Below is a copy of assignment 1 for CLN647. I chose to write about my online experiences as a teenager and how my critical literacy skills were developed through collaborative fiction and popular culture. Enjoy!
The Productive Sleeper: A critical retrospective on my teenage engagement with fan-fiction and text-based role-playing games.
In high-school I was a sociable student, I had a lot of friends -many of whom I still keep in contact with- and received high marks and praise from my teachers. While my experience would be more than enough for some people, I was unsatisfied and turned to the internet to fill my spare time. I used the online world as a place for learning and socialising even before I realised I was doing it. I had friends all over the world and we bonded over common interests like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. The popular culture of the time, books and movies, gave us a starting point and allowed us to create worlds for ourselves through the common online medium of text ie. Fan-fiction and text-based role playing games. Not only did I learn to write better, I taught myself how to think critically and de-construct texts in a fun and engaging way. Steven Johnson calls this The Sleeper Curve, which in itself is a Productive Pleasure which is talked about by John Fiske.
In this essay, I will discuss how the theories of Johnson and Fiske have shaped my online life, as well as my belief that engaging with online communities through the lens of popular culture is beneficial to improving critical literacy and digital literacy in youths. I will begin by briefly defining fan-fiction and role-playing before moving on to a short analysis of the articles by Steven Johnson and John Fiske. Following on from the articles, I will discuss participatory culture and affinity spaces in the context of fan-fiction and role-playing games. Lastly, I will offer a brief discussion of how critical literacy can be applied to fan-fiction and role-playing games.
Fan-fiction can be defined as the borrowing of settings, plots, characters, and ideas from all forms of media and popular culture to create new fictions (Thomas, 2006, p.229). Fan-fiction is usually written and posted online to be read and reviewed by peers. Text-based role-playing or collaborative writing follows much the same conventions as fan-fiction, it is where the player creates a character and 'plays' the character by writing the scene and 'acting out' the sequences through text. Role-playing games are usually played through online forums, email, or instant messaging.
My experience with online communities was stimulated by my love of popular culture of the early 2000's. Lord of The Rings (LOTR) and Harry Potter were the big films of the time and the internet was becoming more sophisticated. I found myself on LOTR message boards, or Harry Potter fan-sites which eventually led me to the fan-fiction and text-based role-playing scene. I was in a world of entertaining fiction that allowed me to engage in critical discussion about character motivations, narrative structure, gaps and silences, and alternate universes without even realising it. I was learning, not in the classroom, but in my room late on a Friday night (Johnson, 2005, p.9). Steven Johnson calls this The Sleeper Curve where he believes that “the most debased forms of mass diversion-video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms-turn out to be nutritious after all” (Johnson, 2005, p.9). Johnson argues that pop culture presented in certain types of environments promote complex thinking rather than merely entertain the audience (Johnson, 2005, p.11). The world of fan-fiction I discovered was not just entertaining to me, I became engrossed in the world and eventually became a part of it. I was introduced to themes of sex, same-sex pairings, violence, positive and negative stereotypes, and racial issues. I was forced to think about issues that would have been sugar-coated in the classroom, which made me see the world for what it truly is, shades of grey rather than black and white (Johnson, 2005, p.14). A question I often as myself then is, what compelled me to engage in such a world for such a long period of time?
While I had a relatively positive experience during my high school years, I still didn't feel like I belonged. I felt more of a kinship with the people I met online rather than the people I saw and spoke to at lunch. John Fiske argues that “popular pleasures arise from the social allegiances formed by subordinated people, they are bottom-up and thus must exist in some relationship of opposition to power... that controls them.” (Fiske, 2010, p. 40). My online friends and I often had conversations about bullies at school or how no-one understood just exactly what we were going through. Many of our stories centred around powerful characters who were unconventionally 'cool' and who often triumphed over the 'normal' pretty girl or popular guy, our collective defeat of them was a bonding experience.
Fiske states that productive pleasures take the form of evasion, or loss of self, and production, or the meanings made from producing the experience (Fiske, 2010, p.45). Writing fan-fiction, or engaging with text-based role-playing allowed us to lose ourselves in the characters and worlds we created. This evasion created a sense of empowerment that gave us confidence in our everyday life and supports Fiske's assertion that a “matrix of pleasure, relevance, and empowerment lies at the core of popular culture.” (Fiske, 2010, p.53). The empowerment that popular culture initiated by driving me to a world of fan-fiction and text-based role-playing games and communities afforded me the confidence to face the social world.
Henry Jenkins defines participatory culture as allowing a community to come together and work collaboratively (Jenkins, 2004, p.7). I was engaging in participatory culture by joining fan-fiction and role-playing communities, the forums and websites I frequented had key features participatory culture entails. The features were: low barriers to artistic expression; strong support for creating and sharing created works; informal mentorship; valued contributions; and social connection (Jenkins, 2004, p.7). The social aspect of these online communities gave us the opportunity to read each other's stories, review works, have our own work reviewed, and write collaboratively (Thomas, 2006, p.229).
The pleasure I gained from engaging with fan-fiction and text-based role-playing sites were not solely to do with the physical act of writing or even the social relationships I developed with my online friends. The main reason I continued to engage with those sites was because of the main reason I was drawn to them in the first place: my interests in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (Gee, 2004, p.77). James Gee, as an extension of participatory culture, calls the forums and websites I engaged with Affinity Spaces. An affinity space can by either physical or virtual and is defined using eleven features which I will mention briefly. Affinity spaces should have a common endeavour that does not relate to gender, race or sexuality; newbies and masters share a common space, there is no segregation; content organisation is dictated by site members; various types of knowledge is welcomed and shared; many forms of participation is encouraged; there are different routes to status ie. Participation, talent, popularity; and leadership is porous, meaning there is no rigid 'boss' (Gee, 2004, p.77-79). The above features are typical of a text-based role-playing forum. Everyone is brought together by a mutual love of a particular genre, everyone participates in the same place, everyone contributes their knowledge and develops the fictional world through their prose, and leaders interact with other members and act as mentors to the 'newbies'.
