This is Internet On The Air, I'm Todd Mundt. When the Web lets the audience become the
author... Details in a moment.
Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of
Michigan School of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K.
Kellogg Foundation.
It used to be hard enough to keep up with the current episodes of TV
shows. Now, many popular TV characters enjoy something of a "double life" on the
World Wide Web. Fans of shows like X-Files, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer use
the Internet to write and publish their own unofficial episodes that explore what the
characters might do in scripts that networks never imagined. The Web pages allow fans to
put their personal stamp on popular culture...and raise questions about who
"owns" these ideas.
Henry Jenkins is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is an
expert on fan fiction. He says the practice is similar to the way that folk tales evolved.
For hundreds of years, people based their own stories on popular characters, like Bre'r
Rabbit and King Arthur, each person adding details or making changes as the story is
passed along. Jenkins says it wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that popular
characters were seen as the intellectual property of large corporations.
Jenkins says the Internet makes it easy for fans to share stories and multimedia
software packages have raised production standards, so it's often difficult to distinguish
unofficial versions from official Web pages. Corporations have threatened to sue, and
Jenkins says the courts ultimately will determine how much freedom fans will have to shape
and send stories based on characters developed by someone else.
Jenkins sees fan fiction as part of a larger trend that involves the blending of
fictional elements across media and cultures...made possible by new technology. He plans
to develop his theory of "cultural convergence" in a future book.
To learn more about cultural convergence and to listen to an interview with Henry
Jenkins, visit our Web site at www.iota.org. For Internet On The Air, I'm Todd Mundt.
