to this,fanzines were present. Fanzines were produced by fans and were typically magazines or newsletters which would be mailed out to "fans".

And then there is Fan fiction which is popular, when fans comment on shows, movies etc. and do alternate endings, or romance relationships, so that they are happy. In Seminar it was presented that tumblr is huge for this, and many fans of the show "super natural" have re created whole episodes to change the ending, to suit the needs of themselves the fans. 

My own example, is because i was once such a twilight fan , how fan fiction took off to create a twilight world were the two main male leads, Edward and Jacob actually have a love interest. Of course it was interesting to see how through the movies, the producers allowed for scenes to be taking as such to allow fans todo this fandom. 

Ultimately audience interpretations of media focuses on fan cultures, unlike casual audiences of  popular media fans, invest extraordinary amounts of time and interpretive energy in their media consumption. in doing so they blur the traditional boundary between media producers and audiences.

  Today in the News :http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/terrifying-beliebers#.bgB1KYpEe

Perfect example, of Fans whom are being centralized as both female and crazy.