Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

audiences are passive (Ibid. 287). More than ten years later Jenkins still argues
for the benefits and positive effects of fandom due to its members’
productivity: in an article in MIT’s Technology Revue titled “Why Heather
Can Write” Jenkins outlines to his semi-academic, semi-business-oriented
audience the benefits of the Harry Potter fandom for the writing skills of
teenaged fans. Fanfiction as a communal writing process, he argues, provides
teenagers with practice, and fellow-fans present a friendly and warm
environment of peer-review, which these fans may not necessarily find in their
formal school-settings. As he points out, the same instances of informal
teaching happen in many other online communities, such as anime fandoms,
where fans “teach” each other “Japanese language and culture in order to do
underground subtitling of their favorite shows” (Jenkins 2004).
There is a problem with such a sentiment; it emphasizes the activity of
fandom versus the passivity of a general audience, not taking into account,
that the same person may very well be fan of one thing, but will passively
consume another thing, as illustrated by the example of Kira mentioned
above. She herself has integrated the idea of activity and passivity in the same
individual body with her personal definition of fandom. Jenkins’ notions of
fandom as production, are realistically speaking overly simple and
generalizing. These theories do not recognize that a fan may find more
pleasure and happiness in lurking online rather than sharing productivity. And
finally, they do not acknowledge that a fan may be a passive lurker in some
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