![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You and fandom: preliminary thoughts
It’s always a little suspicious when someone asks you to believe something really attractive. I mean sure, Mr. Johnson, I’d love to believe that “popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years.” What partaker of that culture wouldn’t? But Johnson gets down to what he’s talking about on page 9, and I’m going to quote it because it’s pretty darn interesting:
Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. You can see this symbolic approach at work in academic cultural studies programs analyzing the ways in which pop forms expressed the struggle of various disenfranchised groups: gays and lesbians, people of color, women, the third world. You can see it at work in the “zeitgeist” criticism featured in the media sections of newspapers and newsweeklies, where the critic establishes a symbolic relationships between the work and some spirit of the age: yuppie self-indulgence, say, or post-9/11 anxiety.
The approach followed in this book is more systematic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry. My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve [named for the Woody Allen film about a future in which scientists are appalled that we weren’t aware of the health benefits of cake, or whatever] comes out of an assumptions that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them.
Okay. Sorry about all that, but I just couldn’t cut it down. Note that he doesn’t dismiss outright the “symbolic analysis” school of cultural studies; just that his argument for these “bad” things being “good” is not based on any moral standards but on cognitive ones. He starts out, predictably enough, in the realm of video games, and describes a “fictional world where rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly defined, than life.” He stresses that “only” in games are you forced to discover the rules—it’s not a static universe like a book or a film. What’s important to him are the cognitive steps you take to learn the universe, not the actual narrative. What is more, the rewards one gets from playing games are not the “instant gratification” decried by the naysayers—most games today require hours of play to accomplish anything.
Now, I know Johnson talks about television later in the book, but I can’t help but stop right here and notice a few things about fandom (most particularly online fandom). Because when I read about a property that forces you to interact with it in ways you may not have a map for (this is why guidebooks to games are bestsellers), that doles out defined rewards with an addictive quality, I’m seeing fandom. Specifically in the sense that fandom is the creation of a game out of a static property. This game consists not only of “creating” the fic, art and “meta” that make up the currency of the fan community (and provides reward in the form of reviews and notoriety), but of “discovering” the rules of fannish interaction—both with the text and with other fans. Whatever the content of the “fanned” property of at least relatively fixed canon, there is a complex series of interactions which expand our involvement with it, and create the sort of fictional world Johnson’s talking about with video games. In this construction, the fictional world isn’t really the universe of the tv show or film or novel—it’s the one we make right here, together. We have our own reward system, our own currency, our own geography and social system.
In other words, SimFandom.
Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. You can see this symbolic approach at work in academic cultural studies programs analyzing the ways in which pop forms expressed the struggle of various disenfranchised groups: gays and lesbians, people of color, women, the third world. You can see it at work in the “zeitgeist” criticism featured in the media sections of newspapers and newsweeklies, where the critic establishes a symbolic relationships between the work and some spirit of the age: yuppie self-indulgence, say, or post-9/11 anxiety.
The approach followed in this book is more systematic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry. My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve [named for the Woody Allen film about a future in which scientists are appalled that we weren’t aware of the health benefits of cake, or whatever] comes out of an assumptions that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them.
Okay. Sorry about all that, but I just couldn’t cut it down. Note that he doesn’t dismiss outright the “symbolic analysis” school of cultural studies; just that his argument for these “bad” things being “good” is not based on any moral standards but on cognitive ones. He starts out, predictably enough, in the realm of video games, and describes a “fictional world where rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly defined, than life.” He stresses that “only” in games are you forced to discover the rules—it’s not a static universe like a book or a film. What’s important to him are the cognitive steps you take to learn the universe, not the actual narrative. What is more, the rewards one gets from playing games are not the “instant gratification” decried by the naysayers—most games today require hours of play to accomplish anything.
Now, I know Johnson talks about television later in the book, but I can’t help but stop right here and notice a few things about fandom (most particularly online fandom). Because when I read about a property that forces you to interact with it in ways you may not have a map for (this is why guidebooks to games are bestsellers), that doles out defined rewards with an addictive quality, I’m seeing fandom. Specifically in the sense that fandom is the creation of a game out of a static property. This game consists not only of “creating” the fic, art and “meta” that make up the currency of the fan community (and provides reward in the form of reviews and notoriety), but of “discovering” the rules of fannish interaction—both with the text and with other fans. Whatever the content of the “fanned” property of at least relatively fixed canon, there is a complex series of interactions which expand our involvement with it, and create the sort of fictional world Johnson’s talking about with video games. In this construction, the fictional world isn’t really the universe of the tv show or film or novel—it’s the one we make right here, together. We have our own reward system, our own currency, our own geography and social system.
