Jenkins’ Five Levels of Fandom Activity

Henry Jenkins (1992) wrote about in his foundational work “Textual Poachers: Television Fan & Participatory Culture” about five levels of activity that fandoms traditional engage in when interacting with core texts essential to their favorite shows, books, movies, or other artifacts of popular culture. Fans of their content will begin their fandom with the reception and consumption of mediated works “with close and undivided attention, with a mixture of emotional proximity and critical distance.” Steven Braun, information designer and fan of the movie “Big Lebowski,” describes this level of consumption in his “Visual Guide to the Big Lebowski” (2018): “One can watch the film numerous times without fully grasping how the various plot threads tie together — if they do at all.” The fans of the Big Lebowski, and by extension fandoms in general, make meaning from the viewing of the fan’s given work of passion. Moreover, those fans articulate those meanings by the performance of the lines and actions from the fan’s selected graphic novel, film, or other media production.

Secondly, fans learn the community’s “critical and interpretive practices” which involves training the fan how to read the various text connected to a given series (e.g., what is canon to the overall universe of a given comic or series). Those fans even understand how to connect the world presented in their favorite works into the everyday world that the fan experiences. There is the “Machete” viewing order to Star Wars films and television series that informs the community the “preferred way” to view the series with the critical gaze of the value of the different episodes within the series and the perceived issues surrounding one of the movies within the series (Sim, 2018). The MCU has a similar viewing order designed to inform the fans the “correct” chronological order to view the movies and television show in order to make sense of the full MCU and see how the different characters from the various Marvel titles interact with one another (Petrakovitz, 2018).

The third mode of activities that fans pursue is the ability to organize in service of their favorite works of popular culture. Fandoms will organize as a way to combat the “relative powerless” that fans typically have in relationship to the massive cultural and economic power that comic book publishers and media organization at large have. The most basic form of this consumer activism is to organize rallies in support of a cause.

A prime example of fandom’s ability to support causes happened in 2016 when Marvel created a new “Captain America” series entitled “Captain America: Steve Rogers.” It was in this comic series that Captain America took a “heel turn” (Oestriecher, 2018) by proclaiming “Hail Hydra.” There was an immediate reaction from the fans in the form of an online, organized protest under the hashtag #HydraCap (Riesman, 2017). The deeper level of activity comes when those fans who hated the idea of Captain America turning evil started donating money to the United States Holocaust Museum as a way of fighting Nazis in the spirit of what Captain America originally stood for (Walsh, 2016). It is in this spirit that the fans believe they are performing a type of “social good” to fight an underlying evil in society. Those fans are internalizing in the morality and code of ethics that Captain America would show if Captain America did exist in the real world of those fans.

Fourthly, fans will tend to create works that speak to the aesthetic traditions and practices of the fandom. The popular term for those works would be “fan fiction.” These works act as both a type of cultural capital that shows the fans investment towards their favorite mediated works and as an artifact that can be gifted to others in the fandom.

The last level of activity that fandom perform is the one of community development. Jenkins (1992) makes the argument in this section by stating that this level of activity:

“Capture something essential about fandom, its status as a utopian community… the fans’ recognition that fandom offers not so much as an escape from reality as an alternative reality whose values may be more humane and democratic than those held by mundane society.”

Jenkins, 1992, p. 280

Fandom exists in a hyperreal state that allows those within in the community of fans a sense of closeness with strangers that have similar cultural tastes and maintain strong social ties even though they may only have interacted with others for just a few hours. The shared social experiences members of fandom have binds them closer than the experiences those same people would share with family members or co-workers. The world of the fandom uses the norms established with comic book and expands those norms to help guide communicable interactions. These norms allow for members of the fandom to talk about the issues they are facing under the guise of discussing issues associated with their favorite graphic novel (Suskind, 2014).