Jenkins (2006, p.7), highlights that “participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement”. Fan-fiction and role-playing communities facilitate learning through the use of affinity spaces and support Gee's assertion that people learn better when learning is involved with a highly engaging and valued social practice (Gee, 2004, p.70). While this is true, it is important to understand the educational benefits an individual has while engaging in online community groups.
Since young people use popular culture to engage in affinity spaces, it is important to help them develop the appropriate literacy tools to engage with the media (Gainer, 2007, p 106). Critical literacy involves the interrogation of texts in relation to the social and cultural contexts of which they are produced (Dowdall, 2009, p.46). Critical literacy can also be applied in a digital context and refers to children who have grown up surrounded by technology and are considered digitally literate as well as educationally literate (Dowdall, 2009, p.50).Teaching critical literacy with the aid of popular culture has come under some criticism with the acknowledgement that a balance must be found between engaging the learner instead of pushing too far and making popular texts undesirable (Burnett & Merchant, 2011, p.45). The challenge falls to the teacher to engage students with critical thinking through popular culture in this case, and Gainer (2007, p.108) argues that this is done through self-reflexive teachers -meaning those who teach critique and acknowledge pleasure in the text.
Fan-fiction and role-playing games allow youths to engage and use their critical literacy skills. To be critically literate, in any sense, involves the ability to deconstruct, analyse, and create texts (Gainer, 2007, p.108). For those engaged with fan-fiction and role-playing, critical literacy skills are developed through creativity with the text, their interpretation of gaps and silences, and their character interactions. When students engage with fan-fiction they are developing plots and characters that are relevant to their own identities (Thomas, 2006, p.234). In my own experience, I have found myself spending hours working on character development. I remember reading chapters of Harry Potter series over and over to find little reasons for why a character would behave a certain way, or what the character did while they were not mentioned for a chapter or two. By writing a new character into the already established world of Harry Potter forced me to think critically about the world, what the character motivations were in the world, and how I was able to challenge established norms. I found myself creating male characters which were my idealised versions of masculinity and allowed me to express a different way of being in a safe space (Thomas, 2006, p.236).
Gainer (2007, p.109) is quick to mention that it is not merely enough for students to deconstruct texts, but reconstruct them. The process I went through in critically analysing Harry Potter did not end with my reading and deconstruction of the text; it was my process of writing – or reconstructing – fan-fiction and role-playing that gave me the chance to apply my developed critical literacy skills. Fiske argues that the empowerment gained from making meaning from a pleasurable and relevant text may not result in action within the social world, but increases the probability of it (Fiske, 2010, p.55). I personally believe that my engagement with Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings online gave me the confidence to look at my world better. I wasn't as intimidated by the opposite sex, because I had spent time online with male characters I had created myself, I was able to think freely and openly about same-sex couples, and barriers of race were virtually non-existent through the online world. My experience with fan-fiction and role-playing games supports Steven Johnson's theory that popular culture is actually making us smarter (Johnson, 2005, p.14).
Many youths, propelled by their love of popular culture, are engaging in creating fan-fiction or participating in role-playing games online. By turning to the online world to participate in these affinity spaces, teens are developing their critical literacy skills in a number of ways. Their interaction with online peers, their formulation of characters and worlds, and their active deconstruction of popular texts are all contributing to the development of their critical literacy skills. Teachers need to realise the benefits of introducing popular culture texts into their critical literacy lessons without damaging the pleasure youths associate with the texts. It also needs to be remembered that the act of writing or 'reconstructing' texts – through fan-fiction or role-playing – allows the student to apply learned skills. As a teenager who loved Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and spent years online engaging with the fan-fiction and role-playing world, I learned the skills to be able to think critically and in turn, apply them to the world around me. Popular culture allowed me to engage with my much loved texts in a fun and creative way and has helped me become a well-rounded and social individual fit for a digital world.
Reference List.
Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2011). Is there a space for critical literacy in the context of social media? English Teaching: Practice and Critique 10(1). pp.41-57. Retrieved from: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ935562
Dowdall, C. (2009). Masters and Critics: Children as Producers of Online Digital Texts. In Carrington, V. & Robinson, M. (Eds.), Digital literacies: social learning and classroom practices (pp.43-61). Los Angeles: SAGE.
Fiske, J. (2010). Productive pleasures. In Understanding popular culture. (pp. 40-55). New York: Routledge.
Gainer, J. (2007). Social Critique and Pleasure: Critical Media Literacy with Popular Culture Texts. Language Arts, 85(2), 106-114. Retrieved from: http://gateway.library.qut.edu.au/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/docview/196867667?accountid=13380
Gee, J.P. (2012). Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling. Retrieved from: http://www.qut.eblib.com.au.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=200413&echo=1&userid=sXzgQkemjSIXqurq2dKKMA%3d%3d&tstamp=1378682531&id=E5B1BA2E4D4B289106053FDC45C976EB8418FB51
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robinson, A.J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Retrieved from: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262513623_Confronting_the_Challenges.pdf
Johnson, S. (2005). Introduction - 'The Sleeper Curve'. In Everything bad is good for you. (pp. 1- 14). New York: Riverhead Books.
Thomas, A. (2006). Fan Fiction Online: Engagement, Critical Response and Affective Play through Writing. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 29(3), 226-239. Retrieved from: http://search.informit.com.au.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=250482439837148;res=IELHSS
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