In thinking about this week’s readings on television and its audience, I was able to connect Seiter and Jenkins’ pieces to one of my favorite shows - and a current scholarly fascination - the Norwegian online teen drama SKAM. In “Qualitative Audience Research,” Ellen Seiter examines the gaps in ethnographic research between mass communications methodologies and those in cultural studies, and argues that whereas cultural studies situates media in context, mass communications studies reduce content “to verbal summaries of observable events on screen” (Seiter, 463). She suggests that one of the causes of this divide is driven by geographic difference in research methods. As such, I found it prescient that I have recently read two ethnographic pieces by scholars Vilde Schanke Sundet and Line Nybro Petersen on SKAM fandom participation. In “Ins and Outs of Transmedia Fandom,” Sundet and Petersen interview their participants to locate their “entry and exit points” in a digital fan community, suggesting that fans can be attracted to fan spaces on intrapersonal, social, and transmedial levels (8). These same entrance points, however, could also become reasons to remove oneself from fandom. In “Play Moods Across the Life Course in SKAM Fandom,” the authors examine the same interviewees, only this time, they locate the different ways that fans become “absorbed by the play world of the fan community,” and the various moods (devoted, intense, euphoric, and tense) of their play (127). What does this have to do with Seiter’s piece? Both pieces rely on the type of cultural studies research that Seiter highlights on pg 464: the authors avoid quantification except in the interest of methodological transparency and close read participants’ responses to extract deeper meaning behind their fan engagement. Furthermore, they support her belief in the usefulness of this type of research and provide a contemporary example where the ethnographic model does not ask its participants to decode a text, per se, but to decode their own participation in their chosen fan communities. They cultivate reflexivity.
Turning to Jenkins, I was struck by his overarching idea that fans become “textual poachers” by reclaiming their favorite texts through reproduction. Discussing the ways a show can live on after it has ended, Jenkins writes: "the one text shatters and becomes many texts as it is fit into the lives of the people who use it, each in her or his own way, each for her or his own purposes" (Jenkins 490). A show may end, but as fans reinterpret its storylines and invent new ones, the text takes on new meanings. Through this (re)creation, the text becomes imbued with meanings that are intensely personal to the creator, whether they intend to share them widely or not.
To offer a contemporary example of fan poaching that, to paraphrase Eileen, has been poached back by the original creators, I turn to a moment from SKAM’s fourth and final season. Each season focuses on the same friend group, but the season’s events are shown from the point-of-view of a new character who receives their own contained season-long story arc. Creator Julie Andem never strayed from this format, but the unexpected, viral popularity of the show’s third season meant that fans were hungry for more information about their favorite couple, Isak and Even, even if the show’s structure meant they were not likely to get it. Season 4’s first episode, however, includes a scene with Isak and Even that is not an original idea, but rather a recreation of a piece of artwork by Instagram user elli_skam. Such a choice, scholar Myles McNutt writes, suggests an awareness on the creators’ part “to acknowledge the intensity of the global “Evak” fandom despite the format of the show not really being situated to continue to focus on it.” Because the show’s POV has shifted to Sana, Isak’s story is effectively complete. Nevertheless, the Instagram artist became a textual producer, imagining a new scene with their favorite couple, and the integration of the fan artwork into the new season demonstrates the creator’s interest in serving this portion of their fan community. I find this to be a fascinating example of fan involvement “forcing [the text] to respond to their needs,” (i.e. more “Evak” content) and the actual producers of the show feeling an obligation to fulfill this need, an act not performed elsewhere in the show until this point (Jenkins 490). There is another conversation to be had about how virality may contribute to such a decision, but for the sake of wrapping up this blog post, I will conclude by saying that in the case of SKAM, even when the proprietor has poached back, the fan is still the one who holds the power.
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| Instagram user elli_skam's original artwork |
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| The artwork recreated in Season 4, Episode 1 "Du hater å henge med oss (You hate hanging out with us)" for no clear reason other than an act of (pretty cool) fan service. |
Petersen, Line Nybro, and Vilde Schanke Sundet. “Play Moods across the Life Course in SKAM Fandom.” Journal of Fandom Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2019, pp. 113–131.
Sundet, Vilde Schanke, and Line Nybro Peteresen. “Ins and Outs of Transmedia Fandom: Motives for Entering and Exiting the SKAM Fan Community Online.” Poetics (Amsterdam), vol. 84, 2021 101510.
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