In other words, SimFandom.
no subject
That's interesting about the video games. My son had a part-time job this summer testing videogames developed for the hardware my husband's working on right now (at the same company.) They needed people who could go through the games very quickly, because it was at the higher levels that the really cool features of the hardware came into play. It tickled me that playing a large complicated RTS could be considered a marketable skill...
You're spot-on about fandom when you say that it's making an interactive game out of a "static property."
Fandom to me is very basic - it's the group of Paleolithic people around the campfire at night telling stories to each other. The "static" part comes in because most stories are based on and derive from others before them. The dynamic part comes in when the teller looks around and sees either the Ooohs and Aahhs (or the yawns) of those before him or her. That's when the story comes to life - through the process of "telling" (whatever form that may take) as well as the life it takes on within the hearers' minds - and many of those hearers become new "tellers" themselves.
That's one thing I really like about fanfiction, too - it's a *living* mythology that evolves. You can watch it in action, a laboratory for changing and spreading memes. (When people say that "Susan Kay is a virus in the canon," they might mean it insultingly, but it's dead-on accurate.)
no subject
My son had a part-time job this summer testing videogames developed for the hardware my husband's working on right now
That sounds fantastic. Yeah, I guess if you're in the right place at the right time, you can get paid for nearly anything. Did he enjoy it, or did it become "work"?
Fandom to me is very basic - it's the group of Paleolithic people around the campfire at night telling stories to each other.
Precisely. That's a fantastic formulation for it, and in line with Henry Jenkins' bit about fanfiction being the folktales for a culture whose heros are owned by corporations. But my post-modern brain loves that that model can be true at the same time that this "video game" one holds true; I love these different ways of looking at the phenomenon to find hidden aspects.
You can watch it in action, a laboratory for changing and spreading memes.
We've probably talked about this before, but I confess in many cases I'm marginally more interested in the fandom/fic than the actual products. I find the social/cultural norms and memes and process endlessly fascinating. Plus, I'm always wondering whether I've contributed anything to that memage, you know? Did "Kissing the Frog" set anyone off those years ago? The individual can have an effect.
(When people say that "Susan Kay is a virus in the canon," they might mean it insultingly, but it's dead-on accurate.)
Yeah... maybe it's off-topic, but the Kay-hate is something I don't really understand. To me, she's not a fanfic writer who got lucky--things weren't the same back then. She may have written fanfic, but she got it published without the support of the fandom or vanity press. And she did some great things for us as fans. I will never give up that special place in my heart I reserve for her, however far away from her ideas I might go. She rewrote a beloved story in a way that touched me as deeply as it's possible for a narrative to do; that's worth something.
no subject
Re: the original story not being as interesting as the fanfic. I can relate to that. It's one reason I love slashy stories (either subtext or explicit.) When well-done they add a whole new dimension to the story.
I don't think fanfiction can be separated entirely from the market forces which create it. People loved the Oz books so much that Baum wrote twenty or so more books. After he died, Ruth Plumly Thompson published a few, and then several modern authors have also written Oz-universe books. I am not sure that had Oz been published today, there would have been that many sequels. Perhaps then we would have seen tons of Oz fanfiction. As it was, the market at that time was more than willing to satisfy the "consumers'" desire for more trips into the Oz-verse.
Today, readers supply their own universe extensions. I was surprised how many POTO published stories there were in the '90s. Obviously readers wanted more.
IMO it's based on the premise that readers and viewers know what they want, and don't need, or want to be told otherwise. When the popular series Beauty and the Beast jumped the shark (because the main actress left the show), the producers took it in a direction most fans hated - which produced an explosion of fanzines and mimeographed continuations of the story - as if the TV series had never changed.
Re: Susan Kay. I don't like calling it "published fanfiction" either, because that term is a gratuitous insult. It implies that fanfiction writing is automatically crap, for one thing, and that's not true.
Personally I didn't like the book, but I give her credit for writing a story so sticky that it's impossible to wipe it off if you write POTO ffics, no matter how hard you try. Similar with Suzy Charnas - that woman thought of *everything.*
no subject
no subject
Most books which deal with pop culture in any remotely serious way--at least, the ones I have found--are WAY worse than this. This is frickin' poetry.
This is also why I didn't go back to school.