Post-Class blog 10/15

In Henry Jenkins text “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture”, he states  “In such a world, fan works can no longer be understood as simply derivative of mainstream materials but must be understood as themselves open to appropriation and reworking by the media industries”(468). I found this quote to be interesting because it shows how important participatory culture is to mainstream media. As Jenkins mentions in the beginning of his text, fan works are no longer “something that people do when they have too much time on their hands” (454). The media has absorbed many of fan culture practices and uses them through various media outlets to gain the interest of more people. They work with them to make people feel that they are no longer just spectators, but an integral part of their favorite works. Of course, the main media outlet that is used is the Internet. Many amateur filmmakers, bloggers, critics, etc. use the internet to share creative ideas, stories and interests with others and mainstream media uses these ideas, and rework them for their own gain. For example, when some media websites asks fans to send in their ideas of how stories, TV shows or films should end, or when the websites have forums and discussion boards where fans can share their interests and fantasies with others and ask questions to be answered by their favorite characters. By Jenkins explaining these concepts through the media phenomenon surrounding Star Wars, we see how this film series generated a huge fandom culture and how its reproduction in parodies, commodities and fan-generated websites shows the impact of participatory culture in the media.