Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies)

Mittell, Jason

doi:10.5040/9780755697137.ch-007

Cited by 27 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…In other words, the show appropriated a ludic narrative logic designed to cultivate a puzzle-solving mentality in its audience right from the start (Bakioğlu, 2014). In so doing, they cultivated what Jason Mittell identifies as a form of storytelling that ‘promotes a model of “forensic fandom”, a mode of television engagement encouraging research, collaboration, analysis, and interpretation’ (Mittell, 2009a: 128–130; Mittell, 2009b, n.d.). In Mittell’s formulation, forensic fandom embraces a detective mentality to seek out clues, patterns, and information that lead to the formulation of theories about the show and encourages a form of engagement that he refers to as drillable media .…”

Section: Truth Lies and Videos: Building A Social Media Franchise Frmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exposing convergence: YouTube, fan labour, and anxiety of cultural production in Lonelygirl15

Bakioğlu

2016

Convergence

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As one of the first social media franchises, Lonelygirl15 (LG15) played a surprisingly important role in transforming YouTube into a legitimate storytelling platform and a site of cultural production worthy of commercial attention. While LG15 has been hailed as one of the first community-based storytelling initiatives that harnessed the power of participatory culture, the anxiety of creating an economically sustainable story led to the careful management of fan efforts and the strict definition of the boundaries of the LG15 canon. In this article, I argue that LG15 demonstrates one of the most worrisome aspects of YouTube’s monetization strategies, the commodification of labour in which advertisers and media companies exploit users for profit. This exploitation does not necessarily come in the form of loss of monetary value but through the alienation of fans from their productive labour. As such, the production of LG15 presents a powerful critique of convergence culture. It demonstrates that the movement of fans to the centre of cultural production does not necessarily mean empowerment but may also suggest exploitation.

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Section: Truth Lies and Videos: Building A Social Media Franchise Frmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exposing convergence: YouTube, fan labour, and anxiety of cultural production in Lonelygirl15

Bakioğlu

2016

Convergence

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“…Some within the fandom focus on the creative challenge of drawing inferences and guesswork and enjoy advances, leaks, theories, and rumors (Johnson and Rosenbaum, 2017 ; Völcker, 2017 ). Mittell ( 2009 ) uses the concept of forensic fandom to describe the long-term commitment experienced by users who dissect the canon and immerse themselves in the deepest interpretative layers. He states that being a follower of these narratives implies:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…to embrace a detective mentality, seeking out clues, charting patterns, and assembling evidence into narrative hypotheses and theories. This forensic engagement finds a natural home in online forums, where viewers gather to posit theories and debate interpretations, and fan wikis (Mittell, 2009 , pp. 14–15).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, there is a lack of empirical studies that systematically and comprehensively analyze their structure, function, and definition. Prior research links fan theories, speculations, or hypotheses to forensic fandom and expand the narrative (Mittell, 2009 ). In addition, these theories are integrated into mechanisms for constructing shared meaning that allows readers to access more profound levels of interpretation than those achieved individually.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mechanisms for Interpretative Cooperation: Fan Theories in Virtual Communities

Sánchez-Fortún

García-Roca

2021

Front. Psychol.

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This work focuses on analyzing fan theories as interpretive processes shared by users of virtual reading communities. Within these spaces of participatory culture, a complex strategy of interactions among its members is encouraged to formulate conjectures about the text's intentions and negotiate its degree of relevance. We have based our research on a methodology linked to the ethnography of reading. From a representative sample of the narrative universes of A Song of Ice and Fire and Harry Potter, the different modes of agreed collaborative textual interpretation are explored. The data show that within these communities of practice, three reading models are developed: predictive theories in which future narrative contents are inferred; explanatory theories in which narrative arcs are endowed and charged with meaning through the analysis of canon and, finally, alternative theories with a highly creative component in which the interpretative limits of the text are explored. Within these virtual communities, hermeneutical proposals are characterized by the activation of complex, heavily referenced literary argumentation to maintain semiosis active and expand the horizon of expectations of its members.

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“…Likewise, the experience of watching television where each episode largely exists in isolation and does not require other episodes in order to be coherent, such as in sitcoms like Married with Children (Moye and Leavitt, 1987) or shows like ER (Crichton, 1994), is fundamentally different to something like Lost (Abrams, 2004) or Veronica Mars (Thomas, 2004). The reason for the difference in the modes of engagement is that the latter cases are part of what Jason Mittell refers to as ‘forensic fandom’, where understanding the story requires the audience take on a ‘detective mentality’ as they engage with the text (Mittell, 2006: 35, 2009a: 128–129, 2009b: 2.3; Veale, 2013). Currently, approaches to critical analysis do not account for how textual structure can shape the processes required to negotiate a given text, or how those processes themselves have an affective dimension that influences the experience of the story.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Friendship isn’t an emotion fucknuts’: Manipulating affective materiality to shape the experience of Homestuck’s story

Veale

2017

Convergence

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Homestuck is a textual and experiential chameleon that manipulates its own structure to shape the audience’s affective experience of the story by mimicking not just the storytelling techniques of other media forms, but their modes of engagement as well. This article introduces terminology to illustrate how and why the online serial Homestuck qualifies as a distinctive form of storytelling. I introduce the term transmodal engagement to illustrate how Homestuck uses the affective, experiential affordances of different media forms to sculpt and shape the experience of the text in completely different ways to ‘transmedia’ storytelling. The second term this article introduces is metamedia storytelling, which describes how the audience’s familiarity with storytelling across multiple media forms can be used to manipulate their experience of fiction. Homestuck deploys metamedia storytelling to continually destabilize the reader’s understanding of the text and their investments in the storyworld by forcing re-evaluations of not just what is happening, but what kind of mediated relationship the readers have with the content of the story.

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Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies)

Cited by 27 publications

References 0 publications

Exposing convergence: YouTube, fan labour, and anxiety of cultural production in Lonelygirl15

Exposing convergence: YouTube, fan labour, and anxiety of cultural production in Lonelygirl15

Mechanisms for Interpretative Cooperation: Fan Theories in Virtual Communities

‘Friendship isn’t an emotion fucknuts’: Manipulating affective materiality to shape the experience of Homestuck’s story

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